The Moon Path - A Taster

Cupping the moon in his hands, Dakin offers it to his little brother. “Go on,” he insists. “Try again.”

With all the patience of the bored seven-year-old he is, Laurie throws his head back and groans. “I can’t.”

“You can. Just concentrate. Just imagine—”

“But what’s the point?” He falls back against the headboard of his bed with a sullen scowl. “I don’t see why it matters so much.”

Dakin sighs and shifts. “It matters to me,” he says with practiced patience, “because I know you can do it. I’ve seen you. If you’d only try—”

“It only matters to you because it matters to her.” Across the long stretch of bed, Laurie’s dark eyes narrow in a glare. “And that doesn’t mean it has to matter to me.”

The moon flickers in his hands. Resisting the argument, Dakin drops his gaze to give it the full attention it requires to hold it – smoothing the curves of the image in his mind and brightening the projection in the air between them. He can feel it, as slick and as cool as the ice their mother puts in her drinks. Just as she described. It isn’t that hard. Laurie’s just being stubborn.

“Go on,” he murmurs again, the soft silver glow brightening between his fingers, stark in contrast to the warm orange light flickering in the sunjars on the walls. “Just once more, then you can choose the next game.” His eyes flick up to catch Laurie’s, and wins the game with an earnest, “Please?”

Making it quite clear that he is obeying against his wishes, Laurie scowls and rolls his eyes, dragging himself back to resume the cross-legged position mirroring Dakin’s own. Finally settled, he concedes with a muttered, “Tell me again.”

With a smile curling the corners of his mouth, Dakin shifts his aching legs to recite the old story in their mother’s words.

“As cold as the sun is hot, the moon is as smooth as glass and as slippery as ice,” he says, making it so. “It’s so cold that it can leave your fingers tingling for hours afterwards, almost burning, ‘though it doesn’t really hurt. Made from frozen clouds, the moon only appears after the rain has fallen. It sends down a pale blue light that freezes everything it touches. That’s how the Moon Path is made, where the light touches the sea. And it’ll take us–”

“The Moon Path’s just one of Mother’s fairytales,” Laurie interrupts with his well-honed skepticism. “It isn’t real.”

“It can be,” says Dakin, making the moon swell and grow in his hands. “If you believe in it hard enough.”

“Believing in something isn’t enough to make it real.”

It is an old debate between them, and, patience waning, Dakin ends it with a sigh. “Just try, Laurie.”

Pushing ineffectively at the dark curls falling across his face, Laurie obeys, leaning over the illusion nestled between Dakin’s hands, expression set in the gravest of concentration.

“Smooth as glass,” he mutters. “Slippery as ice…” Biting his lip, he reaches with a tentative finger, doubt bright on his face.

Dakin finds himself doing the same, with an unconscious but ardent prayer that this time Laurie will be successful. Magical ability and the willingness to believe in the impossible does not come as naturally to Laurie as it does to him; it isn’t as important, he doesn’t care enough, and Dakin can understand why, knows perfectly well that he is entirely to blame. Wishes, sometimes, that he could explain to his brother why it is so vital—

Laurie’s fingers go straight through, touching Dakin’s palm.

“I told you!” Laurie snatches his hand back at once with a low, frustrated snarl and glares at Dakin, holding him responsible for the hope that has sharpened the failure. “I told you I couldn’t do it!”

“Ssh.” The moon flickers again, and this time Dakin lets it go. “It’s okay,” he says, reaching to tug Laurie to him, grateful when he doesn’t resist. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

“What’s the point?” says Laurie, playing absently with Dakin’s fingers, as though looking for residual traces of the moon. “What’ll make tomorrow different from today? Or yesterday?”

Dakin rests his chin on the crown of his head. “Any number of things.” His heart aches for it, for the possibility of change. It has to be true. “Maybe the entire world will change tomorrow.”

© Esme Symes-Smith

----

Art by the unbelievably amazing Suzanami  who completely surpassed all my expectations in bringing the boys to life.

