And so I’m off again on what appears to be yet another novel. I got close to 14k on the other one, Sympathetic Magic, before I realized it just wasn’t coming together. Inside me, mostly. I wasn’t seeing and feeling it like I should and it stopped going.

So I’m letting it rest now and I’ve got this other thing that’s been obsessing me. Since I have no deadlines, as a wise friend pointed out, I might as well take advantage of that luxury to work on something that’s really speaking to me. I hope this one takes.

This character, Carmilla, will be a challenge to bring off. She isn’t particularly sympathetic, although I hope she finds redemption by the end of things. She’s holding her cards close to the vest, though, and not showing me. She’d better give me a glimpse soon. I think she just wants to play with me for a while longer. She does have a cruel streak.

Here’s the opening—still very rough and new.

Carmilla woke to the sound of a sword pulled from a scabbard.

No, not that.  Not this time.

Just the wind blowing the loose tent flap up and along the long metal spike supposed to be staking it to the ground.  The wind snapped it again, hard, a noise like the jaws of war dogs going for a throat and missing, the noise they made when Carmilla’s enemies sent them against her and her sisters.  In the near distance beyond the tent a bugle called, but not to battle.

A jaunty little tune announced the Magic Elf Show three tents down and across the midway concourse.  She knew this tune: The Turkish March by Beethoven, though she doubted Lem Tucker realized where it came from.  He was a fine musician, but he’d probably picked it up somewhere by ear and thought it would suit his family’s show.

The pure notes of his playing pierced Carmilla’s tent as surely as the cold wind from the loose flap, but though it made her want to march, she didn’t move from the bed on the dias where she lay displayed like a grotesque parody of an odalisque. The blue- and indigo-glassed lanterns above her bed swayed gently in the wind, light rippling across her body and the deep blue velvet coverlet beneath her, a shadowplay of deep river currents.  The butterfly sleeves of the purple silk she wore fluttered in the wind, things caught and carried on the waves.  She could almost pretend, almost believe she was back home.

Carmilla welcomed the shivering cold for that reminder of the harsh, freezing waters at the bottom of a ancient river.  Her natural home.  She would love to swim there again, but she couldn’t.  Best not to think about it.

She shifted on the massive bed, letting the cold seek her out as Lem’s bugle notes died.  Already missing the melody, she lifted her voice to sing.  The Turkish March had no words, but she didn’t need any, marking the notes with syllables from an ancient language, now dead to the world of men.  A spritely tune, but forbidding words: an ancient confession of betrayal and flase pride, sins she paid for again and again, every day of her existence, from now until the end of time.  A lament for her own lost life, and for the lives she had taken with carelessness and cruelty, sung to a tune for marching, from a singer so fat she could barely raise herself from the bed on which she’d been placed.

An apt metaphor for what she’d become.

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