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“Jasper’s Promise,” Snippet One
As promised, folks, here is a snippet from my soon-to-be-forthcoming novel, JASPER’S PROMISE, a novel I wrote in Chris Nuttall’s Schooled in Magic universe with his permission and active encouragement.
A quick summary…(these things are hard for me, but I’ll do my best): Jasper, a fifteen-year-old youngster, loses his mother to childbirth, but before she dies, she tells him about the new university at Heart’s Eye, a community near the desert and one at least five or six days by rail travel away from Newtown, where he, his mother, and his odious stepfather live. There, Jasper can get the training in magic his mother never received…he promises to go (thus the name of the book), to do his best, and he finds his talents and starts to learn about who and what he truly is.
Now, without further ado, here’s Chapters One and Two of Jasper’s Promise:
OoO
Chapter One
My children, we must start my story when my life was at its absolute worst.
My mother was dying; she knew it. She’d tried to birth a baby that was way too big for her, and the experienced midwife (who had a hint of magic talent in her blood) was already out on another call. My mother, Eve, was bleeding to death, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I’d tried.
My grandmother was not present as my stepfather didn’t want her there. This had caused all sorts of consternation in the family. But eventually my mother acquiesced, providing the midwife was sent for.
It didn’t do any good, as I said. And what’s worse, my stepfather wasn’t even there to help…though in one way, I guess that was a blessing as I was able to get away from him (finally).
Where was he? At the bar, of course, celebrating the impending birth. He was no help.
Then again, he never was.
My stepfather, David, was a terrible person. He abused me every day. Mom would send me out on errands as often as she possibly could, along with sleepovers at my grandma Hannah’s place, but somehow, David found a way to be cruel and cutting whether he raised the strap to me or not.
Why did Mom marry David? I don’t know. Yes, after my father died, she must’ve been in a bad state. Yes, as the first-ever magician in her own family, her siblings were not comfortable with her, and had sent her away…and yes, she’d been unable to get the proper training, so all she’d learned were scraps of spells. David owned a green grocery, so was reasonably prosperous; more to the point, as my father had died in one of the endless wars long before I became rational or reasonable—that is, before I hit the age of seven—she’d been alone a long time. What she knew was barely enough to keep her out of the gutter, and me alongside her. She knew she needed to give me a proper upbringing…but David almost killed her several times and beat me so badly on more than one occasion, all my grandmother and the local midwife could do was give me painkilling potion and tell me to rest.
Hannah was my mom’s mother, and had disagreed with her own family over the treatment of Mom. She had brought some wealth into the family, carefully hoarded, when she’d married, and when they sent Mom away, Hannah went with her. They’d settled in a dusty town near the Badlands, a place called Newtown that had only been in existence for a few years. Newtown was reasonably fertile and could grow its own food, but it was not a prosperous enough place for bandits to bother us and seemed a perfect place to try to make a new life. Hannah managed, partly because she was quiet (though never mousy) and people tended to overlook her. But Mom suffered for many reasons until David showed up. Hannah never trusted David, even when he brought Mom flowers and candy and took her out to expensive restaurants. (“Something in his eyes,” she told me later.) But Mom was smitten, and as I said before, she also was desperate. She hated being a leech on her mother (though Mom was working as a scribe, the Scribe’s guild said it was fine and dandy for men to be paid three times as much as women for far less work, so Mom never could get out of what sometimes was called “genteel poverty”), and she wanted, somehow, to send me to one of the magical schools.
Yes, I tested for magic early. I lit the ends of my fingers, somehow, so they looked like fireflies; I also could teleport a book or scroll from across the room, providing I really wanted to do it. (The latter exhausted me for hours, after. I had no idea at the time how much mental energy I was putting out, much less the fact that most magicians could not do what I could do, even if they’d been sent to school early.) Mom regretted not getting the right training for herself, though Hannah had of course offered to pay Mom’s way (why Mom had to be so stiff-necked, I’ll never understand), and wanted to do things in the right order: Marry well. Send me off to school to get the best possible training for my magical gift. Then live peacefully and enjoy life with her second husband.
None of that happened.
Yes, she married. But David was a tight-fisted man, and he had a violent and unpredictable temper. Sometimes, he got mad at Mom for not saving money; other times, he got mad because Mom did save money. (“Don’t you trust me to provide?” he’d ask her after he’d hit her so hard, the bruise on her cheekbone looked purple.) The money was not there to send me to Whitehall, or Stronghold, or any of the others. So he said.
Mom was outwardly meek, but inwardly something had stiffened. She wanted me to be properly trained. She didn’t want my magic to get so out of control that I inadvertently became a necromancer. (We had no idea how necromancers came to be, but we had some vague notion that it was due to a power imbalance.) So she started squirreling money away, giving it to my grandmother to hold, in the hopes I’d be able to go somewhere, even at a later age than most, for training.
