In the foothills of the Cascades, outside Seattle, we’re having the snowiest February of the last fifty years. I’ve been able to do my dayjob from home. I’m very lucky for that.
Fantasy, Erotica, Horror
Tag: Tales of the End Times
I have a bit of a religion about snow.
Even when I moved to Seattle, years ago, snow was rarer here than in the Midwest. I wrote three short stories in a row about snow. I’ve written a couple of stories about (not quite) freezing to death in the snow since. The second book in the septet, The Deer Stalker, has a significant set of scenes set near Snoqualmie Pass, in the snow.
This year, my neighborhood has gotten nearly no snow.
But this evening, it’s snowing.
It had to wait to Imbolc, but it’s snowing.
The stuff in the air in the photo is flying snowflakes.
Last night, I finished a draft of the second book of the septet, weighing in at about 78,500 words. I wrote 9,600 words just Saturday through Monday!
I’ve now written 24,000 words, give or take a hundred, in four weeks.
I feel the arc of the book bending to a close, though there’s still a lot of scenes to write. I’m not a tight outliner; I keep a flow chart and notes, but I try to give the characters free rein if they want to take another path.
We’ve turned the wheel of the year past winter solstice. Today is a brilliantly sunny day: time out of time, definitely a December day and yet all sun.
This upcoming month is a make-it-or-break-it writing period. I have about 30,000 words to write to finish a draft of the second book, to meet the timeline I agreed on with my publisher.
For the last three weeks, I had to hold off daily writing, first for the retreat, then for deadlines at the day job.
But now I’m diving in again. Wish me luck.
Hekate Soteira means Hekate savior. The Neoplatonists saw her as the mediator between the realm of the undying gods and that of mortals. Celestial in this aspect, she forms a boundary between the worlds.
I’m about halfway through the septet’s book two, which has the working title The Deer-Slayer, and I’m about to throw my characters off the edge.
There’s a dictum in fiction that you have to get your characters in trouble as quickly as possible. That’s the inciting incident—something that disturbs the life of your protagonist so that person takes a different track. This disruption falls at or toward the beginning and starts the mechanism of the narrative.
But there’s also that point where a trouble brewing all through the story finally boils. This isn’t the climax, but rather where the rising action (in terms of the five-act structure—exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement) kicks into gear.
I have been dedicated to Hekate for more than fifteen years, and she is the guiding deity of my book series, Tales of the End Times. This is my Hekate altar, in the corner of my writing room. You can see at the right a set of Hekate cards that a witch friend of mine and I made for an event we put on, each card holding an epithet of the goddess. Hekate has dozens.
I just wrote a scene about the goddess for the second book of the series, in which a witch draws down as Hekate and prophesies for her coven. This vision came to my character Alyssa, and she describes it to Joanie and her friend Guy:
My name is Mary Trepanier, and I wrote The Queen of Heaven’s Daughter. It’s the first of a septet—seven books, in a series called Tales of the End Times.
Queen is the story of two crazy college kids who fall in love. One of them is a prostitute pursued by the goddess Inanna to become a sacred whore, and the other is an engineering student in way over his head. Joanie, my sacred whore–girl, also falls for Cleo, an initiate of Inanna. Behind the scenes is a genderfluid incubus-succubus, Puabi-Ekur, who loved Joanie in a past life and wants to help her. The djinn come in with their own agenda.