ls269 User Profile | DeviantArt

Hello lovely people! Just thought I'd add a quick journal entry to say that I've started posting my original fiction on AO3 (might even post it here if I can figure out the new interface, it all looks very different from the days when I was regularly submitting chapters on DA!)

The new story can be found here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/39812709/chapters/99675000

This is the story I wrote directly after I finished Sympathetic Magic. It’s dark and romantic and madly detailed, just like SM, but it has original characters and is set in the late Victorian era.

I originally posted it to a friends-only account on Livejournal, because all the advice I’d read online suggested that it was a bad idea to post your original fiction publicly if you wanted to have it published someday (this was back in 2013, before the rise of Wattpad and other sites that I am too old and out-of-touch to know about!)

And, since then, I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words of it - it’s very dear to me, and I hope will be dear to other people too - but I can’t seem to get it published. I don’t know whether it’s too long, too preoccupied with its characters’ emotions and mental states (if you’ve read Sympathetic Magic, you’ll know what I’m talking about!) but even though I’ve had quite a few short stories published in speculative journals and anthologies, I can’t seem to get anywhere with these novels. Worse still, the rejection and lack of feedback is killing my enthusiasm for writing. I’ve written three volumes of this story, but haven’t finished the fourth because I can’t stop thinking of the horrible, dispiriting process of publication.

So I’ve come to the conclusion that this story and these characters are too dear to me - I’ve worked too hard on them - to keep them locked away just because some agents and editors think they won’t make money. I want to write, I want to share my work - I’d love to do that for a living, but it’s not the most important thing.

If you’ve enjoyed Sympathetic Magic and you’d like to give this story a go, please let me know what you think. I was never so happy writing as when I was doing it for free, writing about the kinds of things I loved, for an audience of fellow-enthusiasts who were into the same thing.

Here's the blurb I wrote for it, back when I was trying to sell the story to publishers:

Eleven years after the night they met, he saw her again for the first time...

In 1870, Jack Cade is admitted to the new-breed stronghold of Pandemonium, a colony of people just like him: descendants of the vanished demon race, all of them extraordinary in little ways, and deranged in much bigger ones. There, he falls in love with Ellini Syal, a shy, insular woman who spends most of her time scampering barefoot over the Edinburgh rooftops.

In 1881, he meets her again, but has no idea who she is. All he knows is that there are dark, horribly suggestive gaps in his memory, and that Ellini is running from something she refuses to talk about. Can he work out who she is and what she’s done in time to save her from the creatures pursuing her? Can he save himself from the amnesia and the creeping indifference that are eating him up piece by piece? Or is amnesia preferable to the kind of memories he will have to unearth?

Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

ls269

Mar 11, 2019

Published Stories

8 min read

A Kind of Potion ls269.deviantart.com/art/A-Kin…

Hello lovelies,

Must write a quick journal entry, firstly to assure you that I am still alive (which you may have been doubting after my last journal entry), but also to gather together some news/links/life stuff.

I've had a few stories accepted for publication in journals and magazines (yay!) and thought I'd link to them here in case anyone wanted to read them (also wanted to gather them all together in one place for purposes of reference/gloating).

Stories which can be read for free online:

'The Wishing Tree' on Every Day Fiction: everydayfiction.com/the-wishin…

'The Strongest Man in the Village' in Electric Spec: www.electricspec.com/Volume14/…

They also asked me to write a blog about writing, which you can find here: electricspec.blogspot.com/2019…

'Gore-Tech' for Flash Fiction Magazine: flashfictionmagazine.com/blog/…

'Soul Cages' for the BFS Monthly Story Project: www.dropbox.com/s/ngktlislyl0q…

'Hate-Love-Hate' in Issue 21 of Tigershark ezine: tigersharkpublishing.wordpress…

Stories where you have to buy the journal/magazine:

'The Fish' in Unfading Daydream 7 (if you have a kindle, you can buy the issue on Amazon for £3.14 (or $4.18 in US))

UK link:

www.amazon.co.uk/unfading-dayd…

US link:

www.amazon.com/unfading-daydre…

(Leaving reviews on Amazon is apparently a great way to get the authors noticed!)

