In the mid-sixteenth century an Irish merman warrior catches sight of a beautiful and unclothed young woman on the shore of a distant island. He falls immediately into lust with her and he waits for an opportunity to rape her. He watches as she suddenly falls down upon the sand, on top of an animal skin, and becomes a seal. The warrior is intrigued, he didn’t know the Selkie pod lived nearby and had never seen a Selkie woman. He stalks the woman, waiting to find her alone again. He learns that her pod lives among the seals of the many islands, seldom interacting with the humans who live on Ireland. He eventually sees his chance and kidnaps her, killing several Selkie males in the process. He takes her back to his enclave on the Irish mainland.

The Selkie pod is up in arms over the kidnapping – the young woman was the chieftain’s daughter and promised to the chieftain of another pod as his mate. The merfolk are warriors, though, and kill nearly every Selkie who came after them. The fighting lasts for months as other Selkie pods become involved in the fight to get the "princess" back.

The young woman, Sedna, is impregnated by her captor, her pelt taken and kept by the merman. He gives her “freedom” among the mermaids and she is given the task of food gathering along with the young maids. After several months of watching her captors and learning their ways and given a bit more freedom at the cooking fires, she gathers up poisonous mushrooms and includes them in the stew pot. The entire merclan eats the meal, Sedna pretending to be too ill with her difficult pregnancy to eat. She goes off into the cavern of her captor and waits until the enclave falls silent.

Sedna sneaks out of the cavern to find the entire clan dead just as she planned. She looks for the warrior who kidnapped her, searching for her pelt, and just as she realizes that he’s not among the dead, he arrives to find his clan dead at her feet. He kills her and the child she carries in a rage and then goes hunting for her pod. He kills every Selkie he can find and a great many innocent seals as well. Word spreads among the merfolk and they start killing Selkie pods as well in retribution for the murder of one of their clans.

The Selkie pods are so decimated by the centuries of killings that now there are fewer than a dozen small pods worldwide. They keep to themselves and try not to draw attention to themselves so as not to incur the wrath of the merfolk again. Sedna becomes such a legendary figure among the Selkie that she obtains deity status.

Note: I need to find a good name for the warrior and for the merclan. Sedna is the name of a seal-woman goddess so that works well. The only reason I can think as for why Lochlyn doesn't know this cautionary tale is because he wasn't raised among his father's pod but his ancestral memory is so strong that he sees some of the story when he sees Callum carrying Kendra when she's wrapped in his pelt.

I just finished the re-write of chapter seven. Yay! Interestingly Lochlyn had a flashback when he saw Kendra being held in the arms of Callum, like it was something he'd seen before. I think Lochlyn tapped into an ancestral Selkie memory of a Selkie woman being kidnapped by a merman back in the middle ages. I'll have to mull it over for a while but it feels right. Callum could help shed light on the conflict since he holds his entire Cu Sith line's memories in his head. One of his previous incarnations could have helped one side or the other during the conflict or maybe even come across it on accident. The Cu Sith was the Clan's greatest warrior, they could have sent him to the sea if word of a war reached them to make sure it didn't spill over onto Clan lands. Hmm, lots of things to think on. It's nice to feel like writing again after so many weeks of not.

I caught some stomach bug from someone at work so I stayed home today. Wish I could say I spent the entire day writing but between trips to the bathroom and sleeping I didn't even get dressed until after 3pm. I did get about twice as much written today compared to yesterday so that's good. I've also passed the half way point. Yay! Chapter four is coming along swimmingly and they're just moments away from discovering April Dawn's car in the lake. Chapter three is filled with clues as to Lochlyn's and Kendra's supernatural origins, I just hope they're not too obvious.