When she swelled in pregnancy after eight years of marriage, my stepfather rejoiced. He stopped hitting Mom for the duration. (He hit me all the more, of course, but I bit my lip and endured.) He had high hopes for a son—“One that’s good, not like you, you worthless piece of crap, Jasper”—but of course he’d have to take what he got.
At any rate, when Mom realized she would not survive childbed, she called out to me. (Fortunately, David was still at the bar.) I ran to her; I loved her so much, even though I never said it. “Mom…are you all right?” I asked, knowing she wasn’t. Her overall coloring was bad; she’d gone greenish, somehow, and the blue veins stuck out in her face and neck…she’d lost a lot of blood, I thought, remembering what my grandmother had told me about pregnancy and confinements. And her hair, once her crowning glory, had dulled so much from its original bright red-blonde that it looked like mud, which couldn’t be right, could never be right.
“I will be, soon,” Mom said breathily. “Our ancestors will see me safe, I’m sure.” Then, she struggled, until her voice became her usual one again: calm, measured, and matter of fact. “Son, you need to leave now. You can’t help me, here. You shouldn’t stay, either, for obvious reasons.”
I gulped and nodded, but Mom wasn’t finished.
“Your grandmother has something for you. Then, you are going to head to Heart’s Eye.”
“What’s that?”
“A different type of magical school,” Mom said, gripping my hand with as much force as she had…which wasn’t nearly enough. Still, I was riveted. “They want magicians and nonmagicians to work together—”
“Mundanes? Like David? Yuck!”
“Or like your grandmother,” Mom said, steel in her voice. “Even so. They train people to do all sorts of things, and they’ll help you get the skills you need to live a better life, far, far away from David.”
“You’re sure I…can’t help you? With my magic?” I’d do anything for Mom. Even use my unpredictable magic, if it worked…
“Healing spells are some I never got a chance to study. They won’t work right for me. That’s why I never taught them to you…but son, my time is about to run out. You must leave now.”
I kissed her on the brow and hurried out. I hated having to leave her there. But she’d asked me to go to my grandmother’s house; if that was her last wish for me, I damned well was going to follow it.
I went out through the kitchen door as the cook had already gone home. I hoped I’d avoid David, as he and Grandma didn’t get along, but knew I’d be all right once I got to Grandma’s house because Hannah had one of those new blunderbusses everyone was talking about. That was a type of “gun” – I’d never heard that word before Grandma told me about it—that would shoot David at close range and not miss. While I hated my stepfather and didn’t think the world would mourn him at all, I didn’t want Grandma to get into any trouble, which she might if she shot and killed David. Thus my caution.
As soon as I was out, I realized it was twilight. Good. Easier to hide in the shadows, especially with one of the scraps of spells my Mom had known and had taught me. The toughest thing about using that spell was to stay calm. It was a misdirection spell, and it would not work if you were overly nervous, anxious, or worried. (Later I found there were other versions of the spell that would, but I did not know them at the time.) I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other until I was at Grandma’s door.
I knocked…then Grandma opened the door and said, “Jasper! It’s about time!”
Chapter Two
My grandmother bustled me inside and had me sit down. Small, but mighty of heart, she did not mince words. “Your mother isn’t well,” she said, reading the information off my face.
“No, she’s not. And the midwife is out of town doing Goddess-alone-knows-what, while David is drinking in the bar, toasting the other idiots,” I said with disgust. “I didn’t want to leave, though…I wanted to help her!”
“She knows that,” Hannah, my grandmother, said with infinite gentleness. “She had a premonition, Jasper. She knew she’d not survive this birth, one way or another. And she also knew that you must leave this place to get the training you need…the training she, herself, was not able to get.”
“Why aren’t you with her now?”
“I need to give you a few things, and then I’m going over there. With my blunderbuss, if you must know,” she said with a slight smile.
That made sense to me. David was no threat to her, that way.
“Here,” she said, handing me a bag full of coins of various types and denominations. “This should get you to Heart’s Eye.”
“What’s that? Mom said something, but I didn’t understand…why should I go there?”
“It’s a new type of magical school called a ‘university,’ and they take everyone, magicians and nonmagicians alike. They’re trying to build something new. They don’t charge for learning, either, the last I checked.”
Interesting. They could train me? But I had another question for her, as before my mother had mentioned it, I had never heard at all of Heart’s Eye. That meant it must be very far away. “Where is it?”
“It’s in the desert, kind of,” Hannah said. “I have only heard of it. Never been there. But it’s said to be on the very edge of a desert.” Then she handed me another bag full of cheese, raisins, and bread. “This should help you on your way. The less food you have to buy, the better off you’ll be when you get there. Be wary of any food that’s given to you and use the water purification spell my daughter taught you.”
That was one of the few full spells Mom knew.
She then handed me yet another bag filled with my clothes—I didn’t know how she’d grabbed them without me noticing—and a few of my favorite books, before saying, “Now go, grandson. There’s a stagecoach down the way that’ll take you to the nearest train station.”
