I've just made a little addition to the last part of "The Seduction."  I'd re-read it several times, and I knew that something was bothering me, and this afternoon I realized what it was -- I had messed up the days of the week at the end -- but I'd also not done very much with Timu's thought process concerning the end of the affair, so I added a day and a day's activity and reflection -- so that worked out all right.

I've been thinking about WiP too, and realized that I'm in a state of some confusion over time in the beginning of the plot -- for True Minds I'd had to actually write out a calendar for all the events in the story, so I guess I'll probably have to do that for this one too.

The easy part is the actual writing -- dialogue especially.

But I don't have much time right now -- I'll probably just work on the timeline for a week or so, then get back to the fun stuff.

When Wythe and Timu meet, she is 17, on her first diplomatic mission, and he is 20, working as a spy for his sister in the office of the head of the Vaaselian diplomatic service.

Wythe is introverted, though not shy.  She has extraordinary telepathic abilities, and has spent most of her energy in developing them, and very little time in learning how to navigate personal relationships. Her young colleague, Mathis Skipman, has had a crush on her for years, and when he presses her to let their friendship develop into a romance, she goes along with his wishes, out of a kind of affection and something of a feeling of being flattered. But she feels an immediate strong connection with Timu from the moment she meets him.

Timu has been behaving as a playboy, partly as cover for his spying, and partly out of personal inclination. In order to cooperate with Wythe and her delegation to Vaaseli he is prepared to pretend to romance her -- but he discovers that for him the pretense is real, and that he wants more out of the relationship than the usual seduction.

Timu has been emotionally isolated most of his life, except for his relationship with his sister, Elian, nearly ten years his elder. She was completely devoted to him when he was a baby, and he developed the same kind of devotion to her.  They were mostly apart while she attended the school for diplomats in the capital of Vaaseli, Essin, while he grew up on their family's country estate. Their parents allowed Timu to do mostly as he pleased at home, which usually consisted of roaming on his own in the forests and fields, and eventually into the mountains, studying local wildlife and attempting to use telepathic techniques of his own devising on the animals he observed; he developed few social skills and no human friendships. When Elian took up study of the Telmi after her schooling, and Timu was sent to the service school in his turn, they were together less than ever, but remained close through telepathic communication. Timu's school years were difficult, until the last year, when Elian, alarmed at new political moves by traditionalist nobles, and fearful that her marriage to Prince Renhold would be prevented by them, enlisted him to spy for her on the traditionalist head of the diplomatic service, Magus Paalo, and the Lord Chancellor, Valmur Karoli. Inspired by his desire to help his beloved sister, and the coincidental attentions of an influential lady of the court, Timu reformed himself into a passable student and an elegant courtier, and adopted his persona of dandy and womanizer. By the time Wythe arrives in Vaaseli, however, the pressures of the political situation and his activities as a spy have made his persona a burden to him, and his life seem hollow.  Wythe is friendly, and kind, and obviously attracted to him, though she tries to deny it, even to herself, and he falls completely in love with her.

(For more general background on WiP, see the much earlier post on the topic.)

Timu and Wythe are reluctant celebrities in their world. Their grand passion when they were 20 and 17, respectively, was instrumental in defeating the man who would have usurped the throne of Vaaseli -- their exploits became the subject of story and song, and spread, as popular entertainment, throughout the Alliance.

They deliberately separated after their triumph, because to stay together would have warped and distorted the power that their love had engendered.  It would have threatened the sanity of both -- but since it was centered in Wythe and her pre-existing psychic abilities, it is safely contained in her -- as long as they remain apart. During their 10 year separation she has the opportunity to come to terms with it and learn to manage it, through the techniques of the shamans of the Telmi, a tribe of herdsmen in the far north of Vaaseli. Once she has mastered the power the only danger in reunion with Timu is to the power itself: she will lose her prophetic and telekinetic abilities. At least, that is the assumption of those who have taken the trouble to try to understand the power.