Also physical copies can be bought online through their website for $15:

unfadingdaydream.storenvy.com/…

'Winter Greens' and 'Looking for Love Spoons' in Between These Shores Literary & Arts Annual 2:

www.betweentheseshoresbooks.co…

'The Ghost Girl' in BFS Horizons 8 (you need to join the British Fantasy Society to read the issues, but it's well worth doing, because they're awesome!)

www.britishfantasysociety.org/…

I'll add more as they come up (I've had some accepances from magazines that haven't come out yet).

What can I say about this excursion into the world of publishing? It's gruelling. Rejections are frequent, and mostly thoughtless. Pay is low or non-existent. All the same, it has helped me fulfil an ambition I've had ever since I was a little girl - to be a published writer. I still get very low, but it has removed one of my go-to excuses for tormenting myself - the fact that I'd never been published. My ingenious negative thoughts now have to say things like: "Ah, but it's only in small publications," or "It's taken you 35 years just to get your little toe in the door. You'll never get to do it for a living." These thoughts may well be correct, but the tone is unhelpful, so I'm trying to ignore them.

And I've learned some things about myself through doing this. For starters, I've learned that I write for love rather than approval. Anyone who wrote for approval would have given up after, say, rejection number fifteen. I've also learned that some editors don't know what they're talking about. Conversely, there are some who are really thoughtful and hard-working, who do a thankless job for little or no pay, and are still big-hearted enough to take a chance on emerging writers. It's worth putting up with the one for the sake of the other.

Oooh, I'm also on Twitter now (she joins just as it's dying out, but let's face it - anyone who has read Sympathetic Magic will know that brevity is not my strong point!) I'm @LucyStoneWriter

Lots of love and many apologies,

Lucy.

Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

ls269

Jul 1, 2017

The Worst of Times

16 min read

Note Me | Gallery

The morning is no good. All my worst memories come back to me. Every painful thing that has ever occurred, or is likely to occur, occurs to me. I am tormented by such disparate topics as the decline of the NHS, the man who bullied me at my first job, my friend’s upcoming promotion, and my inability to sort out baby swimming classes. They all tend towards one inescapable conclusion: I am shit.

There's an awesome artwork by MichaelBrack which beautifully expresses this deluge of negative thoughts:

This is me. The monsters are me too. But I have no sense of there being a victim in the case, just as I have no sense of there being an aggressor. It feels like the truth. I’m just telling myself the truth. And, sure, I wouldn’t think those things about other people, or consider telling them so bluntly if I did, but I’m with myself, and I have no notion of cruelty. Just misery.

So I started listening to Edgar Allen Poe, but this turned out to be a mistake, because his short stories were just as dark, unwholesome, and melodramatic as my inner monologue. Also, the baby wasn’t sleeping through the night at that point, and Edgar Allen Poe combined with sleep deprivation is a heady, worrying brew.

I’ll give you an example. There’s a story called ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ (not perverse as in kinky fetishes, though I’m sure Edgar Allen Poe had plenty of those, but perverse as in perversity, contrariness, rebelliousness without good reason). And, in it, the narrator has committed a murder, and covered his tracks so brilliantly that no-one thinks of suspecting him. He’s walking along the street one morning, congratulating himself on this fact, when he suddenly thinks how funny it would be if he just blurted it out, right there in the street. And, because he’s thought it, he has to do it. He starts running, to try and suppress the impulse, or get away from all the potential witnesses, but the trouble with running in a public street is that people tend to assume you’ve done something wrong, and run after you. By the time they catch up to him, he’s shouting about his crimes at the top of his voice, betrayed by his own perversity.

