My ninth book: Raymond's Secret

Raymond's Secret is now released! 

 

Cover by the splendid DrRiptide. 

You can read a short blurb at my blog post here, or go straight to the book's page at Smashwords here. You can also find it at Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and iBooks.
In a couple of days, the price of the book will be raised to US$2.99, but if you have pre-ordered the book or if you purchase it before the price rise you'll get it for US$0.99.
Thank you to those who pre-ordered the book, and thank you to everyone who buys and reads it.
For the past three years, at the end of December, I have published a Raymond book. I have really enjoyed this tradition, and I hope my readers have too. However, Raymond's Secret is the last Raymond book for the time being – at this point I have no idea if there will be a fourth in the series.

2019 was a bumpy year for this author, with a handful of joys and triumphs and a handful of heartbreaks and miseries. Whatever it was like for you, I wish you a happy transition to the new year, and, in 2020, more joys and triumphs than heartbreaks and miseries.

Peace to you.

The cover for Raymond's Secret

Behold: the cover for Raymond's Secret.

Cover by the splendid DrRiptide. 

I continue to be in awe of the beauty of the covers that DrRiptide makes for me.

Raymond's Secret will be released on 31 December 2018 – though if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, that will be the 30th for you, and websites that are based in the Northern Hemisphere will show the release date as the 30th. 
Pre-orders for Raymond's Secret are now open at Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and iBooks. You can also view the book's page at Smashwords, though pre-orders won't be available there (but you will be able to buy the book there when it is released). The pre-order price is US$0.99, which is about $1.57 in New Zealand dollars as I type this. However, a couple of days after the book is released the price will go up to US$2.99, so it's worth pre-ordering! 

Some Raymond trivia

The third book in the Raymond series, Raymond's Secret, is scheduled for release at the end of December. If you have been following the series, you might be interested in some trivia pertaining to it. These are details that have not been mentioned in any of the books so far, plus some 'behind the scenes' minutiae.

• Raymond signs himself 'R.D.V.S.': 'Raymond Dimitry Van Stelte'.  

• Raymond speaks three languages: Romanian is his first language, English his second, and he also speaks Italian. 

• Wilson has mentioned that he doesn't know why people call him 'Wilson' instead of 'Toby'. You may notice that the adults in his life — his parents, Sandra, teachers — call him 'Toby', but his peers, enemies, classmates and friends all call him 'Wilson'. The extradiegetic or 'out of universe' reason — also called, fittingly, the Doylist reason! — for this is that I chose the name 'Wilson' for its similarity to 'Watson': Toby Wilson is to Raymond Van Stelte what John Watson is to Sherlock Holmes. As for the intradiegetic, or Watsonian, reason, it is as much a mystery to me as it is to Wilson!

• The first Raymond book was inspired by a wikiHow article titled something like 'How To Act Like A Modern-Day Vampire'. The article itself no longer seems to exist in the form it had when I read it, but this article is close to it. I stumbled across the article late one night, was intrigued that someone would write such an article and that people might be interested in its content; and then started wondering how such a pretence would play out in real life, and why someone would choose to engage in it long-term. Within days, I was writing Raymond. Raymond cites this article as the inspiration for his game; Doylistically, it is the inspiration for Raymond's existence.

• In Raymond, Wilson thinks to himself that vampires are based on the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler (Vlad III of Wallachia) — "that gross guy in Transylvania". This is, in fact, a fallacy: we now know that Bram Stoker, the writer of the seminal novel Dracula, knew very little about Vlad the Impaler: he borrowed his appellation, 'Dracula', which meant 'son of the dragon', and that is quite possibly the only genuine link between Vlad the Impaler and Dracula the vampire. I don't generally like to include misinformation in my stories, but it is a very widespread misconception and I believe that Wilson, not having personally done any research into vampires, would believe it.

• In all the Raymond books, many of the details of school years and classes have been glossed over, for the sake of not bogging down the story or burdening the poor beleaguered author with yet more research into nitty-gritty worldbuilding. I nearly put a disclaimer at the front of the books: something like, The author frankly admits that while some research has been done into certain details contained in this story, very little research into school terms, classes, et cetera, has been done for the purposes of this book, the author deeming it simply too complicated and largely irrelevant for a short novella such as this. The author begs the reader’s indulgence and understanding.  

