Note found on my desk reads:

Here’s a bit from the story I’m trying to finish up today, a young adult piece tentatively entitled “The Ghost Installers.” It actually came out of a dream that I had – a good reason to be keeping a dream journal.

We talked about that recently in a class – the need to listen to your unconscious mind, to pay attention to dreams and serendipitous slips of the tongue. To nourish it with a variety of arts and make sure its senses are satisfied. To give it space in which to express itself. Sometimes when I’m drawing, that’s when a story that’s mentally knotted begins to untwist itself and show me what my mind is trying to do with it.

The dream was just a moment, an image/situation that I won’t describe for fear of spoilers. Talking to Wayne about it the next morning, I found a story idea emerging, which we batted back and forth, applying the classic try/fail, try/fail, try/succeed algorithm, until it was fleshed out to the point that I jotted down a 250 word outline. Now I’m working through that from scene one till the end, but I think if I get stuck along the way, I might try moving to the ending and writing it, advice from this excellent post about writing process by Kameron Hurley that I wanted to point to.

Here’s a bit from the beginning. Penny and her dad have just moved into their new house, so new that pieces of it are still being worked on. It’s two in the morning, and she’s just snuck in after hanging out with her friends in a nearby park.

She had a penlight in her pocket, although the battery was almost out from using it in the park. She crept towards the attic stairs. The solidity of the little light wrapped in her fingers reassured her, although it could hardly be used as a weapon.

Maybe some animal that wandered in? A raccoon or something. Maybe a cat?

She held her breath, as she crept up the stairs. Was that”¦voices?

“Goddammit, Mysa, hand me the calipers, this one’s a bitch,” someone said.

“Keep your voice down, Brian! There’s a family sleeping downstairs.”

“Who futzed up the schedule? These are supposed to go in before anyone arrives.”

“That’s why this one’s high-priority. They moved in three days ago.”

A mutter of Irritation. “Everything’s high priority.”

Penny swallowed down the lump of fear in her throat. Who are these people and what are they doing here? They sounded like the sort of people who’d been working on the house all along, but why were they installing something at two in the morning? She hesitated, then progressed upward a few more steps. A few more and she’d be able to see what they were doing. Speculations raced through her head, but she couldn’t figure out anything that would fit. This was all too weird.

But the pair, once she could glimpse them, seemed ordinary enough. They wore black coveralls and matching black stocking caps. The taller one was fiddling with something attached to the highest point of the roof. And then she noticed what wasn’t ordinary at all. His feet hung in the air. Unsupported, dangling just enough to show that he wasn’t standing on something that she couldn’t see.

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So far I’m cranking along. Part of the impetus is a Thanksgiving trip, which effectively means I’ve got 20 days, not 30, to finish. But I’m well on track so far, with over 6000 words banked so far. Here’s some of them, taken from Hearts of Tabat:

“I need your help,” Sebastiano told Letha, “but oh”¦” His breath caught at the thought of her seeing what he had seen. “It is too much to ask.”

She came down the steps as he spoke, reached out and took his hand.

“Tell me,” she said, looking up into his face and the sound of the love and worry in her voice undid him. He collapsed to his knees, burying his face in her skirts, and sobbed like a child of five whose worst nightmare has come true.

She held him without speaking, let him sob away all the horror and terror of those moments and the coppery stench of the blood and the horrible way its sheen changed as it dried. Finally he drew away and she released him. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, pressing hard on his eyeballs, as though to extract what he had seen.

“A murder,” he said. “No, a slaughter, really. And they think it was a Beast.”

“Beasts do not murder,” she said. “They may kill in the moment, but they do not plan and enact such acts.”

“This one did. I think. I don’t know.” In his head he ran through lists. “Are there any creatures that thrive on death?”

“There are the Mandrakes, which suffocate and then try to put their infants in place of the human child,” she said. “There are the fairies, which sting so many travelers, but they must be provoked or drawn by injury, usually. You mean a creature that is fed by killing. That is not a Beast, Sebastiano. That is sorcery.”

He knew the truth of her words the minute he heard them. How had he not realized that before? Perhaps some clouding spell had overlaid the house? A golem, constructed by sorcery, using Beasts. Was that possible?

He must have spoken his thoughts aloud, because Letha replied to them, her voice tart as a winter apple. “Of course it is. What else does Tabat do with Beasts but use them to fuel magic?”

I’m also finishing up edits for the story that will appear next year in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, “Red in Tooth and Cog.” A recent publication is As the Crow Flies, So Does the Road in GrendelSong.

If you want some NaNoWriMo inspiration, here’s a post about why if you’re writing, you’re doing things right. Here’s a fun but low-pay call for submissions that might spark some ideas.

(Want some more inspiration? Check out one of my writing classes, either on-demand or live.