I had a lot of time to think this morning so I wrote notes about Undines, Selkies, Naiads and such. Right now Lochlyn's mom is the most fleshed out. She's an English Undine who moved from England to Upstate New York near the Great Lakes when Lochlyn was a child. She never re-married or even forgot about her fickle husband because Undines mate for life (I had to give Kendra some hope that Lochlyn could settle down with one woman, after all). Undines are cold, fresh water spirits with webbed hands and feet, green or blue hair, and a mouth full of very sharp teeth. They live mostly on a diet of fish and water plants. Lochlyn's mom was a healer of her people and she was called upon by the Selkie pod (what is a group of seals called?) to help heal one of their young whose mother was a seal rather than a human. While among the Selkie folk she met Lochlyn's father. They mated and she became pregnant. Lochlyn's father, though, couldn't give up his Selkie ways and harem of females. She couldn't live that way and didn't want her son growing up under his influence so she immigrated to the U.S. She had surgery on her hands, removing the webs, and filed her teeth down and capped so she'd appear more human. She tries to keep her green hair dyed brown. She uses her healing and herbal knowledge to create organic beauty products and she's starting to sell her formulas to large producers. Lochlyn doesn't remember much about his father and has no desire to see him again.

25312 / 50000 words. 51% done!

I'm at 19,014 words and am feeling a little burned out. I'm still not where I was at this time last year, though. I need a couple hundred more to meet it (19,325 according to my post in Shadow Walking). I should be able to hit it tonight before I go to bed if I can refocus my thoughts and get my back to stop hurting. Ugh! Since I had less time to type today (after working all day), I forgot to take my 500 word breaks. I have to stop doing that, seriously.

I took Sybil to work with me today and managed to write a little over 500 words while I was at lunch. I need to find good typing food. What can I eat while still maintaining my typing speed? The only suggestion I've had so far is soup through a straw. Doesn't sound very appetizing. What I can't live without while writing is: chai tea without milk and Fruitbars (the black cherry ones are my favorite right now). I don't know what it is about hot tea and popcicles but it works for me.

Okay, back to the Darkness. I'm nearly at the first swimming scene so things are starting to heat up. It's always good to get your characters nearly naked in a romance, right? Completely naked is even better but that's coming later.

Chapter two is complete and I'm trying to decide if I want to continue on to Chapter three and my 5,000 words written today goal or not (I actually may have surpassed the 5,000 word goal since I can't remember exactly where I ended last night. I think it was somewhere around 11,124 but I could be mistaken). Aarggh! I need at least another 300 to 500 hundred to make sure. 

I'm at 14,050 words right now and it's break time once again. This time I wrote straight through 1,500 words and that was a really bad idea. My back is killing me. I need to make my computer beep at me or something every time I write 500 words. Maybe an electric shock collar. Nah, I'd like that too much. LOL!

I'm nearly done with chapter two. Things are moving right along and Lochlyn is picking up more lovers even though I didn't really plan it. Writing ideas here obvious triggers things in my subconscious. LOL! Kendra's starting to get jealous so that's a good sign. I don't know if she'll be enough woman for him to remain faithful to her for the rest of his life, though. Maybe merfolk are more passionate than I previously thought (not like dead fish, then. LOL!).

I really like Maggie Blackwing and if I hadn't already planned a book around her I definitely would be. Her gift of premonition is really interesting since her premonitions are pretty mundane and while Lochlyn notices that she seems to know a lot of things before she should I doubt my readers will pick up on the gift. Kind of like I'm trying to hide the true natures of Lochlyn and Kendra until later in the book but still give the reader little hints at it once in a while. We'll see if I'll be successful at it or not.

Well, it's been nearly a half hour, I should get back to the book.

I'm at 10,261 words right now and am taking a break from it, though I'm not sure if moving from the couch and Sybil  to a chair and Satan is really taking a break. I tried to update my word count on the NaNo website but it's down right now - too much traffic, I think. Sigh ... the joys of a new site and too many people home and writing on a Saturday.