Anyway, I know this imp of the perverse. Several times a day, it will occur to me that it would be particularly stupid, particularly suicidal, to do a certain thing, and then I become paralysed with the terror that I will actually do it. I can see it happening. There seems such an infinitesimal gap between thinking it and doing it. Like when you suddenly change your mind ordering drinks, and you’re struck by the vertiginous thrill of just how quickly reality can change as a result of your actions. All the way into town, I thought I was going to get a Diet Coke, and now here I am looking at a gin and tonic. I’m not an impulsive girl, so these moments genuinely shock me.

But the worst of it is the train. There’s a fast-moving train that comes through the station three minutes before my train to work. It’s heralded by that familiar, jerky, automated message: ‘Please stand well away from the edge of Platform Three; the approaching train is not scheduled to stop at this station’.

Anyway, one morning after listening to Poe’s Imp of the Perverse, it occurred to me that it would be particularly stupid to run out in front of the train. I mean, nothing contentious there. Probably nothing unusual either. I daresay it has occurred to many a commuter that it would be stupid to jump out in front of a train. Only I had to hold onto a nearby pillar for fear that I would actually do it. Not because I was depressed (although I realize I shouldn’t have prefaced this with a description of my early-morning inner-monologue) but because it would be an awful thing to do.

Anyway, Poe was a bad fit – too much like me, no power to draw me out of myself. After him, I tried Neil Gaiman (oh my god, he’s good! But I couldn’t seem to fall in love with any of his characters except for Coraline – and I defy anybody not to love Coraline), Joanne M. Harris (considering how much I love Severus Snape, I’m not as keen on Loki as I would have thought), Luke Smitherd’s ‘The Physics of the Dead’, and Peter S. Beagle’s ‘A Fine and Private Place' (both made me feel so sorry for dead people that, when a colleague recently died, I felt guilty as well as upset – as though there could only be so many places amongst the world of the living, and I had no business hogging one when she’d been turned out of hers – until I said to myself ‘Lucy, you are going to die too, and your funeral will not be so well-attended’).

I then embarked on a joyful reunion with Charles Dickens. Oh, it does me good, listening to Charles Dickens (as read by Martin Jarvis) on my way to work in the mornings! It fills me with a genial curiosity about my fellow commuters. Listening to the way he observes people – the dry, funny, quizzical, bemused, and delighted way he does it – makes me think that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to just sit back and look at the world, rather than agonizing about my place in it. And Martin Jarvis is so good. He never gets lost in those long sentences. He really brings home how lively and funny that writing is.

I don’t really get on with Dickens when he starts moralizing. I think he’s too hard on a few of his characters, but I don’t think (at least, I don’t think I think) that his heroines are lifeless, idealized and dumb. In fact, thinking about Dickens’s female characters inspired the following section in my story (which I will paste in here because I can’t resist pushing my story on people):

They were silent again, though it was a prickly silence. There was something about her now which reminded him of Estella in Great Expectations – something of that mild, composed astonishment that other people should have feelings, or expect her to comprehend them.

He’d had a crush on Estella when Ellini had read the novel to him. Perhaps it was because he recognized something in her. They had both been lonely children who would have done anything to be loved, they had both been shown love late – but, in Estella’s case, too late. She hadn’t been able to understand it. Jack hadn’t either, come to that, but he had known that he wanted it. Neglect had given Estella a heart of ice, but it had given Jack a heart that was always hungry – and, when you had spent three years in an orphan asylum, you didn’t use the word hunger lightly. It was not a tickly little distraction but a bleak, full-bodied ache. It took over your identity.

Strange that he was now comparing her to Estella when he had once compared her to Lucie Manette. You couldn’t conceive of two more different characters – and yet Lucie Manette had never seemed like a character to Jack. She had not seemed like a person in her own right but like a symbol of the grace that brought out the best in others. A sign-post pointing the way to virtue. And whether Mister Dickens expected all women to be a symbol, and got quite upset when they stopped pointing the way to virtue and, for example, scratched their noses, was a question which was answered, in that novel at least, by the lovely, flawed humanity of Miss Pross. Jack would cheerfully have married Miss Pross in preference to Lucie Manette, but he would most cheerfully – though the thought quite depressed him at the moment – have married Estella.