• As recounted in this blog post, Raymond was written at lightning speed by my usual standards: twenty-one pages in three days. It also preferred to be written in darkness: when I tried to write in daylight, the words would not come.  

• I did not intend to write a sequel to Raymond; I thought it would be a single story. However, less than two weeks after finishing it, I found myself writing Raymond's Nemesis. It took a few weeks to complete, and after it was finished, I was sure that there would be no further Raymond stories ... but, a few months later, I was writing Raymond's Secret. The latter is the longest and most complex of the Raymond stories thus far, and it took two years to finish.

Pre-orders for Raymond's Secret are now open at Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and iBooks. You can also view the book's page at Smashwords, though pre-orders won't be available there (but you will be able to buy the book there when it is released). The pre-order price is US$0.99, which is about $1.57 in New Zealand dollars as I type this. However, a couple of days after the book is released the price will go up to US$2.99, so it's worth pre-ordering!

Pre-order for Raymond's Secret

Raymond's Secret, the third book in the Raymond series, is now available for pre-order!
Here is a blurb.

–––––

Toby Wilson’s best friends from school, Callum and George, are starting to become more and more worried about Wilson’s other friend and fellow student: the polite, mysterious Raymond. Is Raymond just foreign and a bit weird, or is he genuinely dangerous? If he is genuinely dangerous, would knowing the reason why be more dangerous than not knowing it? Wilson struggles to allay his friends’ fears without lying to them or betraying Raymond; and then another problem appears: Raymond has a stalker. And she even knows the contents of his lunchbox. Wilson finds that he needs to learn to emulate Raymond’s poise and acting ability very quickly – preferably without going mad, hurting any of his friends, or getting into huge amounts of trouble that would be extremely difficult to explain to adults.
Raymond’s secret threatens to explode in his face – and take Wilson, Callum, and George with it – in this story, the third in the ‘Raymond’ series, about the ‘sort-of vampire’ and his long-suffering friend Wilson.

–––––

For the past two years I have published a Raymond book at the end of December, as an end-of-year treat for my readers. Raymond's Secret is scheduled for publication on the same date this year: 31 December 2019 – though if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, that will be the 30th for you, and websites that are based in the Northern Hemisphere will show the release date as the 30th.

I invite you to pre-order Raymond's Secret so that you can get it the moment it is released, and at a special pre-order price.
If you're not familiar with pre-orders, they are quite simple: you can order the book in advance, but you will not be charged until the day the book is released.
Pre-orders are open now at Barnes & Noble and Kobo, and should soon be available at iBooks. You can also view the book's page at Smashwords, though pre-orders won't be available there (but you will be able to buy the book there when it is released). The pre-order price is US$0.99, which is about $1.57 in New Zealand dollars as I type this. However, a couple of days after the book is released the price will go up to US$2.99, so it's worth pre-ordering!

The cover is to be revealed in November.

In which G. Wulfing experiences a Winter

As I have said before, I would dearly love to pretend that I do not have a life outside of my writing; but even my most eager attempts at self-delusion fail in the face of bitter and annoying reality. 
And reality is currently exceptionally bitter and annoying: globally speaking, every month seems to bring a fresh wave of wickedness and disaster. It is hard to write when the world is on fire and the apocalypse looks disturbingly near. Personally speaking, for the past three years, and this year especially, I have been dealing with some foes that had lain hidden, dormant, or quietly grumbling, for many years, and which finally woke and required open confrontation and vanquishment; in addition, some massive changes and losses, including a few heartbreaks; and the effort of fighting all of these battles and coping with all of these tectonic shifts has left me emotionally exhausted.
Combined, all these things have pummelled my ability to write. — Or, at least, to write anything publishable. I am in a 'Winter of my creativity'. 
It is not pleasant. Writers do not like to not be writing.
I had been hoping to publish two books this year. Instead, I have ended up doing a post-publication edit (yes, really!) of The Enemy Soulmate. Nonetheless, I will soon be preparing Raymond's Secret, the third book in the Raymond series, for publication in December; so I should manage to publish one book, and one is better than none. Writing The Enemy Soulmate proved that I cannot write to a deadline (and the fact that I am editing that book again, after publishing it, is simply further proof); so pushing myself to finish another book this year as planned would simply result in stress and a total lack of productivity. I must accept the Winter. I will not beat myself up for not publishing two books; I will not worry about it. I will simply focus on doing what I need to do in the other aspects of my life, so that when my creativity resurfaces I will have everything else under control and thus can make full use of it. 
The world goes through phases, as do individuals. If this is a bad phase in world history, it will pass and we will all do our best to survive it. If the end of the world really is nigh, we will not survive it anyway, so panicking is pointless. 
In the so-very-apt words of others: keep breathing. Keep calm, and carry on. Don't panic.

