OC October Day: 26 & 27 - Nameless, Cherry and her Whitehound

Day 26: Nameless
Trying to figure out how I got this far without mentioning this asshole. All right, then, Nameless. He about whom my current Nanonovel will be.

Nameless is sort of my answer, well, half of my answer to naming magic in a lot of fairy tale worlds. The other half is around here somewhere. He was raised by a mute, so he never learned language until he was older, which is also my answer to why he only really knows three language despite being a little over a thousand years old. It's hard to learn a second language after a certain age, still harder to learn any language, even if you're a fae. He eventually made it off the island where he was born (Ireland) and into England, and eventually from England to France, and by that time he had enough language and social skills that he was able to make his way around the world as needed, although he didn't very much start banking property and storing wealth for a rainy day till the last couple hundred years.

When he was between three and four hundred years old he met another immortal, not that he knew it at the time. An equally irascible werewolf? immortal creature of some kind who, like him, is alone in the world. They spend a while circling around each other, shadowing each other out of curiosity and irritation before they agree to travel together on the basis that two men traveling together can watch each other's backs and at least have the illusion of purpose, and so are less suspicious than men traveling alone. This leads to some amusing disguises as they pretend to be on pilgrimage, pretend to be traders (and sometimes act as one), etc. The Black Death was what really cemented their friendship about twenty or so years after they met, mostly because they ended up having to fish each other out of mass graves after they nearly died from it.

Other events Nameless has been around for include the Beast of Gevaudan, wandering up and down along the Silk Road, the French Revolution, the American Civil War (poor bastards, they fled one only to get caught in the other), the Spanish Flu, the American Westward Expansion and the American sexual revolution. As it were.

By the time the novel begins he's very set in his ways and he likes his life. He wanders, finds a traveling job or a steady job and a place to rent in some country, puts down roots for a year or two, gets up again, moves around. After long enough in the outside world he gets restless and goes back to New Zealand again, to their farm, and settles down for ten, fifteen years. Sometimes his friend is with him, sometimes he's not. They maintain a large swath of land, hiring groundskeepers on a five year contract to herd sheep and generally tend to the property except for the house. That one, they maintain on their own, mothball, sometimes "sneak" onto the property to make sure nothing's busted, broken, or caved in. The novel takes place during one of the quiet times in New Zealand, interrupted by his father. They don't get along.

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Day 27: Cherry and her Whitehound
So, Cherry showed up in the first Black Ice book, actually if I remember right the first Black Ice story. She's friends with the Black Ice narrator, if reluctantly, and they help each other on various cases especially considering the District Attorney's office has reason to hire a private investigator now and again. She's also friends with people who, in one way or another, connect to all three books. In White Lightning she's connected to Julien because she's also fae, and there are few enough of them in the city that for the most part they all know each other, even though she keeps a low profile.

Cherry also has a Whitehound, sometimes called a Deathhound, as a protector. It masquerades as sort of a white-ish when not rolling in the mud coyote-dog-wolf mutt, except to people who can see under the illusion which isn't very thorough, more of a suggestion. Magically active people of all species can see under it if they focus. The Whitehound took up with her when she started settling into the human world, in New Amsterdam, for reasons that have yet to be revealed to me. Or that I have yet to pry up out of my subconscious, depending on how you see it. It hasn't come up in a story I'm actually prepping for publication, we'll put it that way, so I'm leaving that gun in Chekhov's armory for the time being.

Cherry's a bit of an introvert for a fae, preferring to spend time in her house blasting her music and doing whatever she wants while being mocked by the Whitehound to going out with friends, though she does make time once or twice a week to go out with co-workers at the ADA's office and sometimes to go to the Embassy and attend a function or just keep in contact with the people there. She does also go to concerts, not often, but she enjoys live music, and she has had the occasional girlfriend. Most of her girlfriends are also private investigators, cops, or other forms of ass-kicking professions. She herself can handle a gun and knows some form of martial art. No, I haven't decided which there, either.

(no subject)

And today, part two of show prep madness? On top of the madness of pulling together this wholesale order. The good part about this show's madness is that it's not very far away, so once they get the truck packed and then unpacked at the site and if they realize they've forgotten something, they can call over and we can throw it into a box and they can come back and get it, so that's not too bad. I think we did a pretty good job packing everything at the almost last minute, too. It's just the wholesale order now, and an endless stream of repacking kits yay.

I accepted a structured poetry challenge from Jane Yolen on Twitter the other day. I'm a little nervous, the only form of structured poetry I've ever written is a sonnet, and at that I've only written two or three. But it'll be good for me, I figure. Even if it is over Nanowrimo. It's only a poem. Maybe. Well, technically it's seven poems.

(Of course by the time I get the rest of the show stuff packed, or my part of it, and the wholesale order packed, and deal with the other phone calls, I'm too damn tired to do any of the writing or any such thing I should be doing. Blegh.)

No, too tired. I'm vaguely remembering what happened the last time I went to capoeira on less than minimum 6 hours of sleep, which is what I'm operating on now, and no. (The last time this happened I basically could last 2-3 minutes of exercise before I fell over, and kept having to punk out and it was both mortifying and not productive. And possibly worried the teachers. No.) I mean, this should really tell me that yes, capoeira is profound physical exercise, but all I hear is you suck you drop out of everything you're weak. Bleh. I think at least in the upcoming months I'm going to have to start highlighting or circling or stickering or shading days when I do make it to capoeira, and actually making a fucking effort to get there Mondays. Not all Mondays, but first and third of every month should be do-able.

And now of course my brain decides I have to earn the evening off by doing something productive with it. I'm going to stab my brain with a pen and use it for a science experiment.

OC October: Day 28 - Adele

Day 28: Adele
Oh right, Adele! Now let's watch me try to re-create a character from a novel I wrote last year? Last Nanowrimo, yes, and explain her to you all.

Adele last-name-unremembered is a park ranger who works just outside of New Amsterdam and stumbles across a ritual site one day when out walking her section of the grounds. Now in this world rituals are permitted on federal and even most state parks, as long as you get a permit, don't damage any artifacts or sites, and follow the constraints of the law (no murder, no animal sacrifice apart from the permitted animals, etc) as well as the actions and so on described in the permit form. This ritual site was way too hinky for her to believe anyone had signed off on a permit for it, and in an area not typically requested for rituals. So she got suspicious, and she started digging. This led her to a much bigger case, which led her to some secrets about the nature of New Amsterdam that very, very few people thus far knew.

Adele is one of my favorite characters, albeit one with not much to talk about because she's only in the main story of one anthology. She's in the upper years of middle aged (late forties or so? early fifties), slightly overweight or at least a size or two larger than beauty standards would have, something more around beauty standards of thirty forty years ago. Her blonde hair is tending towards stringy these days, and she's long since given up trying to inject some glamour into her daily routine when she deals with sweaty people, long walks and getting sweaty herself, and the occasional animal when she has to help out wildlife and/or animal control. But she also has had many years under her belt at her job, she's good at it, she enjoys it, she could tell you obscure facts about her park for hours, and she has a good relationship with most of the regulars both campers and ritualists. She was all set to continue at this job several years after she was eligible for retirement, because she loves it. She loves hiking, she loves staying in shape by staying active at her work. If she gave it up she'd have to join a gym. (This is only slightly facetious.) The events of the story... probably won't change that. She doesn't expect to have to deal with that kind of thing very often. But it does bring up some questions, and she comes out of it thinking a little harder about what she takes for granted about her life and life in general in the area.