While Wythe lives among the Telmi she becomes one of them, while never officially giving up her status as a Maga of the Alliance, and a diplomat of the Ravellan League. She entirely adopts their beliefs in the spirit world and its influence in tangible creation, and becomes their most highly regarded shaman.

In the meantime Timu makes a career and a distinguished reputation in the ocean-going trade between Albrahar and Xanthia, as much for his skill as a mariner and his defense of the trade routes against corsairs as for his ability to increase the wealth of his Albraharan partner and himself. He also develops an interest in shipbuilding, and turns his talents as a draftsman to ship design.

In Vaaseli, the progressives enjoy political power as Prince Renhold and Princess Elian, Timu's sister, rule alongside Renhold's father, King Hendric. The traditionalists are reduced to dreams of revenge and hopes for restoration of the old order of social control left to the whims of the nobility.

A serious threat to political stability in Vaaseli arises when a self-interested naturalist, Pieter Sevren, stumbles across the sacred site of the Telmi's Fire of Origin -- a natural gas and petroleum field in the farthest north near the sea. Pieter, a rationalist (who nevertheless has a strong superstitious streak), has dreams of glory as he imagines the practical uses his discovery might be put to. Though Wythe has the opportunity to intercept him before he travels south to the capital, she can neither convince nor coerce him to keep silent about what he has seen, and she fails to get adequate cooperation from her friend Prince Renhold in quelling Pieter. News of the discovery spreads in Vaaseli among scholars and artisans, and more men from the south go north to investigate.  To prevent the sacrilege of outsiders trespassing on their sacred lands, Wythe establishes a telekinetic barrier, first around the site itself, and eventually around all her people.

The Telmi have Alliance permission to use telekinesis for ritual purposes, and it is a naturally occurring ability in most telepathic infants, but because of its potential for use as a destructive weapon it is forbidden, by Alliance treaty, to any government to even experiement with it. (The Vaaselian usurper whom Timu and Wythe had destroyed had developed telekinesis for just such destructive purposes.)  Now Prince Renhold must deal with accusations that his friend, Maga Wythe, is using telekinesis inappropriately -- the traditionalist nobles especially want him to take strong measures against her and the Telmi, and they have at least potential support among progressives interested in developing science and industry in Vaaseli, who wish to exploit Pieter Sevren's discoveries.

Renhold may be forced to move militarily against the Telmi, if he wishes to avoid civil war in Vaaseli between his government and the traditionalists.

I've always felt that I grew up really weird.

Back in the early fifties, when they met, my parents were Communist party members.  By the time I was in the picture they were pretty fed up with the communists, and I think, if asked, they would have called themselves "progressives."

My Dad (John) was born in 1894, on Chicago's near Northside, the child of Jewish immigrants from Estonia. His own mother died at some point in his childhood, and his dad remarried, so he had a ton of brothers and sisters, but I never got to meet any of my relatives on his side of the family.

My Mom (Tess) was born in 1920, to Finnish-Americans in the Copper Country of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Both sides of her family were Lapp (Sami, we say now, which is more accurate) though my grandfather had been raised by a Swedish Lutheran minister.

They were both born and bred in the labor movement, which of course was mostly socialist and communist in those days.  My dad was an organizer for the Electrical Workers in the '30s, which was not a job for the faint of heart or the physically fearful. He was also trained as a chef, and worked as one for much of his life, and was the homemaker in our household when I was child, while my mom worked in the mailing department of a socialist Finnish-language newspaper.

My mother's father, however, was a entrepeneur -- an industrial blacksmith who tried to make a living out of gas stations and tourist cabins and the like. He dragged his family all over the country, from Michigan to Louisiana to Florida to California to Illinois -- eventually back to Michigan -- trying to make a decent living.  I think part of his constant motion was genetic, rather than economic -- he was a nomad, somewhere deep inside. His son, my uncle, became an entrepeneur too, turning the tourist cabin thing into a little motel and hamburger stand in Kearsarge, Michigan -- but his real calling was architecture.  On his own he copied the style of Frank Lloyd Wright in building his little drive-in into a beautiful steakhouse -- the restaurant business was his excuse for the stunning building he created over the years. He's retired, in Arizona, now -- I don't even know if the Hut Inn is still standing.  I hope it is.