I think audiobooks are a good solution to my problems with reading (and oh, I have many problems with reading – don’t think that laziness isn’t one of them, but probably the biggest is fear. If you knew how many books I’d started and then never finished, in the expectation that I was going to get my heart broken, you’d be amazed. I could fill a library with the books I never finished).

Lots of people say you can’t be a writer without being a reader, but I think it’s my frustration with other people’s fictional worlds, and my desire to have a world of my own that I can control, which makes me want to write. I suppose people would call that escapism, but I don’t agree with the stigma that has become attached to that word (matter for another journal entry, I hope). Anyway, I have no problems with escapism. I was born to escape. I was doing it before I even knew what I was escaping.

So, my major problem with reading: I get too emotionally involved in books. I fall in love with characters who die and relationships which end. I find myself unfairly resenting the second person the hero falls in love with, and cheering on his first love, even if she’s a bitch. I think I can sense an unhappy ending coming, because I will sometimes dig in my heels when I’ve only got a hundred pages left, and mutinously refuse to go any further.

Audiobooks help because somehow – counter-intuitively – they create a sort of distance between me and the text. You’d think it would be the other way around, because it’s actually being performed into my ears – every scream and sigh and whimper is being voiced – but, somehow, because it’s less personal, because my brain isn’t creating those voices, and giving them characteristics I recognize from people I love, I am less involved. Which isn’t to say that an audiobook hasn’t made me cry. I was crying a lot at the beginning of David Copperfield (because it was about a boy whose mother couldn’t stand up for him, and I was wondering whether I’d have the strength to stand up for my own little boy in similar circumstances) but I just pretended I had the sniffles, and watched my fellow commuters politely squirming away from me.

Bad things about audiobooks: you can’t throw them across the room in frustration – at least, not without damaging valuable electronic equipment. This was particularly a problem for me when I was listening to Mayhem by Sarah Pinborough (I was pretty angry with myself for sticking it out to its moronic conclusion).

Other bad thing, particularly with Dickens: you really can’t (or I really can’t) appreciate lovely images or well-worded sentiments as much as if you were reading them in print. I hit the ‘rewind thirty seconds’ button pretty damn regularly, but it’s not the same as having the words written out before you, to linger on and savour as much as you’d like.

So, in conclusion, I’m reading again, and I’m happy about it (that was a lot of words, just to say ‘I’m reading again and I’m happy about it’!) I wanted to start writing journals again, because a) I wanted to dislodge that whiny ‘Not too Shabby’ entry of three years ago, b) I’ve been through a big life upheaval (or Michael, as we call him) and I’m just starting to recover and sort my feelings out. I thought it would do me good to write out my thoughts on everything that has happened since. So, coming up, you lucky things, will be journal entries about such treats as Motherhood, the Never-ending List of Things that Went Wrong, Writing Postnatally, my Inner Monologue and How it Refuses to Engage with CBT, plus Anything Else I Can Think of That Might Make Me Less Confused. I will not write a whining journal entry if nobody replies. I will continue to resist the Temptation Train (actually, I stand on the footbridge now until it has safely passed, and mostly my own train is so late that this doesn’t cause any problems). And I will always, always keep writing.

Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

ls269

Apr 12, 2014

Not too Shabby

12 min read

Note Me | Gallery

Hello, dears,

Thought I’d write an updated journal entry, trying to make sense of all my thoughts and feelings on finishing my new story (for Sympathetic Magic readers who don’t know which story I’m talking about, please see this journal: ls269.deviantart.com/journal/E… And then these two journals, which get progressively less optimistic: ls269.deviantart.com/journal/S… ls269.deviantart.com/journal/C… )

It’s been weird. The contrast between finishing this and finishing Sympathetic Magic is pretty alarming. The contrast between the 61 comments I received for the last chapter of SM and the zero comments I received when I posted a chapter from the new story here is pretty disheartening. But I’ve fought through all this and finished a story that I love, and that’s the most important thing.

