Oh my goodness, your WIPs are so expansive! But I love how much you have and how some are even remnants of childhood, aw! I also really love how poetic some of the titles are. Care to expand on "the garden where music weeps?" That one certainly caught my eye. 👀
<3 Thank you so much! I certainly have a widely varied approach to naming my files. While some are poetic, others are deeply silly, lol!
'The Garden where Music Weeps' is a short story I wrote in 2004. It's about a forgotten god who is no longer worshipped and feels drawn to the Garden, where an otherworldly harpist binds his essence to her music and he slowly drifts away.
It is poetic, and has gone down well at open mic readings and in writers' groups, but when questioned, readers/listeners tend to not be able to say what it's about, which may explain why I've never been able to sell it.
I'd be tempted to release it as an audio piece, as it does seem to go down well as a performance, but I have so few spoons these days, and it's way down the list of priorities.
An excerpt:
Strains of Elysium drifted through the air. Notes formed half of firmament and half of void rang and coursed through every edge of matter - icy tendrils through the dark, dried flowers; shivers through the lace-like leaves. Chords ran up and down his body. The music of her harp. Before he realised that the sweetly mournful tones were dying away, she turned to face him. Her fingers stilled the strings to a silence like a fallen cymbal’s clatter. Her eyes looked through him. Like her music, they thinned him, plumbed his depths, found the nooks and crannies of his being - then skimmed away. As though he were a feature of her world, not a newcomer, a stranger, an invasion of her insular space.