Jungle Realm

Last Friday I introduced you to my seven realms series, starting with the desert realm. This week I’m sharing the beginning of the jungle realm. It’s the same premise, just a different setting.

Three friends were on their way to a vacation when they caught some teenagers hassling a little old lady – of course they came to her rescue. But it turns out the little old lady was a fairy godmother and granted them a wish as their reward. It was to be used for something personal, and the three wished to meet the men of their deepest desires.

Evangeline Covington couldn't remember the last time she'd had such a wicked hangover. She groaned, but didn't feel up to opening her eyes yet. It wasn't like they'd had that much to drink last night, two bottles of wine between the three of them - she must be getting old.

She felt damp. There was something digging into her back and the distinct smell of greenery in the air. She had a sneaking suspicion of where she was. Cracking her eyes open slightly, she slammed them tightly shut again, her suspicions confirmed. They hadn't made it back to the cabin last night - she'd slept outside.

"Fi? Taylor? You guys awake?" Even the sound of her own voice made her wince.

There was no answer. With another groan she rolled to her side so the sun wasn't in her face and tried opening her eyes again.

Frowning, she stared at the bright red flower in front of her nose. She didn't remember there being flowers blooming in the woods, especially not such exotic looking ones.

Feeling a slight chill, she levered herself into a sitting position and took a good look around. "What the hell?"

Hangover forgotten, Eva got to her feet and stared around in disbelief. This was not the woods full of pine trees surrounding the cabin on the lake. In fact, this wasn't a forest at all, it was more like a jungle.

Several different varieties of palm and other exotic trees towered upwards, hung with trailing vines. The undergrowth seemed to be filled with broad-leafed shrubs and ferns. An endless variety of colorful blossoms rioted around her.

Eva staggered, reaching out to steady herself by holding on to the trunk of a palm. "Where am I?" she whispered.

More importantly, how did she get here? The last thing she remembered was sitting around the camp fire with Fiona and Taylor. They were drinking wine and made a toast to friendship. Then she'd spotted the evening star and . . .

"Esmeralda!"

She remembered hearing the old woman's voice, something about making a wish. They'd treated it like a joke and decided to wish for their perfect mate.

All her life Eva had loved adventure stories, especially ones set in exotic locations. Her favorites were by the old romantic fantasy writers - Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, A. A. Merritt - with their tales of lost cities set in the jungles of the world. In her deepest fantasies, ones she'd never shared with even Fiona or Taylor, she'd dreamed of being swept away by her very own jungle lord.

"This is crazy!" she said firmly. "Hello? Anyone?"

People didn't just wish for something like that and have it happen. Someone was playing a joke on her. A very bad, practical joke. There must have been something in the wine that knocked her out so someone, or a couple of someones, could transport her to the nearest zoo and leave her in the middle of the African exhibit.

Eva leaned against the palm tree for support. Which was just as likely as being transported to an actual jungle. What else had Esmeralda told them?

"I'm a fairy godmother, but no one believes in magic anymore, more's the pity."

"Magic," Eva repeated, trying the word on for size. Esmeralda was right. People didn't believe in magic any more. Maybe if they did she wouldn't have such a hard time believing in it now.

A cool breeze swept through the jungle and she shivered, her damp clothing amplifying the chill. The tops of the trees were starting to wave and when she looked up she caught a glimpse of dark clouds building.

"This is so not fair!"

She needed shelter from the oncoming storm and fast, judging by the smell of rain in the air. With any luck she could curl up and go to sleep, awakening to find this was nothing more than an alcohol induced, very vivid, dream.

Birds of Passage

I’m making a slight change to the line-up here. Two reasons: 1. It’s my blog and I can do what I want, and 2. After four days off I found myself unprepared to present a new form today. So, starting today, the first Wednesday of the month I will share a favorite poem written by someone else, and the last Wednesday of the month will be a new form.

That being said, I have to admit that this was not the poem I had planned on presenting today. There is a poem that was written about what it was like to be the child of a merman, but I could not for the life of me remember who wrote it. This is going to frustrate the heck out of me, and I swear I will find it someday, just not today.

Instead I will offer this one from one of my all-time favorite poets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I love the lyrical quality of his poems and the way they flow. I even used a quote from one of his poems at the beginning of the first book I ever attempted to write. This is not that poem. ;-)

Birds of Passage

Black shadows fall
From the lindens tall,
That lift aloft their massive wall
Against the southern sky;

And from the realms
Of the shadowy elms
A tide-like darkness overwhelm
The fields that round us lie.

But the night is fair,
And everywhere
A warm, soft vapor fills the air,
And distant sounds seem near;

And above, in the light
Of the star-lit night,
Swift birds of passage wing their flight
Through the dewy atmosphere.

I hear the beat
Of their pinions fleet,
As from the land of snow and sleet
They seek a southern lea.