And you know what? I don’t think I could have done otherwise. There were all these images in my head, and I had to communicate them. Probably everyone feels this way about the things they love, and the things they want to do. And probably most people have to pursue their dreams without any encouragement at all. I was very lucky the first time – I was lucky that people found something they could identify with in Sympathetic Magic.

But, whether lucky or not, I have to go on writing. I can’t choose not to. They key – and it’s not easy for a neurotic girl like me, but I can see it clearly, in theory, in my head – is to wrap up that lucky moment and keep it with me, and never use it to belittle my new work by comparison. I’ll always take it with me, the kindness and encouragement I had from my DA readers, and I’ll try to use it keep myself going rather than shut myself down.

In rational moments, that seems like the most logical thing in the world. Is a good thing less good because it’s gone? Of course not. You should treasure good things from the past, and never use them to devalue the present.

Now, having said all that, I should add that I don’t have many rational moments. But – and here is the key to fighting depression, for me – I can remember that there were rational moments. If you know that it’s possible to be another way – to think about things differently – then you know that despair doesn’t cover everything. It doesn’t stretch from horizon to horizon, reach back into the past, and discolour the future. It seems like it does, but it doesn’t. It’s temporary, just like everything else. If something is always recurring, then it’s also always leaving.

It helps me to remember that. Plus, all this rejection will be good practice for the inevitable and persistent rejection I’m bound to receive from agents and publishers. So I’m bitter but grateful, pessimistic but hopeful, and I hope that all makes sense.

Well, after all that, I’m sure you’re just dying to hear what the story is about. I always find that a difficult question to answer, because all my stories start off with the characters, and the plot is just something that sweeps along after them, as if they’re all wearing long, billowy cloaks. I once asked a reader what he thought Sympathetic Magic was about, and he said it was about despair, and how it’s always wrong to give in to it, no matter how tempted you might be.

Curiously enough, this new story is also partly about despair, although I can’t say I’ve come down so unequivocally on the side of not despairing this time. My stories are always the places where I work out issues like these, but, maybe because my life has taken a darker turn since SM, this story is a lot darker, and finding real, substantial hope is a lot harder. Not impossible, though. There’s always love in my worlds. A lot of the time, love makes things worse for the characters, but it’s always their redemption, as well as – in a few cases – their downfall.

So here’s how I’m describing the story at the moment: It’s a love-story-mystery, set in Victorian Oxford – very steampunk, very gothic. It’s about a man who’s taken a magic potion to forget the woman he loves, and then meets her again – as a quiet, nervous little stranger, who feels no inclination to talk about their past. As the action unfolds – and via a series of flashbacks that intersperse the story – both he and the reader piece together who this mysterious woman is, what she’s running from, and why he chose to forget her. It’s set in a variety of lovingly-described locations – from Edinburgh to India – and has a core of ineffectual, English sweetness, despite all the dark events.

So, anyway, that’s pretty much all my news (except for the depressing, realistic stuff, like mortgages, lack of job security, lack of baby, or any hope of ever having a baby. That stuff underpins pretty much all of the above, but doesn’t really need to be gone into right now).

I should say sorry for not being on DA much, and for being a bit slack about contacting old friends – I just figured you wouldn’t want to hear about all the grim, grey, gruesome stuff. Don’t know why I’ve changed my mind now. I should probably apologize for that too.

At least there’s something positive to add now. I wrote a book. It’s 350,000 freakin’ words – it’s about characters I love – and I loved writing it. That’s not too shabby, as comforts go.

Lots of love,

Lucy.