Poem: O Cat!

O Cat! 

17 March, 2011.

O Cat!
Thou purring portion of magnificence!
How sleekly, softly perfect thy fur;
How divinely, deeply beautiful thine eyes,
Those pools of the universe in which God Himself
Put something of His majesty.
Thou the savage, death-dealing hunter;
Thou the serene, beauteous demi-god.
Surely, of all creatures, good and evil is mixed most strangely
And most purely in thee.
Thou art at once
God's perfect creation
And His curse.
And here, purring in my lap, 
Thou art
My adored pet
And my ruler.

Poem: When The World Is On Fire

When The World Is On Fire


15 May, 2019. 



A unicorn ran through the world,
Through fields, through rivers,
Over mountains and hills.
It danced through streams, purifying the water,
And passed through forests like a dream, leaving perfume and sweet thoughts
For all who were blessed with a glimpse of it.
The goodness of the unicorn, its gentleness and strength,
Made the world a better place,
And the unicorn knew that people led better lives
Because of the unicorn.
And the unicorn laughed.


One day the Spring was less joyful than usual.
One day the Summer was too hot.
One day the Autumn seemed too bitter.
One day Winter came and never seemed to leave.


The skies never brightened with the Spring.
In Summer, the forests caught fire.
The streams flowed brown, then turned bitter,
And then the fish started to die.


Grass withered and did not grow back.
Rain did not fall — or it fell and flooded.
Plants shrivelled. Animals vanished.
The herds were thinner. The flocks were smaller.
The bears starved. The wolves stopped howling.


And the unicorn wept.


But still the unicorn danced in the streams,
Danced on the mountaintops,
Breathed on the leaves to make them grow greener,
And did all the good a unicorn can do.
Still the unicorn ran through the world.


Then war came.
People screamed.
People died.
Tyrants poisoned the world,
As though they thought they had the right to do so;
As though they thought their cruelty would never affect them.
Suffering flowed like a river,
Glutted with unimaginable evils.
The unicorn did not understand how this could have come to pass.


The unicorn sobbed, and hung its head.


But still it kept running,
Trying to find some streams to purify,
Trying to dance when every whisper of the breeze brought the scent of new evils,
And more pain.


The clouds became darker — darker than the unicorn had ever seen them.
The sounds of war became louder and more horrifying.
The smell, the smell — the stench was overwhelming.
The unicorn choked.


The screams became more numerous. More, and more, and more.
So many. Too many.
The whole world was screaming.
The whole world was on fire.
The seas were boiling, animals dying; 
Flames licked at the unicorn’s hooves.
Birds dropped from the sky —
Lifeless bundles of feathers with closed eyes and silent throats. 
All the green in the world was blackened with blight.
Everything good that had ever existed —
Everything that the unicorn could remember as being good or beautiful —
Seemed to be spoiled, tortured, ruined.


And the unicorn stumbled.
Knees bending, legs weakening,
Strength and grace flowing away and dissipating
Like the clean rivers that had turned to toxic steam.
What is the point of a unicorn
When the world is ending?


How can I bless the world,
Thought the unicorn,
When what it really needs is saving?


And how can I save it
When it is beyond my power to save?


I was not meant to save the world.
I am meant to inspire it, not save it.
But when the world is ending,
What good is inspiration?
What good are sweet air and refreshing dreams
When all the air is poisoned and sleep is a luxury?