I hear the cry
Of their voices high
Falling dreamily through the sky,
But their forms I cannot see.

Oh, say not so!
Those sounds that flow
In murmurs of delight and woe
Come not from wings of birds.

They are the throngs
Of the poet's songs,
Murmurs of pleasures, and pains, and wrongs,
The sound of winged words.

This is the cry
Of souls, that high
On toiling, beating pinions, fly,
Seeking a warmer clime.

From their distant flight
Through realms of light
It falls into our world of night,
With the murmuring sound of rhyme.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Home Again, Home Again

Yup, I'm home again. When the daughter was little we used to take her up to Owen Sound a lot (up north/west of here) and when we got home we'd always tell her: Home again, home again, hot diggity dog! Which was our version of the rhyme:

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig
Home again, home again, jiggity jig
To market, to market, to buy a fat hog
Home again, home again, jiggity jog

I had a wonderful four days (which was really only two full days) visiting my sister. It's amazing how much you can do in just four days. I think I'm going to do a separate page to chronicle my visit (since vacations away from home happen all too rarely) so I'll save all the good stuff for that. Keep watching for either the page tab at the top or the link to it.

Seriously, you didn't really expect me to get any writing in while I was gone, did you? Silly you!

So today's post is just a short one, but if I get back on track the way I'd like this week, then watch out next Monday!

Seven Realms

Nothing new this week I’m afraid, but I’ve been revisiting a series I started developing a couple of years ago with the idea of it being the next WIP after I finish the Moonstone Chronicles and the Ardraci Elementals. Or maybe I might even start working on it before I’m done with the others.

At any rate, I thought you might like a preview. To set this excerpt up…Taylor and her two friends were on their way to a vacation when they caught some teenagers hassling a little old lady – of course they came to her rescue. But it turned out the little old lady was a fairy godmother and granted them a wish as their reward. It was to be used for something personal, and the three wished to meet the men of their deepest desires.

The sound of a bird screeching brought Taylor awake with a start. She sat up cautiously, expecting a shaft of hangover pain, but nothing happened. Not that she was trying to borrow trouble, but if she drank enough wine that she passed out on some beach somewhere, why didn't she have a hangover? It was as puzzling as to the fact she'd passed out in the first place. They'd only had two bottles of wine between the three of them.

"Somebody must have spiked one of those bottles," she said, getting to her feet. "It's the only possible--where the heck am I?"

With the sand beneath her she'd assumed she'd wandered onto the beach at the resort about half a mile from the cottage, but looking around herself all she could see was sand. There was no hotel, no water, no ... anything. Just sand.

Taylor sat down again. She must still be drunk. The nearest desert was hundreds of miles away. There was no way she could just magically appear in the middle of one.

Magic! What was it that little old lady they'd helped said? Something about being a fairy godmother and no one believing in such things any more.

There was more ... she remembered sitting by the fire, passing the bottle of wine around, and she'd been just about to get up to get the makings for some s'mores when Eva spotted the evening star.

"No, that's ridiculous!"

When they saw the star they heard the old woman's voice again: "... whatever wish you make tonight upon that star will come true. But mind it's a personal wish, something frivolous that will benefit only you. None of that world peace nonsense. You will be touched by magic."

"Touched by magic," she repeated. They decided then and there to wish for their perfect mates. "No way!" she said, a little louder.

If there was one thing Taylor loved, it was old black and white movies, the older the better. And her absolute favourites were the silent movies. Douglas Fairbanks, Lillian Gish, Buster Keaton ... but the one she'd had the biggest crush on was Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik. So without even thinking about it, when it came time to make her wish she wished to be swept away by a desert prince.

"This can't be real," she said, getting to her feet for a better look around. There were no deserts in Canada, nothing even resembling a desert in the woods she had started out in. But there was no denying the fact that she was in the middle of an unknown desert. No sheik in sight, she was utterly alone.

Found Poem

Yes, I know I said I’d post my purple “not quite as creepy as the story poem” but I’ve decided it’s a work in progress so you’re just going to have to wait until I finish playing around with it.

In the meantime, I found a Found Poem that I wrote a few years ago. A Found Poem is pretty much what it sounds like – a poem that’s “found” in other writings. It’s created by taking words, sentences, or whole sections from prose sources and making changes in spacing lines, turning them into a poem.

My poem was “found” in the introduction of a psychology textbook called Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. It’s a really fascinating book, and I’m not normally a fan of non-fiction. Anyway, this is the poem that spoke to me from those words:

The Wild Woman

We may have forgotten her names,
we may not answer when she calls ours,
but in our bones we know her,
we yearn toward her;
we know she belongs to us and we to her.

A sense of her comes through vision;
through sights of great beauty.
I have felt her when I see
what we call in the woodlands
a Jesus-God sunset.
I have felt her move in me
from seeing the fishermen
come up from the lake at dusk
with lanterns lit,
and also from seeing my newborn baby’s toes
all lined up like a row of sweet corn.
We see her where we see her,
which is everywhere.

