This week, I’m finishing my rewrites of Journey to the Water. I am planning to report back once I’ve done that with a release date. While I work on formatting and final edits, I can show you the cover and offer some tantalizing previews. Again, I truly appreciate your patience as I work to get this book into your hands.
If you’re waiting on a Figuratively Speaking Mermaid Tarot deck, good news! As of the last Kickstarter missive (Saturday), the decks are now #22 in the printing queue! (I think they started in the mid-400s.) If you’re not waiting for one now, this also means that they’ll be available for sale soon. I’ll update you as soon as I know more.
I’ve finished my reread of Journey to the Water! Next step to get it into shape is a new outline, and then the Great Rewrite begins. In the meantime, I thought I’d share a little bit about my editing process, in the hopes that it will be helpful, of interest, or both. I’ve mentioned a few of the steps of my process before, but it will be good to have it all in one place.
Here are three things about me:
I cannot afford to pay a good editor at the rates that they deserve.
I have a Master’s degree in English literature. (Points 1 and 2 may be related.)
I do my own editing, but I always, always have at least one other person whose taste and advice I trust read through my manuscripts before they go to publication.
In order to edit my own work, I need to first distance myself from it.
“So,” I said to Cricket, trying to appear nonchalant, “you’ve been reading.”
She regarded me with a look of utter disdain. Of course she’d been reading. “First, I read the safe books, and I learned to bind the monsters between the pages.”
As if in response, the bookshelf at her side shuddered, its heavy tomes shifting in place. I took an involuntary step back toward the stairs.
“Then I read the others,” she continued. “I didn’t sleep for four days. I know all of Deinaros’ secrets, and some he didn’t even know. He wasn’t all-knowing, after all.”
The ship that took me back across the Summer Sea was not Ramla’s, but the vessel of a woman from the northern shore. Her name was Astraea of Danar, and she possessed the golden hair and sky-blue eyes that I had only ever seen before in my countrymen from the far reaches of the North. I myself, however, favored my mother, and my hair was dark and my eyes were the same as any other man who walked these southern shores. Only my build set me apart from the people who walked the streets of Gallia, whence I was returning.
I asked, but Astraea had never seen the floating mountains of ice, nor walked among the mountains that I had crossed in the early days of my exile. She did not speak my mother tongue. In response to my next question, she declared that she had met the man called Hamilcar and his ship, the Lady of Osona, and remembered him fondly.
“He sails these waters from time to time,” she said. “At the beginning of the year, when the winds are swift and the waves high. If you stay in Gallia, you might see him again.”
I hoped that I would, but my hope lasted only a brief moment. What could I tell him of my adventures since we parted? That I had found the birthplace of my beloved Khalim, and found that I had known him for so short a time that I was hopeless to follow him through the land of the dead? That I had destroyed the city of Svilsara by slaying the being who called himself his god, and left them starving and alone without even the illusion of prosperity to comfort them? That I had aided a man who wished to assassinate a king, and escaped only because I was deemed a lesser threat than my guide?
I remained still, one hand on the latch to the vault door and the other hanging in the air, half-reaching for my harpoon. Who was this man? What was he doing here? Kural had assured me the vault would be empty of watchmen, but perhaps I was a fool to trust Kural. He did not make the climb himself, after all. My heart sank into my belly as I thought of Bran’s fate, left alone on the forest floor with an untrustworthy caretaker.
Bran was a steppe horse—a gentle one, but trained for a warrior, nonetheless. I had to trust that he could look after himself.
“Who are you?” I asked the incongruous man in the vault.
Cricket was charged with provisioning me for my journey. She took me to a passage hidden behind a tapestry on the first floor, with a staircase that led us into the rocky bowels of the cliff. At the bottom, a tiny kitchen, no larger than a ship’s galley, sat dark and cavernous with only a clay chimney pipe to relieve the smoke. Why this place was hidden, and why it had to be here under the rock, Cricket did not say. Perhaps this was the only kitchen she had ever known. It certainly was her domain; a selection of copper pots and iron pans hung well within her reach, and I had to duck to avoid another rack of herbs hanging from the ceiling.
“Has Deinaros told you anything of my journey?” I asked her.
She rolled a selection of dried fish in a thin cloth and handed it to me. “No. If you return, you can tell me of it.”
“If I return?” I echoed. I could not help but smile at her utter lack of faith in me. “You think I won’t?”
