Robert Priest's Blog: Blogging not logging

I finally finished the whole trilogy! Yes, the Spell Crossed trilogy is complete. Book 2, Second Kiss and book 3 Missing Piece are now out and available. It's been a long haul, having worked on them for the past 15 years. Personally, it means I've followed through on a childhood commitment to write the kind of books I was reading them. Fantasy. I learned a lot along the way and a new appreciation of the novelist's craft. I'm tempted now more than I used to be to write a novel for adults. But I need to catch my breath if I'm going to do that. Meanwhile I am very close to finishing The Wolf is Back, a follow-up to Rose Rose, a book of poems for children and young adults. I confess to being very excited by it. All of this means that I'm going to have more time to attend to matters here in Goodreads so I hope some of you will encourage me by reading this blog and feeding back.

Book 1 in my Spell Crossed fantasy series, The Paper Sword, is an iBooks summer reads selection! you can get an eCopy for a mere $3.99. Just go to the iTunes store, go to books, go to summer reads and it's in the young adult category. So economical and perfect reading for fantasy lovers. and then you won't have to wait very long for second kiss because it's right there for $8.99.

had a great book launch for Second Kiss at the Dora Keogh in Toronto. Sold a goodly number of books through Ben McNally books. Meanwhile toiling daily on the follow-up Missing Piece and I'm really enjoying it. First draft is almost complete including formatting of text etc. It being a book about pieces I have a number of fairly small fractured chapters but a large cast of characters.

Monday I'm off to Salerno Italy for a poetry Festival. Back on June 10. That's my fourth travel this season, more than usual for sure, especially when I've got a book to finish but the same thing happened when I went to Japan and had to finish Second Kiss and look how good that turned out (I tell myself).

In between times I'm gigging with my band, (just did a great gig at say what in Toronto), writing songs, writing poems for my new book of children's poems called People like you and Me. And about halfway through a book about old poems which includes quite a number of sonnets I'm slightly embarrassed to say.

I have an idea for a new young adult novel after I finished missing piece. But this one will take place in our world and not be a fantasy. But the main character will be a kind of rude brilliant revolutionary chatty person. That will be about April Fools' Day.

I've also changed my workstation again. I now have a wireless keyboard and I sit about 4 feet back from a large iMac screen with the resolution up large so I have no problem seeing it. Mostly I dictate but when necessary I have the little keyboard with the touchpad on my lap. I probably write three times as much like this is I ever did or could physically in my years of plunking at a typewriter. That's good because there's a lot of ancillary writing tasks that go with being a writer and it's easy to get up in the morning and wind up doing two or three hours of feeling forms and writing emails so that by the time you're finished the energy for creative writing has been severely dipped into by mundane but necessary tasks. Now I can do that work which isn't psychologically taxing and have it not be physically taxing either so that late in the day if I get inspired and need to spill out some whole episode or chapter or delineate an idea I can do it without hurting myself.
And that's good. Plus I'm learning a bit of Italian

I got my authors copies of book 2 of Spell Crossed, Second Kiss, yesterday. The book looks great and feels good. Even a tiny bit hefty. Three hundred some odd pages. Putting the first and the second book together side-by-side I'm enjoying the aesthetic of the two covers. Meanwhile I am busy writing Missing Piece, book 3. And I'm off for two weeks of teaching in Banff. It's so intricate writing fantasy. Knowing what to tell about what's going on with the magic and what to leave unstated but hopefully able to be ferreted out as the narrative proceeds. More of the latter is good I believe. Enjoying working with the character Tharfen who takes the lead in book 3. Right now there are snowflakes the size of tea cozies flopping down into the water filled use troughs outside my window. Kamikazes.

We all know that the most vital human quality required for learning is curiosity. And I'm thankful that the huge curiosity I had as a child is quite active in me in the last decade or so. It's just a great time to be curious. If you were curious two hundred years ago there was lots to learn of course but you had to first go and find a teacher or patiently examine nature over a great period of time. Of course there were books 200 years ago. There were great libraries. But even if you could get to the nearest library by the time your curiosity started to suffer from fatigue you might not be allowed in. In England for instance working people, Catholics, Jews and others couldn't get in.  And as always everything was harder for females. So even if you were the most curious female in all the history of the earth it was massively more difficult to satisfy your curiosity than now — for many — impossible. 
When I was a kid  I wanted to know everything And every author mentioned by another author — I wanted their books immediately. But actually getting a book when you wanted it was often a feat that required the passage of a long period of time. Information on authors other than a small paragraph on the dust jacket was almost impossible to attain.

I suppose there were books in bookstores then but we were recent immigrants and there was definitely no money for books except maybe at Christmas I don't think I even went into a bookstore until I was maybe twelve and Coles books came to Scarborough.  There was certainly very little educational TV — if you had a TV — if you are allowed to watch TV —  I only had very limited time allotted to me. If there was anything overtly educational on TV it was most often about World War II. There were some explorer type shows with old white guys pointing out "primitive" stuff in exotic location, but it was often erroneous if not outright racist. I swear it was on one of the shows that I heard a native people somewhere being referred to as "subhuman" And this was after World War II.
 But my point is information, knowledge – let alone wisdom, was hard to come by.  There was so much I wanted to know. I could've learned so much mathematics so much faster than I did.  I could have gobbled up history at ten times the rate dispensed by the droning by rote of your basic teacher in a public school.  It wasn't a great time for curiosity.
Now, if you're curious about something you can at least start with the Internet.  And not just in the so-called "developed" word.  and when one author mentions another or when in looking up one word you encounter another very interesting word or when in seeking the explanation of one kind of science you find mention of fifteen other kinds of science you have the option of starting off on those tangents immediately.  You can push your curiosity forward in a linear way or go off in flank actions and tangents to the sides and move as a field phenomenon — whatever suits your style of intake. Carefully of course. Being sure to check sources of course. Learning what and what not to trust of course. But with your appetite opened up as wide as you want. What a grew time for curiosity.

