Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
The Story Continues...
The simple answer is to say "for personal reasons." But that's far too bald a reply, and I owe readers an explanation rather than an excuse! Several things happened all at once, at the time when The Lost Songs began its slither into limbo.
So bookmark this page and come back to it. Contact me, if you like, and I'd be glad to tell you how things are going! Thanks so much for your interest in The Lost Songs. Leaving it in limbo has bothered me for years, so let's get this sorted.
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| The 2012 artwork, repainted for 2024. Nice, no? |
November 14, 2023
To begin with, a word about how and why this story slithered into limbo when it looked so promising. It was also getting a heck of a lot of reads -- over 1,000 per chapter -- and yet ... and yet, here we are, many years later, and it's very obviously been allowed to lie fallow. Why?
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| The old artwork is being repainted in 2023, and it's amazing what's doable... |
The simple answer is to say "for personal reasons." But that's far too bald a reply, and I owe readers an explanation rather than an excuse! Several things happened all at once, at the time when The Lost Songs began its slither into limbo.
First, we had to suddenly STOP what we were doing -- everything -- and pack an enormous household into boxes, get up and MOVE. You have just four weeks to do six months' work, including packing, moving, unpacking, cleaning an enormous house from top to bottom, hunting for a new home... Anyone who has lived on "the rental roundabout" in Australia knows how this works. It's nasty. It not only throws you right off stride psychologically, the hard, physical work can also result in injury.
It did. I was left, after the move, with spinal issues and serious problems in several joints. Long story short: I lived in constant pain for upwards of five years, and though this started to abate by 2017, I can report that even in 2023, I'm still in the same pain, albeit at lower levels. In 2017, when I might have gone back to The Lost Songs, other stuff was happening. Worse stuff.
In 2015, my mother had entered what doctors and palliative nurses refer to as "her last illness." It was ... rough on everyone, and as her permanent full-time carer (a job I undertook in 2004), it hit me like a runaway truck. The work became physically, emotionally and psychologically impossible. I did the job anyway, but I ended up wrecked in every way you can imagine.
It took months for me to be able to write a coherent sentence again, and the bare truth of the matter is that I could not return to any of the work I'd been doing when the bad times began. The Lost Songs was the last thing in the world I could write. It almost still it. I find myself in an odd position --
I'll call it "Doing a George R.R. Martin." See? I'm far from alone in this predicament! One day, for whatever reason, the magic goes away, and you can't get it back. You try; you fail.
In fact, I was enjoying the Song of Ice and Fire book series (consequently, I didn't like the dramatization very much). I devoured each volume and, like millions of other people, have been waiting for the last segment in the saga, the end, the conclusion -- closure!! -- since 2011. Mr. Martin is at least ten years late with it, and going by his answers as to why and how this happened --
It all reduces to the same bottom line: the magic went away for him. He simply can't write Game of Thrones stories anymore. Now, GRRM could easily hire on a ghost writer to finish it ... give the project to a team of gifted fan writers who'd have a 1,200 page book done inside of a year, and ready for the industrial-grade editing it would doubtlessly need. Editing is the easy part. As Jodie Picoult said, "You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page."
But I don't have the liberty of hiring ghost writers. The best I can do is apologise and, better yet --
I'll offer you "the short version" ... in other words, what the film industry calls a "treatment." Less than a novel/screenplay, but far more than a simple synopsis. Richly illustrated: if a picture is worth a thousand words, then this will be an epic. Plus, blow by blow, I'll tell you the story as it was mapped out for dramatization. Then I'll zip it into a PDF to make pleasant reading, and I'll place the link right here as soon as I have it posted.
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| Leon and Roald at the Gypsy camp ... freshly repainted for 2024. What a difference! |
So bookmark this page and come back to it. Contact me, if you like, and I'd be glad to tell you how things are going! Thanks so much for your interest in The Lost Songs. Leaving it in limbo has bothered me for years, so let's get this sorted.
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| This is where they're going... |
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| The warrior monk -- he knows the way, but oh, it's dangerous... |
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| ...did I say dangerous? There's a great treasure, if you'll only walk this way... Eep. |