Thank you to my betas, and Sarah and Amie in particular for really pushing me to short out this chapter, and Steven for telling me it's finally there. Let's hope I can get the rest of it up to scratch too!

Halfway Through

So, it's been a funny few days. Lots of good things happening, so I'll start with those.

First up, more commissions! Weee! This time by the wonderful AndyTheLemon

I've been flailing after her art for a fair while, especially admiring her quick commission sketches (damn! I wish I could sketch like that!) So as soon as she opened them up again, I hopped right on it. I highly recommend her if you've got a spare $10. I love what she's done with the boys <3

Second up, and something I'm still a little in shock about -- I've been picked to be one of the new admins of The Writers' Helpers, where I will be answering questions and giving writing advice. I applied sort of on a whim, not really expecting anything to come of it -- it's a pretty big writing blog, and kind of a pipe-dream -- but eeee! I was so excited when I got the email saying I'd got through to the next round! And yesterday I sent in the last part of the interview process, and they said they'd send the password along shortly after that so... Woop! I've been really wanting to get more involved with the tumblr side of the writing community, so this'll be a fun way of doing it. 

So now for my moan. 

UGH I am so damn stuck on this bloody part! And the worst part is, I know it's just me being stuck in my head because I had such issue with it in the last draft. The problem is, I'm reeaally pleased with the way it ended up last draft, but the way one of my characters has changed means that the whole dynamic between them all has to change too. It's like a triangle -- you alter the degree just a fraction, but that sets the tangent along a completely different course. So I'm trying to work through this AND keep up with my wordcount, and it's just a headache. And I know I should chill out and just do it as it need to be done and relax, but I really really wanted to finish by the end of July, and that goal is slipping away from me and asdfhjk!!!! I feel like I'm never going to finish. It's always 'One more month, one more month', and the months are piling up and I feel stuck in quicksand. And I know it's right for the story, and I'm seriously happy with what I've got so far, but it's killing me!! 

*deep breaths*

It's going to be okay, I know this. There is no hurry, especially with writing. I'll get there in the end.

Update: Today ended up going surprisingly well. Sarah sent me a quote from an article on types of writer's block and how to overcome them which gave me a lot of pep --

10. You're revising your work, and you can't see your way past all those blocks of text you already wrote.

Revising is a nightmare - and if you've adhered to the "write a first draft quickly and then fix it in rewrites" school of thought, you've agreed to a Faustian bargain. There's no way to make this process go faster or more smoothly, a lot of the time. Sometimes it takes a while of looking at your text from different angles to figure out where the problems are, and sometimes you need more feedback from more people to figure out where the real structural weaknesses are.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if you're getting stuck during revisions, that's not any type of Writer's Block (as nebulous a concept as Writer's Block is), but rather just the natural process of trying to diagnose what ails your novel.

Although one thing that works for me when I'm getting stuck with revisions is just to rewrite large sections from scratch, without looking back at your original draft. Same story, new words. Sometimes, it's a lot quicker than trying to wrangle the words you already put down.

So I ended up with 2k of Moon Path AND started a new project. I bought a new notebook and have decided to start free-writing short stories again ^^ I haven't touched short stories in over two years, but I've started having cravings again. So I also have a thousand words of a short story called '3 a.m'. It's very silly but a good start!

Character Development: Laurie

Laurie by Hragon

Laurie (Laurenthian) started out life as my MC, and my first sort-of-but-not-really first original character back in school when I had to write stories that weren't Harry Potter fics and very much a

drone. He was there to serve a purpose as a vessel for stories, and he did the job reasonably well but we were both very dissatisfied. It wasn't until 2013 that I really gave him the space to grow and develop, and when I did changed completely beyond expectation.