She comes to us through sound as well;
through music which vibrates the sternum,
excites the heart;
it comes through the drum,
the whistle, the call, and the cry.
It comes through the written and the spoken word;
sometimes a word, a sentence or a poem or a story,
is so resonant, so right,
it causes us to remember,
at least for an instant,
what substance we are really made from,
and where is our true home.

The longing for her comes
when one happens across someone
who has secured this wildish relationship.
The longing comes
when one realizes one has given scant time
to the mystic cookfire
or to the dreamtime,
too little time to one’s own creative life,
one’s life work or one’s true loves.

We eventually must pursue the wildish nature.
Then we leap into that forest
or into the desert
or into the snow
and run hard,
our eyes scanning the ground,
our hearing sharply tuned,
searching under,
searching over,
searching for a clue,
a remnant,
a sign that she still lives,
that we have not lost our chance.

The Wild Woman has no name,
for she is so vast.

Almost There

Like the post title says, I’m almost there – there being back on track with the writing. Although I guess that seems a little ironic considering I missed last Monday’s post, especially in the face of Monday being a holiday.

But I’ll tell you something. Deciding to do something and actually being able to do that something are two totally different things. It’s all well and good to say “I’m going to devote X amount of time to writing every day” but there are still chores to be done – meals to make, laundry, and now that it’s summer the grass to cut – shopping and errands to run, and people dropping by to visit the hubby.

I was in my office last week, congratulating myself on finally getting some writing time, and I’d no sooner opened a notebook to work on something than the hubby’s parents stopped by for a visit. I was fully prepared to stay hidden in there but one of the cats dropped a stink bomb in the litter pan outside my office door, effectively gassing me out of the room.

It’s the little things, but the little things tend to add up pretty quickly.

Now the weekend would have been prime for writing – I was able to do my grocery shopping on Friday and I had nothing else planned. However, I’m going away Thursday (at the obscenely indecent hour of 4:30 a.m.) and I won’t be back until late Sunday. So the weekend was all about preparing for my trip. Also preparing for the fact I'll be babysitting the grandbaby full time the first part of the week.

But part of that preparation was getting my blog posts written and scheduled for the week. Not just this one and the one on my other blog, but the Wednesday and Friday posts as well. And I didn’t just get my blog posts done, I also got a brief synopsis of the seven realms I’ll be writing about in a new series I’m working on, in hopes of sweet talking the nephew I’ll be seeing into creating maps.

Now yes, that wasn’t getting any work done on my current WIPs, but the fact is I was able to fit all that writing in while doing a whole bunch of other stuff as well. I proved to myself I can do it, it’s just too bad I’ll have to wait a couple of weeks to see if I can do it with my regular writing.

And for the record, I’m taking my writing bag with me on my trip. We’ll see if I’m able to actually get any writing in. ;-)

I Dream the Colour Purple

This week’s prompt was to write about a colour (the secondary prompt was going back and changing one thing in your past but I think that’ll be a story for another day).

I actually came up with a flash piece and a poem this time around – both need a bit of work. The flash story is still in its first draft and the poem, while not as dark as the story, is missing something, I just don’t know what. I'm going to save it for my Wednesday post, so if you're curious come back then. :-D

I Dream the Colour Purple

I dream the colour purple; landscapes made purple by the light of dusk and dawn. I wish I could live always in one of them, in the shadow times. There is purple in the way the ocean swells in a sunset storm. It’s there in the backlight you see in the sky right before a lightning strike. You found it frightening but the colour speaks to me like no other.

I dream the colour purple. We walked through a field of lavender and you made some remark on the smell, ignoring the colour spreading from our feet all the way to the horizon. How could you not want to wrap yourself in it? You were even less impressed by the vineyard, when we stopped to taste the sweet, warm burst of flavour from grapes fattening on the vine in the summer heat.

I dream the colour purple. The purple-hued circles under your eyes were beautiful to me. Makeup could only partially disguise them; I don’t know why you tried. Even more beautiful was the colour of the bruises you wore from a punishment done just right.

I dream the colour purple. The piercing hue of the amethysts we found when I took you rock hunting; the wonder of finding a geode with its hidden treasure. It was our last outing together. You never should have tried to run.

I dream the colour purple. It was the colour of your eyes – just like Elizabeth Taylor’s. I always loved your eyes. It was the only thing I loved about you which is why I plucked them out to add to my collection.

I dream the colour purple. It is the colour of royalty to some, of death to others. You didn’t understand my love of purple, but you do now. It is the colour of your corpse as it lies cooling at my feet.

I dream the colour purple. There is a carpet of violets, deep in the heart of the dark wood. Your final resting place; you and others like you. Rest easy, knowing you will feed the colour purple. And my dreams.