Lesser Shadows

the buildings wait for the assassins

the shadows are prepared for them --
they flow like dark sheets
of blood from underneath the doors

there are many vacant rooms
many rifles waiting

soon the assassins begin to arrive
they are all a little crazy
moved by politics or dark desires
they are tense and frightened
but eager, jostling one another
for places at the windows

there are assassins behind bushes
assassins on roofs
and distant hilltops
there are so many assassins
there are assassins crouched
in shadows of assassins

it is good that the victim is young
and wealthy
it is good that
he seems to symbolize something

now they prepare their weaponry
his car goes by
the triggers click
a thousand bullets meet
inside a single head
the skull explodes
the president is dead
silently
some with spittle running
from the corners of their mouths
some dazed
as though awaking from a trance
the assassins file out of the buildings
past the shocked, staring faces to the highways
past the farthest edges of the sun's descending red
and, as night absorbs the lesser shadows
America absorbs her murderers
completely

Another task of writing is getting an assist from technology. Sometimes when you've been toiling away at a piece sculpting it and trimming it for hours and it's getting on towards midnight and you're too tired to read it aloud to yourself you can do what I do. I have an option in my MacBook to send selection to iTunes. When I enable this the text can then be spoken by the machine voice. Which is uncannily better than it used to be. I can just sit back with my head hung over and have the whole thing run by me one more time. Receiving it a different way. Listening.

Once again I've come to Goodreads to blog, signed in and been unable to find the link that takes me to this page where I'm writing now. New blog post. Weird. If anybody's reading this (and I don't think anybody is but that's okay for now) please drop me a line and tell me the easy way to get to my own blog. For now I just go to Google and put in "blogging not logging" get to it that way.

The good news is that I've upgraded my Dragon Dictate software and acquired my buddy, Al Booth's old iMac which has so much more power so that not only do I have a new program but much more processing capability so that it runs very smoothly all of its very necessary editing functions and spelling functions easily attainable. Since I've been a public speaker all my life and I'm fairly comfortable speaking out loud and have used some version of voice to text for at least 15 years I've grown pretty comfortable with this process and I love it.

So I've been working on Missing Piece book 3 of my spell crossed series and I'm managing to be pretty delighted with how it's going. I probably said in previous posts that I've become a writer of "faith" my faith being that I will maintain high enough imagination to make virtues out of my narrative challenges. Faith that things will continue to unfold within the very general parentheses of the plot line I have. Also I'm behaving myself in terms of not going off on huge poetic tangents. Trying to keep a lot of it action and dialogue oriented. I sent a proto-version of Chapter 1 to Dundurn in the hopes that because it's only 4 pages they may be able to put it in at the end of Book 2, Second Kiss. All of this is helped by the fact that I have this new toy that's dictated all of what you've just read without a single mistake so far. Though I did have to capitalize a few things. Later — RP

What I like about fantasy

fantasy or books with magic in them were always my first choice whenever I went to the bookmobile I attended in Scarborough. Then as a grown-up I was taken with the magic realism of Marquez and Julio Cortazar and Salman Rushdie. And poetry. And I think they all have much in common. The sense of escaping causality in the material sense getting into the poesis. A realm where the word is power. Poems and spells. A world where one could overcome vast forces with a word. Now science makes some of the wilder dreams of the poesis attainable. Flight. We dream it. We hold the vision hard and insist on it and our senses through science attain it. Same thing with telepathy. Same thing with healing and immortality. How many spells before mutations of the spells broke down into equations. All of which started with a vision of the world not the way it is or was-a magical vision. but as the lingo streams through the logos it selects more and more for the more exact language of numbers. we wind up in a world much more made of mathematical formulations than magical spells or the geist legends of poetry to which our organisms are attuned. We are not made for an exact world. nor an understandable world nor a predictable world. We are made for a fantastical world.

After a long day resisting writing yesterday when I finally got down to doing “just a little bit” so that I wouldn't feel completely useless I had a vision. It's a vision I had before even starting this novel of papers in the wind but yesterday it took on a meaning within the new story that pretty much thrilled me and allowed me to in good conscience click my “had a worthwhile day” button. I wasn't going to get into writing the whole scene but I did do a quick rundown of what should take place and what the mechanics of it had to be. And what was the micro story that whirled behind it. By that time I was feeling so useful I didn't even have to count the words. Then I did some work on my sonnets—strict Shakespearean sonnets mostly with rhymes and everything but no archaicisms and no syntax torturing -- in fact in hopes of achieving the effect of common speech. I don't know why. I can't completely justify it. I sometimes backpedal about it but I go on doing it nevertheless. About 15 of them. One things for sure I've noticed with writing that the more I write the more I write and you get to a point where you don't have to waste a lot of your energy on overcoming resistance you're just there in the whirlwind reaping and sowing away. once all wheels are rolling the wider fields of the mind become available, into and on job frequently just throwing stuff into your consciousness. it was like that.