He began as a quiet, imaginative boy -- very shrewd, very observant, who sneaks around the house to listen and find out for himself what no-one will tell him. In that respect, he is very similar to Wendy from Karen Wallace's wonderful novel of the same name, and one of the most influential books I've read. Based on Peter Pan, Wendy is the oldest of three siblings and takes her responsibilities very seriously. She has learnt that she cannot trust adults to tell her the truth, so if she wants or needs something, she has to go out and get it for herself. She cloaks herself in the imaginary, and relies on her imagination to protect her and make sense of things she doesn't understand, and that

is something that's very much part of 'The Moon Path'. Laurie is the same, but it's his loneliness that really provokes his imagination into action, and the need for companionship.

I suppose it would be worth saying here that I wrote 'The Moon Path' because I wanted to pay homage to my own imaginary friend, who was very important to me during my teenage years and probably saved my life. I wanted to write about that relationship and that dependency. So, at least in their early incarnations, Laurie is very much me, and Joanna is very much Him. As they grew and my focus shifted -- due mainly to a comment from my grandmother after reading NaNo2013 saying she thought it was a book about the brothers -- they changed into something much more themselves. And I'm glad for that.

As drafts have progressed, he has remained essentially the same -- still astute and sharp, and very much reliant on his imagination -- but he has become sharper, fiercer and much more impatient. He is undeniably a product of his parents, inheriting (to a degree) both their tempers, but thankfully being raised predominantly by his brother has tempered him somewhat, and I think it's his loyalty and affection for Dakin that just about keeps him from being the brat he is in danger of being.

Klaus Baudelaire - Series of Unfortunate Events

Talking of Laurie's brattiness, that's not necessarily a description I would give him, although I can

understand why people would and do think of him in that way. In the beginning of the story, Laurie is thoughtless and, for the most part, very selfish because that is the way they (his mother and brother) have encouraged him to be. They want him to stay childish and careless, and have orchestrated the situation that allows for that. When everything changes and falls apart, it is arguably Laurie who has the biggest adjustment to make, and he has to do it alone. He is angry and hurt, and no-one will explain anything. Having spent seven years being incredibly, and destructively, sheltered, coupled with a firey temper and uncontrollable indignation, he struggles hard, and thinks and acts before think about the consequences, because there have never been consequences before, at least none that he was aware of. In part three, when Laurie is thirteen, more than anything he is defensive, and that manifests in unfair aggression. He is unreasonable, but it is self-preservation and distrust more than simply being spoiled-brattiness.

Little Women's Laurie

That being said, in this the fourth draft, he is becoming sweeter and a little less jagged, at least towards Dakin, and I'm enjoying the way that that conflicts with how he is with his parents and Alyk. He has a little more perspective this time around, and I think/hope that's making him a little more sympathetic. He's still fierce as hell and probably wouldn't think twice about breaking someone's arm who threatened them, but that's his way of repaying Dakin and stepping up to take the big-brother role when Dakin loses it.

Visually, he is a combination of BBC Sherlock and Klaus Baudelaire (Series of Unfortunate Events)

and his name, obviously, is shamelessly stolen from 'Little Women' because Laurie is wonderful.

Art and Inspiration

Right now I'm procrastinating re-writing 500 words I lost last week because I'm an idiot and rely waaaay too heavily on auto-save!

So I got my cover for July Camp yaay! Definitely incentive to look forward and take it seriously (although I still have no idea what point I'll be at by the end of June!) Still, I'm hoping Camp will make me knuckle down and really drive myself to the end. I'm in a cabin with the Gremus again (O! wonderful Gremus!) and I know they'll be a big help in this!

Right now, I'm at the point in my draft that I was on November 1st 2014, and where I really struggled to get going again post NaNo. I'm hoping it'll be easier this time around, although the middle still makes me nervous so we'll see. Alyk is making a lot of sense to me, which is good. I'm excited to see how he'll develop over this draft. I'm still freaking out about this draft every other day, but the days in the middle when everything feels right more than make it worth while!

Now for some more art!

I was incredibly lucky enough to win a prize in Hragon's  follower giveaway. As you know, I absolutely adore her art, and couldn't believe I won the prize I reeaally wanted -- a portrait of a character. I picked Laurie because she did such a perfect job with him last time, and this one's even better. I'll never get over how amazing it is to see your character perfectly depicted outside your head! It's such a crazy thrill, and now I have both the boys. It's very motivating! 