The unicorn looked around.
Nowhere was safe.
Nothing was untouched by the blight, or unspoiled by cruelty.


Except me, thought the unicorn,
Looking down at its white legs 
With their satin hide and silky feathering.
I am still untouched.
I still desire good things. I still have a pure heart. I am unspoilt by cruelty.
I am the only place in this world where goodness still reigns.


I can lie down and die here,
And relinquish the last good thing in this world.
Or I can keep moving.
I can run through this miserable, ruined place
And be the last good thing on this planet.


The screams tear my heart to pieces.
My eyes burn from crying as much as they burn from the poisonous fumes.
Every innocent creature that suffers
I mourn.
And my jaw hurts from grinding my teeth because I cannot save them.


But if I am the last good thing on this planet,
I will not let myself die.
I may have no hope for this world,
But if I lie down and die,
I will take away the last beautiful thing from this world,
And I will not be the one to do that.


So the unicorn stood.
Its legs trembled.
Its ears drooped.
Its tail dragged in the ash.


But it lifted its head.
And it started walking.
Because as long as there is one unicorn left on this planet,
The world is not completely evil.



In which I explain how I was turned into a writer

My short bio, or profile, begins thus. “G. Wulfing, author of kidult fantasy and other bits of magic, is a freak. They have been obsessed with reading since they learned how to do it, and obsessed with writing since they discovered the fantasy genre a few years later.”
However, it was really one specific series of books in ‘the fantasy genre’ that did it. These books are now famous, but at the time I was one of few people I knew who had even heard of them. They are The Chronicles Of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis.
C.S. Lewis said that a book named Phantastes, by George MacDonald, ‘baptised his imagination’, and this ultimately led to his becoming a writer of science-fiction, fantasy, and other things. For me, C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles Of Narnia did the same. As a child, I was introduced to the second episode of the B.B.C.'s television adaptation of The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe; and it was as though a light went on in my head, illuminating everything.
I already loved reading, but my exposure to fairy tales, legends, myths and fantasy had been minimal. I had no concept of fantasy such as Narnia showed me. It is not an exaggeration to say that with that single episode of that television series, my world was blown wide open. I felt like I had seen the sky after living my whole life underground. The very world around me had shifted, or perhaps I had shifted within it. Everything felt different. I knew that I had been changed irrevocably. And I knew that there was nothing more in the world that I wanted to do than go to Narnia.
I watched every subsequent episode as it aired, fanatically. Then I watched the adaptations of Prince Caspian, The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, and The Silver Chair, as they aired. When I realised that the series was based on a series of books, I asked my mother to read them to me. She read The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, then decided that she disliked it – which was baffling, but adults have always been baffling to me – and said that she would read no more: if I wanted more, I would have to read it myself.
So I did. I read every book about Narnia. I thought about it constantly, and wrestled with the question of how to get there.
Yes: how to get to Narnia. As though it were a real, non-fictional place. Because, on some level, I felt that it was, even as I knew that the books are fiction. I still do: if you told me that Narnia does not exist, I would, on a rational, cerebral level, with my adult brain, have to agree with you; but part of me – the child inside me – would feel that I was lying. Part of me, deep down, knows that Narnia is, somehow, in some way, real.
Of course, I surreptitiously checked every likely-looking wardrobe I encountered, just in case one of them was a portal to Narnia. I checked everything else that looked likely, too. Every mysterious, magical-looking object, every strange door, every curiously perfect gap between trees. I sought out places that looked like Narnia, or looked like they could hold a portal to it. I fantasised that the next time I looked up from a stream, or passed between two large rocks, or stepped into a ring of daisies or mushrooms, I would find myself in that beautiful, perfect land. The land that held everything I had ever wanted; the land where I could be everything I wanted to be, and have everything I wanted to have. The land so far removed from everything I have always hated about this cruel, unsatisfying world.
And as the years passed, and no portal appeared, I reluctantly had to admit to myself that my chances of reaching Narnia were negligible, and I was wasting my time looking for an entrance.
The only way to get to Narnia was take myself there.
