here<\/a> on my author website.<\/p>\nOne of the several reasons that I got so blocked on this book was the way it seemed so tightly tied into my magickal work and Real Life(tm). The Longer the Fall<\/em> is all about magic, and draws heavily on my personal experiences–but then, so does Mortal Touch<\/em>. But the entire period of time in which I’ve been working on The Longer the Fall<\/em> has been marked with a series of downright creepy coincidences, synchronicities and instances of “life imitating art.” It got to the point where these incidents not only were spooky in their own right, but the cumulative effect has had me wondering, for years now, just what might happen when I did finally finish the book.<\/p>\nSince Mortal Touch<\/em> was published, quite a few people have been asking me when The Longer the Fall<\/em> was coming out, and I kept pushing the release date ahead further and further. I did make progress on it several times, but there always seemed to be so many other huge projects demanding my time. I really wanted to establish myself as a publisher, not just a “self-published writer.” I wanted to get several other authors published before I released another book of my own.<\/p>\n2009 has been a phenomenal year for me in many ways. By the end of August, I’d released Gideon Redoak,<\/em> had sent out the ARCs for Cat the Vamp,<\/em> and on September 10 I sent the first-round edits off for Krymsin Nocturnes.<\/em> I didn’t have another convention scheduled until October. I’m an astrologer, and I calculate all my transits for each month. When I did my transits for September, I noticed that Pluto was making a fairly significant transit to natal Venus in my horoscope. Because Pluto was just turning direct, this transit was in orb for six solid days. Now this could have various meanings, but as one astrology writer says, “if you work in any creative, artistic field, take advantage of a powerful creative flow that is possible [now]…your art is subject to the transformative theme of this transit.”<\/p>\nI looked at all that, and thought, “Okay. I can’t pass this up. Pluto transits are literally once in a lifetime events, and too many other things are falling into place. I am going to consciously channel this energy, pull a “mini-NaNo” marathon and finish The Longer the Fall<\/em>, no matter what.” Regardless of the fact that the transit coincided with a week I needed to plan a church service, plus observe Mabon (Autumn Equinox) and a New Moon! Plus<\/em>, Mercury was retrograde!<\/p>\nBut retrograde Mercury is a funny thing. I’ve found that while it may bollux up things like communications, when it comes to internal<\/em> mental work, the kind of thing that I was doing where I was just locking the doors, turning off the phone and burying myself in my writing, retrograde Mercury can actually facilitate that process. It turns Mercury’s communication inward and tends to block distractions coming at you from outside.<\/p>\nSo, on Sunday the 13th, I started reading through The Longer the Fall<\/em> from the start so the details and pacing would be fresh in my memory. On Tuesday, I started writing. By Sunday the 27th, 13 days later, I had written 43,784 words, an average of 3,368 per day. In that same 13 days, I also: planned and prepped a whole church service including shopping for and baking a sacrament, wrote a 1,918 word sermon, did a New Moon ritual, observed Mabon with a ritual and Tarot reading, kept up with chores, workouts and errands, baked cookies, got my hair cut, went to the transfer station, made pear sauce, and tweaked my Albacon panelist schedule, hotel reservation and party plans.<\/p>\nThe pattern of coincidences continued. I had greatly contracted the timeline of my original outline (that was one of the things hanging me up, I’d realized), and at this point, I was playing the timing of events totally by ear. I knew what needed to happen, I was feeling my way though how and when it would happen. I didn’t plan the Pluto transit and I didn’t pre-plan the story timeline. But, as it happened, I was writing events that take place in the book right at the Autumn Equinox–on the Autumn Equinox. I was actually writing scenes that took place over a period of days, on the dates in question.<\/p>\n
And it gets even weirder.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday the 22nd, the day of the Equinox, I went out into my front yard to collect some leaves to decorate the altar for my ritual, and I discovered a large raccoon dying in the front yard. I have no idea what was wrong with it. I wasn’t going to approach it closely enough to examine it. It was breathing, but too far gone to move. Flies were buzzing around it, and I’m sure it was suffering. I felt very bad for it, but I knew from past experience that there was no one I could call to help, not even to dispose of it. I’d just have to wait for it to expire and then remove its body. I was troubled that I didn’t know what it was dying of, and I didn’t want the cats to be exposed to it. It could have been hit by a car and managed to get that far before collapsing, although it was quite a long way from the street.<\/p>\n
I left it alone, it died (poor thing), and on Thursday I donned gloves and went out and used garden tools to place its body on a snow shovel blade. (It would<\/em> die during a warm spell, phew.) At around 2:00 a.m. I took it over across the street where it’s all brush and woods and put its body down in the brush there, where it’s pretty inpenetrable and things would take their natural course. I had no qualms about this–I just didn’t want to be doing it right in the neighbors’ faces.<\/p>\nHow does this relate to The Longer the Fall?<\/em> Well…by Thursday, I had just gotten to the scene in the book in which my characters have to move and dispose of a body. So, I wrote a scene in which two people sneak out at night, move and bury a body…and then I snuck out at night to move and dispose of a body (albeit not a human one).<\/p>\nWeird? No, typical! There have been more coincidences like this throughout the writing of The Longer the Fall<\/em> than I can remember or tell, they’ve been so numerous. Granted, the book has a ways to go before it hits the street–but you can’t blame me for wondering what might possibly be going to happen then! Wouldn’t you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I promised to talk about my recent writing marathon, for my writer friends and others who may find my experiences interesting. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}