Still having trouble seeing through the tears of laughter: Kitty Video. (Thanks, Sue)

Oh, yeah. Draft one of The Secret Common-Wealth is 52,370 words. For while I thought it might be closer to 70,000. Now I've got to convince my increasingly decrepit laser printer to print it out. Double-spaced, it'll be close to 200 manuscript pages. It's a little novel, but not as little as my last one.

Gee, now that I've finished my novel for NaNoWriMo (or the first draft, anyway), I'm kind of at a loss. I don't really feel ready to start anything new, and I'm not quite in the right frame of mind to work on any of the things I left unfinished at the beginning of November. But I don't want to lose to 2,000-words-a-day momentum, either. I'm thinking I might change direction completely, and work on some comics.

50, 301 words and one more big scene to write. For a while I thought it would be longer, but then things started moving much more quickly. Hooray!

It occurred to me last night, when I should have been sleeping (which is when things usually occur to me), that this novel that I've almost got a first draft of fits right in the tradition of stories about fairies requiring human women for success in childbearing. A while back, I read a novel called Fairy Tale by Alice Thomas Ellis. It was quite good, and I must remember to find a copy. Anyway, in the novel, the Welsh fairies need human women to bear their children. That reminded me of Charles deLint's The Wild Wood (still, for some reason, my favourite deLint novel), where the main character agrees to bear a child for the fairy folk, because their own queen is incapable. I was thinking of writing an essay on that theme in literature -- the need for a human woman to bear fairy children. In folklore, it more usually shows up as the fairies needing a human midwife, or sometimes a human wet-nurse (which is why women are in great danger of being taken right after childbirth). So I've been keeping a list of all the books I can recall that have those motifs as well. And now I've gone and written one. I guess it's an idea that's been haunting me. I wonder how many stories it'll turn up in. I still haven't exorcised shapechangers from my creative psyche. I think nearly every story I've written since I finished my Master's has shapechangers in it. I was about to say "Except for The Secret Common-Wealth, " but then I remembered the fox woman Maddy saw in the woods near her old house. Yikes! I thought writing was supposed to work out the haunting things, not keep bringing them up over and over. Oh well. It's fun to see what permutation comes out each time I start a new story. At least the main character isn't a shapechanger this time.

Just for fun, I did a numerological profile for Maddy (at Facade).

Hmmm. Almost ten o'clock and I haven't written anything yet. Actually this is becoming disturbingly normal.

44, 757 words, and today I discovered that Dubhghall plays the tin whistle and the Pied Piper was a fairy. Maybe.

The end is nigh. Really, really nigh. I'm not so sure any more that I'll have much over 50, 000 words. My characters are heading into the grand finale, whether I'm ready for it or not.

I find it comforting that these things happen even to Neil Gaiman:

I had an utter fanboy moment when a faintly familiar-looking person came over at the end and introduced himself as Philip Pullman, and I just started gushing foolishly, and he was kind enough not to notice.

Hah! Just cracked 40, 000 words. I guess I can justify buying myself the t-shirt now.

What if Neil Gaiman, Tim Burton and Robert Smith were flatmates? Read Nice Hair, and find out. Amazing what turns up when you go through old bookmarks. And if you like that one, try Jinks by the same writer/artist.

Typed my brains out last night, due to the silly notion that I should write as much this week as I did last. So I'm up to 37, 754 words and closing in on the goal. The end of the story is approaching, too, despite some weird and unexpected detours.

34, 829 words and the bloody fairies continue to take over. Meanwhile Donald Macleod is not-so-quietly going insane (or having a breakdown, anyway), and I think there may be too many characters who don't do very much.

Gah! I am losing the ability to type and spell at the same time. Sometimes the sequences of letters that come out bear only the slightest resemblance to the word that was in my brain.

Today Maddy went into Doon Hill, which wasn't supposed to happen. But there was her mother waiting, so in she went. I don't know if the scene will stay or get cut, though it seems to have revealed Dubhghall as an ally. That's kind of nice, because I rather like him. You just can't tell with fairies, though. A lot of my adults are turning out to be very much less together than I originally thought they were, which means that Maddy has to really keep her head. And how do you keep your head when you're getting the grand tour of a fairy hall? I don't know, but maybe I will by the time she makes her way out again.

The fairies were only going to play a minor role in this story. It's supposed to be about kids and parents and coping with death. Now I think the Good People are taking over.

Unreason's Seductive Charms:

We may speak admiringly of Greek rationality, of the Age of Reason, and of the Enlightenment, yet it is far easier to find great writing -- and even, paradoxically, serious thinking -- that extols unreason, irrationality, and the beauty of "following one's heart" rather than one's head.

Very thought-provoking essay by David P. Barash (link via Frankenstein Journal.)

Wondering suddenly why the mothers of two of my main characters have the same name as my mother (and me), I looked it up:

Usual English form of Maria, which was the Latin form of the New Testament Greek names Mariam or Maria (the spellings are interchangeable), which were from the Hebrew name Miriam. The meaning is not known for certain, but there are several theories including "sea of bitterness", "rebelliousness", and "wished for child". However it was most likely originally an Egyptian name, perhaps derived in part from mry "beloved" or mr "love". This is the name of several New Testament characters, most importantly Mary the virgin mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene. Two queens of England have had this name, as well as a Queen of Scotland, Mary Queen of Scots.

I am no closer to figuring out this odd little occurence (keeping in mind that coincidences rarely happen in writing).

So then I looked up Madeline (it's on the same page as Mary), which is a variant of Madeleine, which is the French form of Magdalene (meaning "of Magdala"), which brings me right back to Mary. How bizarre.

Morag, which was supposed to have been Maddy's name, is the diminutive form of Mór, meaning "great."

One could argue that it's a religious thing, I suppose. Mary, Mother of God (and therefore mother of us all), and all that. But first one would have to suppose that I am religious. And, supposing that, one would be wrong.

It just occurs to me that John O'Brien (from the poorly-titled Taken, 1941) also had a mother named Mary. And my mother's name is Mary. (Then again, my own first name is Mary, so perhaps I'm just mothering my characters.)