And since I couldn’t go there physically, I would have to go there in my mind.
I already went to Narnia vicariously, through the books themselves. But if I wanted more, the next best thing was to create it myself.
But I couldn’t imagine stories about Narnia by myself: that would be wrong. I wasn’t the author, so I couldn’t possibly know what the author’s characters would do. I could fantasise about meeting Aslan, and Peter and Prince Rilian and the others, but that wasn’t the same as being able to create whole adventures in Narnia by myself. I did not know, at the time, that there is a word – 'fanfiction' – for what I was contemplating, but the concept felt wrong to me. It would feel … fake, somehow; dissatisfying; because I would be writing about people and things I hadn’t actually experienced. (I am not disparaging fanfiction in general: I like fanfiction, and have written some myself.) I didn’t want to write fanfiction about Narnia – I wanted to go there. But if I couldn’t go there, and I didn’t feel that I could write fanfiction about it, the only other option was to write fantasy that was like the Narnia tales but did not actually feature Narnia. I would have to create my own world.
So I did.
And then I wanted to explore other ideas that the rules of my world did not allow for; so I created another world. And another. Some were well developed, some were fragments; – shards just big enough for me to tell a story on. I wrote short stories, and parts of stories, and outlines of stories, and poems. Then I wrote a first draft of a novel. And, of course, I read every book I came across that looked like it might give me a feeling that could almost compare to that which Narnia gave me. Some came close. The Lord Of The Rings, written by someone who I later discovered, to my delight, was actually a friend of C.S. Lewis, made me feel very much the way Narnia did. So did the Star Wars films.
And it wasn’t the same as being in Narnia. It wasn’t perfect. It did not fully soothe my longing; oftentimes it aggravated it unbearably.
But, in the same way that travelling to your destination can give you a taste of the joy of being there already – as you look at the horizon and know that you are drawing closer to where you long to be – as you pack and prepare and work toward your desire – so did seeking and creating other worlds help to make me feel less far away from Narnia: the land that held everything I had ever wanted.
There are now a thousand worlds I want to visit. A dozen or so, so far, of them are ones that I have created myself, and writing about them is the closest I – or perhaps anyone – can get to reaching them.
I am still a sad little beast, longing for a Paradise: for a world that holds everything I have ever wanted.
But so is everyone else.
I have realised that, deep down inside, and though most people would never admit it, everyone longs for a Paradise. And that everyone has a different concept of what Paradise, for them, would be. For me it is Narnia, or Middle-Earth, or something like it.
I have also learned that this powerful, powerful longing for Paradise – for something more, for a world that holds everything we ever wanted – is not a bad thing. Many people criticise those who they know yearn to visit another world, dismissing them as daydreamers and escapists. But, as Lewis and Tolkien and others would agree, the whole point of escapism – of fantasy itself – is to enable us to rest and recover from the sorrows and suffering of our own world, and to teach and entice us to build a better future than we can currently imagine.
If we can envisage a world that has everything we ever wanted, and has not the things we hate about this world, we can be motivated to make changes to what we have now. Escaping to other worlds helps us to return to this one stronger, and longing for something better helps us to change what we already have.
The Chronicles Of Narnia changed my world. It is entirely possible that everything I am now, I am because of Narnia.
I cannot quite flatter myself that any of my worlds will have the same effect on someone else. But if any of my stories eases – or aggravates – someone else’s longing for Paradise, or makes them feel just a little less further away from it … then I will not consider my time wasted.
Somewhere out there may be another sad little beast who understands exactly what I mean. If I am talking to you now, little beast, then I greet you. These words are for you.
Keep searching for your Paradise. For travelling toward a desire, even an unattainable one, is better than standing still and accepting a world that dissatisfies you.

Poem: The Truth

The Truth 

March, 2006.  

I told you of magic carpets,
Of phoenixes, genies, and kings;
And you believed me.

I told you of dragons,
Of rocs and wyverns and satyrs,
And you believed me.

I told you of a place where the sky is purple,
Of floating islands and hoards of gold,
Of forests where magic is rife —
And you believed me.

I told you of unicorns, miracles, and angels;
I told you of fire and water and earth;
I told you of sweet air and magic swords —
And you believed me.