A NaNo'er was giving away art a couple of months ago, and they got back to me today with Ammeline, so it's been a couple of days of excitement (much needed after the couple of days before) Super cute! Definitely need to find a way to include Ammy in Book 2; I don't think I'll be able to wait 'til Book 3!

And, finally, the NaNo blog was asking for Not-So-Secret-Admirer letters for their inspirational blog, so I wrote one for my Writing Buddy, Sarah, and it got picked and published yesterday! It can be found HERE The whole blog is worth taking a look at for motivation and inspiration :) 

So, all in all, it's been a good, busy week. (EXCEPT GAME OF BLOODY THRONES SDFGHJK!!! but I'm not ready to talk about that yet.

Updates & Art

Firstly, big thank you to Hragon (hragon.tumblr.com)  for this amazing picture of Dakin, Laurie and Ammy! She is truly a spectacular artist, and it's really fantastic to see Laurie and Ammy, in particular, outside my head. As a writer, I struggle quite a lot with visuals, so having something outside of myself to work with really helps the story along. Thank you!

In more general news, it's been a funny sort of week. I spent three days on one scene -- struggling through it one day, writing it out by hand the next (because I'm an idiot and forgot my keyboard) and typing it out again. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, and how my problematic character has turned out, but it certainly threw off my gameplan this week. BUT today was good, and I think I wrote well today. Approaching the climax of Part One is pretty exciting, and I'm psyched to start thinking about Part Two and bringing Alyk back into the picture. I really feel like I have a decent handle on him this time around, so I'm looking forward to seeing how that pans out. 

Draft Four is such a funny beast. I'm used to the ups and the downs that come with writing now, but nothing prepared me for how much more intense they would be this time around! Maybe it's because I'm putting more pressure on myself to Get It Right and not have to do another rewrite, idk, but it's certainly pretty exhausting! I told Christine the other day that I was nervous about her reading because she's my harshest critic, and she just looked at me and said, "No, you are." And she's absolutely right. I am bullying myself mercilessly, but I don't know how to stop. I can only hope that -- by the end of this -- it'll be worth it. 

Character Development: Dakin

Alright, so I've been thinking about doing some proper explanations of my characters -- who they are, where they come from etc. etc. -- probably more for myself than for anyone else, but one of the most frequently repeated questions on the NaNo boards is 'How Do Character??' so, here's my how do. 

We will start with my primary MC, Dakin. 

He started, in this incarnation, as a secondary character, included only to fill a small role as 'MC's Brother'. My original intention for Dakin -- back in the days when 'Moonpath' was a weird fantasy set between the real world and an imaginary one -- was to be a sort of connection between the two worlds. Some sort of romance was to be included blah blah blah. Long story short, that didn't happen. Instead, he turned into Laurie's primary motivation for getting the hell off the island -- Dakin was a warning of what his life would be if he didn't escape now. 

In all my drafts, as different as they are, the separation of the brothers has always been a vital component. I really wanted to explore a relationship between two people who have this history, and this tight bond but are still, for all intents and purposes, strangers. I realised, by the end of NaNo 2013, it was this story that I really wanted to tell and, in doing so, Dakin became my MC. 

And by doing so, I had to go backwards, right back to where it all started. 

Dakin starts the story on the brink of his thirteenth birthday. Life is tricky, finding the balance between surviving his father, protecting his brother and keeping his mother happy, but he has his routine and knows what to expect. Everything is predictable and simply a matter of waiting. The thread with which he is held together is very brittle and, at the beginning of the story, he is really starting to struggle not to snap. Everything is changing but no-one will talk about it, and he's afraid of asking the questions he really doesn't want to know the answers to. Life is hard, but he is scared of pushing to make things better, knowing that it could go either way -- infinitely better, or infinitely worse -- and reluctant to risk it. He would rather wait and hope that his mother makes good on her promise to take him and Laurie away, but the more time passes the more Dakin realises that the only person who will save him is himself. 

