m o c . o o l i z a w s . w w w

two and two are four and four are eight and two are one and one are two

How far will a disciple follow their calling?
Does fear come after enlightenment?
Should enlightenment necessitate a prophet?
Can a prophet even save herself?

7 April 2010
I am, at long last, back to working on eleven. I never intended to be away for so long, and now with a total of four unfinished novels, it doesn't seem like I should need to keep working on them in any particular order. I contemplated doing Script Frenzy for a second time this year. I'd really like to turn Chasing Mermaids into a screenplay, but I was feeling eleven. The stars must have aligned or something....

I really need a better excerpt up here.

23 October 2009
I've been reading through eleven and doing some minor edits along the way. I've got the itch to get in there and finish it, but I've got NaNoWriMo starting in just over a week, so at best I'll get back to eleven in December.

27 November 2007
I finished Facets just this past October, in time for NaNoWriMo to start once again. eleven will remain on hold until Five is finished. Here's to hoping that will be much, much sooner than October, so I have time to work on eleven.

5 October 2006
eleven was put on hiatus before NaNo last year and will remain so through this November's effort and until my current project is finished. I managed to write my way through several difficult obstacles (for which I can only blame myself) before I (intentionally) set it down. I want to have a couple folks read through it and offer feedback before I sit down and write the rest.

28 July 2005
eleven has been a complex effort, currently with sixteen story sections and five "work" sections. I indulged myself this morning with my first-ever word count, and according to OpenOffice 2.0beta, it's 120498 words. My best guess is that I'm somewhere between 60 an 80 percent complete. I doubt I'll finish before November, and I'm fairly certain that the lure of NaNo will claim my end-of-year writing time once again.

26 July 2005
This little creation of mine breathes its first breaths on the internet.

Minnie was three. She didn't realize the significance of her place in the world. She didn't understand that others' lives were somehow different from hers. She did know that she was hungry and very thirsty and she felt an insatiable longing for her mother.

It wasn't that nobody looked after her, indeed, in God's eyes she had been given many guardians. The words of the Second Prophet had been clear, and her biological parents had known for certain that God wanted Minnie to be a child of The Community and not the family. And so, Minnie, like all the children of The Chosen, endured the longing that the generations before her endured without resolution.

The dust was contaminated and the heat extreme - the constant movement difficult on short legs - the pace relentless. The Second Book, however, was clear on these points as well:

'For The Chosen, only suffering awaits. For two thousand moons They will wander without relief, and at The End, the Kingdom of Mior shall be theirs.'

None knew the way to Mior, or even if such a place existed, but the suffering and the wandering seemed unavoidable. And so, Minnie lifted her small legs in a continual progression of tiny steps until the day that The Council decided she was too weak to continue.

And then, she was left behind.

I wrote the first bits of eleven in August 1998. It amounted to about two pages and was based on an idea that had been brewing in my head for some time. I'm pretty certain that I wrote those words after reading an original set of "lobster tales" sent to me by my friend Jane. It would take another four years, and another set of lobster stories to spur me on.

In August 2002, after Jane's second Cyrus McWaffle infusion, with a fancy fold-up keyboard hooked to my amber Handspring, and a hour-and-a-half of commute every day, I began writing eleven in earnest. The first thing I did was to roll in another story start - just a paragraph that I had "penned" in August 1992 - which felt inherently entwined with my other fledgling story. This same effort continues today.

In November 2003 I took a break from eleven to write Chasing Mermaids for NaNoWriMo (a self-enforced manical month of writing.) It ate up my writing effort until July 2004. So much for "a month." I went back to eleven until November 2004, then leapt back into NaNo with a more conducive plan: I'd write an eleven-inspired story to keep myself "on track." Thus was born ENX. which took up my writing time through March 2005.

Cold Water. It's the cold that makes it work. It's like magic how it pulls the blood off the skin. Even when it's dried on from a long night of laying face-against-the-floor.

The floor, however, will need peroxide. Cold Water won't work on the infinitesimal plastic fibers. They'll hold tenaciously to just about anything. You've got to use peroxide to blast the blood off the plastic.

It's funny how it stains the skin though. You wouldn't think it'd do that, but it does. Makes it look like you were crying, or embarrassed with only one cheek - makes it look like you were lying face-against-the-floor in your own blood all night.

contact me at swaziloo at swaziloo dot com