She shrugged, and the trinkets still around her neck clattered softly. “We’ll see.”
I spent three days before Deinaros the All-knowing summoned me. The three floors of the tower to which I had been confined soon lost their novelty, and I wandered the city instead, taking in the sights and sounds of the sprawling metropolis. The markets beckoned me with the scents of fresh fish and warm bread, and the taverns promised strong drink—with some effort, I avoided them, to keep my wits about me. Wherever I went, the steepled temple looked down on me from above, its seven carved pillars a constant reminder of Phyreios. What relation the Ascended had to these tall, faceless gods of the West, I could not deduce. These seven stayed confined to their temple and the small carved icons in the windows lining each winding street, and for that I could only be grateful.
Cricket left each morning to sell her trinkets at the harbor. I went with her, on the first day, curious as to why her teacher sent her alone to the market. At best, I feared she would be robbed, weighed down as she was by such a quantity of silver; at worst, I had just recently learned of the flesh-markets of Nyssodes. A clever kidnapper needed only to coincide with a waiting ship, and Cricket would never have returned to the tower.
She bade me keep my distance, though, when we reached the docks. She had charms to sell, and my looming presence frightened away her customers. I asked if she was afraid, and if she had the means to defend herself.
With the book removed from my care at last, a weight lifted from my shoulders. The relief came with a flare of panic—had I handed my one and only lead to the realms beyond death to a charlatan? Deinaros turned the pages, his brows furrowed in concentration and a pleased smile playing upon his lips. I had already faded from his awareness.
If nothing else, Deinaros knew this book. On the word of his young attendant, he had expected it, like an old friend returned at last from a journey of decades. He greeted each horrifying diagram with a nod, each twisting line of text with a tap of one long finger.
“Well done,” he said, more to the book than to me. “This copy is nearly complete. The only things missing are the long, rambling musings of my former master. Everything useful is here.”
“Your master wrote it?” I asked. “He must have traveled nearly as far as I. I retrieved this book many months ago, from an island in the southern sea.”
Deinaros glanced up for the briefest moment before his eyes returned to the page. “No, he only penned the original, centuries ago. He never left the city of his birth. His followers, myself among them, made copies, and those who found those copies made more still.”
My heart sank. How many ambitious rulers became like the king of Salmacha, their souls clinging to their bodies even as their flesh rotted and fell from their bones? A second, selfish question followed the first: how many ill-starred lovers, grieving parents, and lonely widows had taken the book and attempted the same task I had undertaken? Had the gods already taken up arms against a sea of sorrowful humanity, chasing away any chance I had of breaching their ordained defenses?
“Very few now,” Deinaros said. “It was purged from the kingdoms of the West. So many were burned that the pyres reached the heavens. I have not seen a word or line from this book in many years.”
I left the tiny commune around Isra’s well, and I left the serene face of the goddess, and I wandered across the desert to the lands of the West. Somewhere beyond the northern horizon lay the lands of my people, where our gods walked the plains of endless ice in pursuit of the great beasts that ever eluded them, and my dragon-headed ship lay beneath water cold and dark as death. My journey would not lead me back there. I had to press forward.
Once, my friend Aysulu had told me of the gods of the West. There were seven of them, she had said, like the seven Ascended of Phyreios, though they moved between faith and legend and metaphor and not in the streets of their cities. Isra was one of them. Like her, the others had wind-scarred faces and the faded implements of their stations held in their stone hands: a shepherd’s crook, a set of balancing scales, a scepter, a smith’s hammer. They towered over the dunes, their eyes long since etched away, the human hands who carved their figures buried beneath centuries of sand. At their feet, the remains of their temples crumbled into dust.
The Book of the New Moon Door releases this Friday! I’ll have all the retail links for you then. If you preordered a copy, they are supposed to arrive at my house tomorrow. I’ll be heading to the post office today to get some Priority Mail envelopes to put them in, and the wrapping paper, sealing wax, bookmarks, and stickers are already here. Gods willing and the weather holds, I should be sending them out on Wednesday!
No new chapters this week. Journey to the Water should start up again next week with a new chapter on Patreon, and then I’ll be back to a regular posting schedule. All the previous chapters are under the Stories tab above (under the Menu if you’re on mobile), if you need to catch up. Thank you for being patient while I was focusing on getting New Moon Door done.
Space Whales Press 