Developmentally, I began Dakin's story in my comfort-zone. He is very much. at the core, an

amalgamation of all the characters I've ever really connected to. In the beginning, he is very inspired by my (ridiculously extensive) head-canons of Pre-Hogwarts Draco Malfoy. Anyone who knows me will not be surprised at this. Draco has lived in my head for the last ten years, and I've been really wracking my brains as to how to bring him out and make him my own. I knew I couldn't force it, that would be nightmarish, but he's definitely grown into himself as Dakin. I wanted to write about a ridiculously privileged boy who, on the surface, has everything he could possibly want but is struggling to battle some pretty hefty demons. As the story has unfolded, of course, he has moved away Draco and has grown into something very different, but it's important to talk about the roots of the character, and that definitely lies in Harry Potter fanfiction. 

Speaking of fanfiction, there's another character that definitely needs mentioning in connection to

development. After Season Two of BBC's Sherlock aired in 2012, the character of Mycroft Holmes grabbed me like a bulldog and refused to put me down for a very long time. More specifically, the relationship between Mycroft and Sherlock. 

I loved the relationship between them -- these two amazingly clever men with this bizarre brotherly bond that I had never seen before. Of course, me being me, I needed to write it, to extract all the marrow from this headcanon that was growing at unspeakable rates. I was fascinated by the way they are surrounded by all these people and yet they are isolated in their uniqueness and so reluctantly dependent on each other. I have never had any personal experience with siblings, but this was something I could connect to. I saw Mycroft as incredibly protective of Sherlock's waning innocence, and he would do anything to preserve his little brother's childishness, no matter what the personal risk. Obviously Mycroft was a very ambitious young man, and I wanted to explore the conflict of fighting his way to the top whilst at the same time needing to prioritize a boy who didn't necessarily want to accept the help but also cannot survive without it. The age difference between them (7 years) also struck me as interesting and was very influential on the path I took those headcanons down. For more info, see my fic All We Have in the End  Unfinished, but I'd love to go back to it one day. 

Okay, so back to Dakin. Once everything crumbles (as of course it has to) and everything holding him together has been stripped away, he is left with only the shell of himself and a stranger who had been brought in to, effectively, keep him alive and out of the way. Dakin between the ages of 14 and 18 was really interesting to write because everything that made him him was removed. He has nothing -- no control, no freedom, no real purpose to live but even his life isn't his own anymore. The only thing giving him any sort of motivation at all is the vague hope that everything will go back to the way it was. He has forgotten why he wants that or what it would mean should it happen, but the want is deep and instinctive. He is so preoccupied with this want that it keeps him rooted in the past and prevents him from moving forward. He is static, unable to move backwards and forwards. The motivation that comes from this isn't a healthy one -- he cannot have what he wants, and brooding over it only makes it feel as though he is losing it all over again. It is only with the final realisation that everything he knew from before is gone and letting go of the scraps that he is finally able to start making forward progress and start building himself back from the beginning. 

Inspiration and influence came this time from the character of Yuki Sohma from Natsuki Takaya's manga series Fruits Basket. The isolation and the damaging effect of being alone with nothing but your own thoughts and the callous criticism of others eating away at you until there's nothing left really struck me, especially in such a young character. Being broken down mentally can have a catastrophic effect physically, and that was something I wanted to explore. How could anyone survive that, and what would happen when they came out the other side?

Another element of Yuki's story that really inspired me was his relationship with his mother. In all my stories in all the years, I have always somehow managed to avoid talking about mothers; they are always mysteriously absent for whatever reason. But, with Moonpath, I wanted to break this habit. And the relationship between Dakin and his mother, it transpires, is one of the more interesting. Dakin's love and unconditional faith in his mother and her promise to him is both what holds him together in the beginning and breaks him apart most brutally. I was surprised, in the beginning, that my beta readers despised Aurelia far more than Lysandis, and when I questioned Sarah on this, she made the simple case that 'Mothers are supposed to put their children first', and Aurelia's failure to do so make her the true villain of this story. She holds the power, she could make things better so quickly and so easily, but it is her reluctance to face up to her

mistakes and her subsequent distance from Dakin that really sets the events in motion. 