My parents met at a Communist Party-sponsored civil rights rally in Chicago, in 1950, where my mother was one of the speakers.  They married soon after. My mom had previously been engaged to a black man (I guess in those days he would have been a Negro) but they both decided that life as a bi-racial couple, with bi-racial kids, would have been too hard. My dad had been married before; his first wife died of cancer, without bearing any children.

My sister was born in 1951, during a blizzard in Chicago. At the time my parents were trying to make a living with a short-order restaurant in the Loop called Theresa's Kitchen.  It didn't work out.  They moved to Superior, Wisconsin, after staying for awhile with an old friend of my mother's in a farmhouse in Minnesota. My mom worked as a waitress before getting her job with the newspaper. While my sister was little, and in my baby days, we lived in an apartment above the newspaper office.

I was born in St. Mary's hospital in Superior, in 1958.

The cultural milieu of my childhood was dominated by the Viet Nam War and the civil rights movement. An oft-repeated scene was my mother hunting and pecking her way across the keyboard of her Remington typewriter while she and my dad co-wrote letters to the editor on these and other topics of the moment.  Cigarettes and black coffee. Tess and John.

Politics was always more important than money in our family.

We never owned a car.

My parents almost never bought anything for themselves, except for cigarettes.  They did buy my sister and me a brand new piano, on installments, and a good clarinet for my sister from the Sears and Roebuck catalog.  We had library cards, and we knew how to use them.

My parents were both committed atheists, but my sister and I were baptized in the Lutheran Church, at the behest of an aunt of my mother's. We also went to Lutheran Sunday school, so that we would be informed about Christianity.  When my sister was in high school she developed a crush on the Catholic Church, and took instruction for awhile, and went to a Catholic college, even -- but never became a card-carrying Catholic.

I gave up Sunday school when I was 12, and had my first episode of depression.

That's enough for this post.

Sometimes the only place I find any peace is in my fiction. I'd rather be with my characters and their problems than dealing with my own, I suppose.

Current real-life problems:

My car needs work on the brakes and the transmission.

Gas prices are making my commute to work almost impossible.

There's no place to work in this little town (two supermarkets, two discount stores, two liquor store/gas stations, two pharmacies, one ice cream joint, one burger joint, one Subway, one self-serve carwash, one community library.)

There's no place for a family of seven to live in the city where I work that we can afford.

I'm only working part-time, because full-time hours in retail mean not getting home until after midnight about half the time, and my kids and husband need me, and I them, in the evening.

If I got another job with more hours, even if they were better, the pay cut wouldn't be worth it.

I may or may not be able to get a job teaching writing once I get my master's in August.

I know I could make a living writing fiction, if I could just get an agent and then a publisher to consider my work seriously. (And that's all I want -- a living -- no best-sellers or movie deals -- just steady enough sales to justify contracts for new books.)

I shouldn't have to do pointless work for pay, when I can do meaningful work that will benefit other people long term. (I really believe good story-telling does that.)

Writing is so easy for me, and so enjoyable -- it's all I bloody want to do, all the time.

And right now I'm coping with what I hope is the ultimate ordeal of my marriage -- which is an excellent one, by the way, in every respect but this one -- as my husband attempts to get off psychiatric meds so that his brain can come back to life, and he can work. (He's an extremely talented writer who hasn't been able to get off the ground because of his own head.)

Of course I shouldn't bitch about life -- if I hadn't had to deal with all this crap all my life I wouldn't be able to write about people dealing with other kinds of difficulties.  I know that.

Oh, and one more thing --

I hate the capitalist system (sing along, if you like)