Since I've surpassed my goal for the weekend already my new goal is 15,000 words by tomorrow night. I think I can do it as long as things keep moving along the way they've been going. I'm about a quarter of the way through chapter two and the sexual tension between Lochlyn and Kendra is heating up. It's kinda fun since Kendra isn't a very pleasant woman - stubborn and argumentative as I imagine Merfolk to be (ocean living isn't easy - lot of competition for food and such). Lochlyn's more laid back, seals are more into communal living, though I wonder if he shouldn't have a harem of women since in a seal group there is usually one bull to a bevy of females? Hmm, something to consider. Would Selkies live more like seals or humans? Probably seals since they spend the majority of their lives in seal form. And would Selkies mate with seals? That would make life interesting for the seal mother if she gave birth to a Selkie child. Okay, now I'm just off on a tangent. I should get back to the novel

I've hit over 1,700 words already today and I've only been writing since 11:30 (plus have taken a number of breaks, including one to update both of my LJ's). I'm trying to get up and walk around and stretch every 500 words so I won't kill my body in the process of writing this month. I have about half of Within Darkness outlined and things are moving right along according to schedule. I'm hoping to hit 2,500 or more today and 5,000 tomorrow - though I may take a long break tomorrow and get tattooed. I want to hit 10,000 words before I have to go back to work on Monday. I knew there was another reason to take this week off work other than not to have to deal with Halloween at work with my old manager. Well, I should get back to the laptop. I've been away for over an hour.

I just had an idea (shock!). I'm going to make all the children who were eaten by the goblin in "Into Darkness" be descendants of the pioneers who founded Robin's Cross. More children other than just Clara Belle's had to have been fathered by Puck, only the other women and men didn't care who the biological father of their children was because they were too busy trying to survive. The goblin was attracted to these children because of their Fey blood. This will also mean that Ellie isn't as human as she thought she was which fixes my other problem - how does a human woman end up with so many half-human friends. Yay, clarity!

Yeah, yeah, I know I haven't finished book two yet but plot ideas for book three have been swirling in my head for months. Today I started writing some of them down. I haven't gotten very far but by November 1st I should have a complete story outline for "Within Darkness."

So far the premise is that there have been a number of suspicious car accidents along a particularly narrow and winding section of road abutting a small yet deep lake. The drivers usually survive (though some haven't) and they all claim that they swerved to avoid something in the road. Lochlyn Douglas, crime scene investigator and half Welsh selkie, believes they have seen something even though he can't find any evidence of the creature. Kendra Murphy, police officer and half Mermaid, isn't so sure and thinks the investigation is a waste of time until she's a victim of "The Lake Wraith." She swerves to avoid the thing in the middle of the road and ends up crashing her patrol car. She then teams up with Lochlyn to uncover the mystery. They discover each others secret identities (of course) and dive into the lake to see what lies on the bottom (within the darkness). They find the remains of a vehicle which was registered to none other than April Dawn Rose but they don't find her body in the car. They start searching for the woman who killed a man and kidnapped their friend's child, the woman's whose actions set the events of "Out of Darkness" in action. 

I've given myself a deadline for "Out of Darkness." I want to finish the first draft by the end of October. It should be doable if I apply myself to actually making progress in the storyline and stop getting distracted by making each scene perfect (always my downfall). Last year I wrote 50,000 words in 18 days, I should be able to write 70,000 words in two and a half months, right?

The October deadline is obviously because I have to start book three in November for this year's NaNoWriMo. I know which characters I'll be working with in the third installment of the Darkness series but I only have a rough story idea. Some time between now and November first I'll need to come up with a completed outline so I'll know what I'm writing toward. One pretty cool thing is that when my mom finally finished reading the third draft of "Into Darkness" she told me how much she liked the two characters the third book will revolve around - I'm tentatively calling it "Within Darkness." I think it's great that she noticed the two characters enough to mention them to me since they only had small walk-on roles in that novel. My major dilemma at the moment though is that despite their ESP the main characters from "Into Darkness" are human while Urs, Callum, and Odell are not and neither are Kendra nor Lochlyn. Is it too much for my readers to believe that two human cops in a small town would be friends with all these Fey and half Fey creatures? Should I add elements of the preternatural into the heritage of Ellie and Mac to make them fit in with their friends or should I make the other characters more human? Aarrgh!!!