------------------------
Journal CSS made by caybeach
Brushes by gvalkyrie

Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

ls269

Nov 2, 2013

Cheerful

8 min read

Wow, over a year since my last journal post – and much longer since my last deviation! Sorry for disappearing, lovely readers! One of the reasons I haven't updated in so long is that I've been depressed – not heart-broken, eloquent, probing-the-depths-of-the-human-condition depressed, but a grinding, grey kind of depression that revolves around electricity meters, mortgage payments, lack of job security, and the terrifying necessity of calling the Customer Service helpline at British Gas. No-one wants to read about that.

(I'm not saying that the other kind of depression was good for writing either, by the way – it was as debilitating as a fever, and much harder to shake off – but at least it felt artistic).

Still, throughout all this, my new story had been keeping me afloat (in fact, it's been providing a lovely contrast – lots of demons and melodrama and Victorian dresses, set in an era where they've never even heard of Customer Service helplines), and that's one of the reasons why I wanted to write this journal – because new watchers, or old friends who haven't quite given up on me, might not know where to find it, or even that it exists at all.

And, in spite of everything, I've now managed to write 250,000 words, and am nearing the end of the first volume. (I'm not quite a mean, self-motivated writing-machine, but I'm still proud of myself!)

So, if you would like to read my new story, all you have to do is create a Livejournal account (if you don't already have one) and add me to your friends list. I'll befriend you back, and then you'll be able to see my chapters (they're not posted publicly because I hope to publish someday, and publishers won't touch anything that has already been made publicly available online). You can find my Livejournal account here: ls269.livejournal.com/

The experience of writing original fiction has been really different and really similar at the same time. Basically, I find that I can only create a coherent world by writing it, so the world was pretty wonky and weird and full of holes at the beginning, but is gradually taking a believable shape. Plots, too, don't come to me right off the bat – I have to arrive at them via a long series of rambly character-conversations, so the story is much more exciting now, at Chapter 40, than it was at Chapter 1. (This isn't really a great advertisement for reading, isn't it?)

All this means that I was made for writing fan-fiction, where the world is already in place, and all you need to do is play with it.

People's responses are different for fan-fiction too, because the characters are a kind of shared property – they're not exclusively yours – so you can discuss them with a lot more freedom, as though you're discussing the antics of a mutual friend. You get comments like: "Oh, Severus! *shakes head* Why do you have to do this to yourself?"

And you can reply: "I know, right? What an idiot! What a sexy, stern, smouldering, sarcastic, dark-eyed... wait, what are we talking about again?"

With original fiction, you need to kind of earn that level of familiarity. People don't feel qualified to be exasperated with your characters right away. You need months and months of the characters being inimitably themselves, before you can have readers going: "Oh, that is so Jack" or "that is so Ellini". (Fortunately, they're both so deluded and self-destructive that I'm starting to get that a lot! )

(By the way, I should take this opportunity to thank the three readers who've kept me going throughout this story. LuxminderO831, swordhawthorn and hhimring - you are my rocks!)

Anyway, in other ways, writing original fiction is basically the same. Posting the chapters is still tedious and labour-intensive. Anticipating reader responses is still anxious and compulsive. I still make myself feel guilty when I have a day off work and don't do any writing. I still write my favourite bits in a mad rush of enthusiasm, and then have a terrible, tedious time joining them up before they're ready to be posted.

Anyway, I'm going to try and post a sample of my story later on today – there's a series of flashbacks called 'Forgotten but not Gone' running through the main story, and I'll try and post that to give you a flavour of the romance, because the first few chapters don't have much romance or sex in them, and it's hard (for me, anyway) to feel enthusiastic about a story without that!

Lots of love to you,

Lucy.

Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In

ls269

Joyful Resignation

Published Stories

The Worst of Times

Not too Shabby

Cheerful

Published Stories by ls269, journal

Published Stories

The Worst of Times by ls269, journal

The Worst of Times

Not too Shabby by ls269, journal

Not too Shabby

Cheerful by ls269, journal

Cheerful

Still Writing... by ls269, journal

Still Writing...