There are mountains that hold up the sky;
There are rings that can make you invisible;
There are magic wells that can heal wounds —
And you believed me.

And then I told you what no one else knew.

I told you the truth.

And like no one else had,

You believed me.

In which I talk about the administrative side of writing

Something that writers don’t seem to speak of often is the administrative side of writing. The pages and pages of notes and research that have to be sorted and arranged for easiest use and access whilst writing. The images, calendars, and maps. The timelines and outlines that are constantly being altered, and how these constant alterations are fitted into the manuscript itself. The research – links, screenshots, saved images, copied and pasted text – all of which has to be sourced because otherwise you’ll forget which website you took that information from and now you need to cross-reference it to make sure it’s not nonsense … If you put all your reference images, soundclips, videos, etc., into Scrivener, that keeps everything together, but does it make the Scrivener file too bulky? Is it just as easy to keep all these things in the project folder that already has the manuscript in it?
And where should this paragraph be stored? It’s part of a draft copy of a conversation that you’ve written out six times and you could probably delete it but you might conceivably need it later … should you number these drafts? Do they need their own file? If you put them in a separate file will you forget that they are there? Does this minor character need their own character sheet, or should they just get a few notes at the bottom of your master notes document? Is the master notes document getting so enormous that it’s unwieldy? Can you find things within it easily enough or do you need to break it up into smaller documents? If you do, will you be able to find things or will you be constantly flipping through all the smaller documents trying to find that particular paragraph in which you decided what the minor character’s political affiliation is? Where did you put that snippet about the history of phlebotomy, and should it go in the ‘medicine’ section of your notes or does phlebotomy need its own section? Have you updated the manuscript to reflect the changes you made to the timeline last night or were you planning to do that today? Are these notes you left yourself about that particular aspect of the story still current or have you fixed that part already? And then there’s colour coding: blue for passages that need more research, turquoise for tasks that are completed, pink for things you need to remember as you continue writing, red for things that urgently need changing, orange for things that might need changing depending on what else happens, grey for passages you’re no longer convinced you want to keep …
Managing a large writing project is an important aspect of the project in itself. Every world, every narrative, every character a writer creates needs to have all its details recorded in order to avoid a thousand continuity errors that will be jarringly obvious to the reader but which got lost somewhere in the overcrowded chaos of the writer's mind. I use all the techniques mentioned above, and I have organisational systems in place to make sure I can find everything with minimal difficulty and don't end up making stupid mistakes; but there are still times when I spend five minutes trying to locate a particular passage in my notes or manuscript, or find an old note to myself and think, "What was this about? Have I dealt with this already?" and have to spend ten minutes of precious writing-time ascertaining that yes, I did deal with that issue, but I forgot to change the note's colour from red – 'must deal with this' – to turquoise – 'have dealt with this'. Sometimes, the alarming question of "Why did I change that? What did past me know that current me has forgotten?" arises.
And this is only the administrative side of writing. The management of a writing project, without making any mention of managing the story or the characters or the themes or the style or the setting ... or blogging, or social media, or self-publishing, or cover design ...
The scraping-together of a coherent, entertaining, hopefully even edifying, narrative, with no continuity errors or glaring inconsistencies, out of thin air, is a task on a level of difficulty that is beyond the understanding of those who have not achieved it, and deeply intimidating even to those who have achieved it multiple times.

Poem: If I Called

If I Called 

26 January, 2006.

If a voice through darkest midnight
Reached your ears as you Southward journeyed,
Would you turn and start the road back?
– If I called you, would you come?

If a cry upon the salt wind
Touched your heart as with waves you fought,
Would you manhandle the boat about?
– If I called you, would you come?

If your name spoken in suff'ring
Tore through air and through space to reach you,
Would you drop what you were doing?
– If I called you, would you come?

If I weep alone at midnight;
If I cry out in the battering wind;
If I moan your name in pleading –
If I call you, will you come?

If you need me to be near you,
If you cry though the distance is great,
I will turn and start the road back –
If you call me, I will come.

–––

I also post short poems to Tumblr sometimes. You can find them by searching my Tumblr blog for the tag 'poem'.