… I’ve just been doing more urgent things than blogging, morally supported by the disappearance of many of the other writers I follow from the blogosphere. A big ‘wow!’ to people who can keep up with writing, and real life, and blogging! And a big ‘whew!’ to those who quit doing it and thereby demonstrated that writers don’t have to blog when they don’t feel like it.
So why am I back? To announce that I just got the editor’s comments on the third Osyth novel, Swept and Garnished. Once again, Double Dragon is way ahead of schedule — so next week, after my current nonfiction project is off to the publishers, I’ll be diving back into SAG after not thinking about it for months.
Already, I have a different perspective on it. The title, for instance; when I named this novel, I have to admit I was thinking of the bible. You may remember the Matthew 12 quote about a man who drives an evil spirit out of himself:
When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.
(Yeah, I’m a KJV girl)
That meaning still applies to the novel, and to all three of them for that matter. My characters get in trouble when they try to discard parts of themselves; the demon Antimora is only the most extreme example so far. Someone in this novel will go even further in that direction.
But as I look back at SAG, I see another meaning to the title. Sweeping and garnishing rooms is traditional women’s work, and traditional women play a huge role in this novel. Old women, women whose motivation stems not from ambition but from love, women for whom family comes first. I had no idea I was going to write about traditional women; I identify more with women like Teddy Whin, the striving academic types who don’t recognize love until it gets in their faces. But here traditional women are in SAG, doing their thing without caring whether it’s my thing or not. Arranging vacations, making scrapbooks, canning pickled cauliflower, taking magic back from trees, and challenging demons.
I look forward to spending time with them again as I edit the manuscript.