When you're a child, your mother is the whole world. It doesn't matter what anyone else says, she is always right and you will be on her side unconditionally. Unfortunately, unconditional loves comes at a price when it isn't reciprocated, and that's something I really want to get to the bottom of with Dakin and Aurelia. Everything he does is, ultimately, for her and the less she acknowledges him the harder and the more desperately he tries which, unfortunately, only pushes her further away. I wanted to write about the impossible position of a guilty mother who loves her son but cannot and will not accept the mistakes she has made and the damage she has caused. 

I don't necessarily agree that she's the villain - I don't really think I have a villain at all - but she certainly holds the most power and is the inciting catalyst for a great deal of what goes on, even in her absence. 

Realising that his mother isn't going to save him is major turning point on two occasions, and makes him stronger at both points, giving him the incentive to fight for what he needs himself. 

By the time Part 3 comes along, at which point Dakin is 19, he has managed to scrape himself together into a good place. He is as content and as happy as he ever expects to be, with a routine and work to keep him occupied and distracted. By this point, I wasn't really influenced by any outside sources, more looking at the logical route that a character with this background would take. My thoughts were: As long as he keeps still and nothing changes or deviates, everything is perfectly fine. Of course, in novelling, 'perfectly fine' is unacceptable and the boat needs to be rocked. Long story short, getting what you want comes at a hefty price and never materializes quite in the way you expect it to. 

I can't really say much more without giving the ending away, but yes, this is how a character grows from seed. It takes time, a helluva lot of time, and patience and false starts, but if you spend enough time with them eventually you'll wake up one day in shock to find a three-dimensional human being taking up space in your head. 

Oh, and funny story about the name *headdesk* In October 2013, I needed a name for a Final Fantasy character and Dakin sprung into my head. I had no idea where it came from, assuming it was from a book or something, but I liked it a lot! NaNo passed, and Dakin was christened Dakin and I was very pleased. Still had no idea where I'd heard it before though... Then, one day in early December 2013, I was pottering a long minding my own business, and then I remembered. 

It was the bloody middle name of my bloody ex-boyfriend - someone I reeaally didn't want to pay tribute to!

But by that point it was too late. Thankfully, Dakin is completely himself and not even slightly similar to Him. Thankfully. 

Art Credit:

All pics of Dakin belong to me and were drawn by the wonderful Suzanami 

Mycroft and Sherlock belong to and are drawn by Against-Stars 

And all Fruits Basket belong to Natsuki Takaya. 

Art, Progress and The Hobbit

Apologies for the lack of updates, it's been a busy couple of days. Tricksy scenes are like buses, they all come at once and then it just gets ridiculous. I'm happy with the scenes individually but, once again, crisis of confidence has struck and I'm feeling paralyzed. Who am I kidding? This isn't going anywhere. It's boring and whiny and full of plot-holes -- oh god! the plot holes! I can't keep anyone's attention with it. It's like an ugly child whose mother thinks it's gorgeous but the whole world knows better. 

*headdesk*

*I* like it, but I'm feeling delusional,

In other, happier news, Hragon from NaNo did some sketches of Dakin for me and I'm super pleased! It's always nerve-wracking asking for art, but I've admired their work for a while and was not disappointed!

Also, we got preview tickets to see The Hobbit today and... well... It's worth seeing but I laughed more than I cried. It was no Lord of the Rings.

Eagles what?

New Cover!

 Yesterday, a wonderful NaNo'er -- Jinxmoonstone -- made me a beautiful cover for Book 3. Isn't it pretty? Jinx is supremely talented and I almost wish I was going through the self publishing route just so I could do it justice!

You can see more of their work at Inksplatter Art Shoppe

Keep an eye out on the NaNo Artisans thread for when they open their requests again!