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I have been writing TCE --
Cedric could not ignore the categories Davian kept using to shape his rhetoric: they and them, we and you, Mortals and --
Who, exactly?
“I think you know it too, don’t you, Cedric?”
Davian could hardly contain himself, and he spoke with increasing confidence, a ball released to race down an incline. “Have you ever felt things just happen to work out as you want them to? Lights turn green when you’re running late? Dealt a full house and the rest of the table’s got nothing to match? Never draw the short straw in a game of --”
“Not everyone’s Talent manifests in such a manner.”
Again, the old woman with that word.
“Of course, of course,” Davian chattered dismissively. “It could be nothing like that. Everyone’s gift is unique, but there are certain similarities. Patterns.”
His eyes seemed to glimmer, completely focused on Cedric.
“The truth is that some people endure reality,” Davian spoke, seeming to look over his shoulders before he continued. “And others --”
“Make it.”
(excerpt from working draft of Chapter 10: Soaked)
Some of my enduring difficulties have been with writing Davian. I was not his original creator, rather, I inherited him.
”I want more --”
And I felt so discouraged, when Davian --
“Hard to come by --” they said. “and harder to hold.”
I recently was released to winter break, from my travails. And I aim to write. I hope to complete Act 2 of the four I have planned.
And yet, I’ve thrown myself into organizing, tabulating, stipulating, which documents should be preserved into perpetuity, and which should disappear into obscurity. And sometimes it is so difficult to look back at FPMC. So I have taken to trying to do what I could not do then.
Once, some two years ago, I thought I should preserve the voice with help. Help from the spirits from beyond.
Once, some two years ago, I thought I would revive the man who had gone. The man who had spoken, but had since been silenced. The one who would speak no more. Once, he had spoken to Mandarc as a newcomer to the coterie.
I left that behind, thinking I could not keep looking backward. And I sent Davian to the stars, thinking I could not give voice to something that was never mine.
It was Straud who would be forced to confront the absence of his old friend.
It is true that Book 0 primarily concerns Cedric’s apprenticeship under the man Davian Winchester. (Yes, I renamed him.) And I have been struggling underneath this weight, this veritable burden, because, in part--
This is not how it originally happened.
No, in fact, this was not, in the original conception of FPMC, how Cedric came to learn of the magic he possessed.
In truth it was quite different!
But maybe; maybe it was not so different.
I have chosen to modify the retelling, to tell it how it happened, how it didn’t happen, and how it should have happened.
Or how it made the most sense of happening.
43,236 words -- that’s what Novelcrafter claims I’ve penned. Barfed. Vomited upon the page.
Yes, Book 0: What Time Cannot Touch.
How you haunt me! How I despise that I feel I must get through this telling, this re-telling, this re-re-telling before I can get to the things that really happened!
Oh, but--it all really happened.
The truth is that some people endure reality--
and some make it.
(I’m not gonna crack.)