“But that’s three towns away! How can I—”
“I’ve already paid,” my grandma said. “Go. Now.”
I went, but my heart was heavy. I couldn’t help my mother, who would die…my grandmother was going to be the only one at my Mom’s deathbed…and I felt like a complete failure.
Yet they believed in me, or at least that I deserved a chance to become something else, something other than what I already was. I had to go and try.
But that didn’t mean I liked it. And I wasn’t going to pretend I did.
OoO
So, there you have it. What d’you think so far?
I’ll be posting more in two days. Until then…go, Brewers, go!
This Reblog Fits, so Here We Go Again…
This post is an important thing to remember as we all continue to get through the dog days of summer into fall. (I do wonder why they call it “dog days,” but that’s neither here nor there. As I love dogs, they can call every day a dog day as far as I’m concerned.)
That’s why I chose to reblog it, in the hopes that more people who maybe didn’t read it the first time will read it now.
There’s a lot of stuff going on in this world that is incredibly frustrating. Maybe that has always been true, but because we didn’t have 24/7 news coverage, much less the internet, we didn’t get inundated with all of the various information out there — some good, some bad, some neutral, and a whole lot of it completely incomprehensible. (Though the cute cat and dog pics can stay. Just saying.)
As far as a quick personal update here, regarding stories and such…my three novels are still in a holding pattern, but I grow closer to getting them back out there, either by self-publishing or through a new small press taking a flyer on me. In addition, the book I wrote in Chris Nuttall’s Schooled in Magic universe, with his permission of course, will hopefully be out in the next month to month and a half. (A cover reveal will be forthcoming soon, too.)
For those wondering about my living situation…it’s the same.
As I said in my last update, I’m doing the best I can. Some days are better than others. Some aren’t. I will be happier, though, once I get past September 21, as that will be the 24th sad anniversary of my late husband Michael’s death.
Books I can recommend: As well as anything by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, anything by Katharine Eliska Kimbriel, anything by my friend the late Rosemary Edghill, and whatever genre you feel like reading, as Chris Nuttall probably has it and you will almost certainly enjoy it, I can recommend two new-to-me writers, those being Skyler Ramirez and Linzi Day. Ramirez writes mostly space opera, while Day writes mostly fantasy. Both tell excellent stories that I have enjoyed immensely. I’m also big on Carla Kelly’s Regency romances, as she mostly dwells on people other romances have forgotten about, like Naval personnel, middle-class and lower-middle-class women (usually finding a way to pair off with Naval personnel), medical doctors…her novels are a breath of fresh air, and I always enjoy reading them.
Those are just a few of the wide-ranging and genre-hopping books I read on a regular basis.
Oh, yes…and Kayelle Allen has a great new book out called WATCH YOUR SIX. It’s SFnal, dealing with humans, Ultras (genetically made humans that live far longer than regular humans), and “Ghosts,” who have been given Ultra blood and were able to survive otherwise mortal wounds in the same body. Six is the best friend of Pietas, the Ultra leader…and their friendship makes me laugh, sometimes cry, and overall is so much fun to read that I had to tell you all about it.
So, what are you reading? What’s going on that you’d like to talk about? Tell me in the comments!
Blast from the Past, but Still Relevant…Little Things Do Count
Folks, I wrote this several years ago, but it is still relevant today.
Creativity is a blessing, but it takes nurturing, care, and time, just like anything else. That said, doing little things adds up over time, and eventually will show you that what you’ve done makes more sense than it seemed at the time.
I hope you’ll enjoy this blast from the past. Without further ado…
The IOC Is Wrong. Jordan Chiles Deserves Her Medal
Folks, I am livid.
I watched the Summer Olympics, as many did, keeping a close eye on the gymnastics competition. (They now want to call it “artistic gymnastics” as opposed to the rhythmic gymnasts who use ribbons and balls and such. I think we can tell which is which, but whatever.) The American gymnasts were excellent. Simone Biles was her usual self, competing with Rebeca Andrade (pronounced “An-dra-jee”) of Brazil, and Suni Lee, Jade Carey, and Jordan Chiles all had excellent Olympic performances as well. (I don’t mean to slight the other gymnast, Hezly Rivera. She won an Olympic gold team medal and did her best.)
So, what made me livid? How about this: In the final competition, which was the floor exercise, the judges from the International Olympic Committee screwed up. They messed up the scores to the point that Jordan Chiles’s coach had to appeal to get a point put back. (A tenth of a point, actually.) Ms. Chiles won the bronze medal, got her medal, Simone Biles got the silver, and Rebeca Andrade got the gold.
So far, so good.
The Romanian gymnasts (they were in fourth and fifth) were very unhappy. The judges didn’t score them right either. One of them was said to have a foot out of bounds when she hadn’t gone out of bounds. The other had just had her medal taken away, by her view, and also felt some of how she’d been scored was wrong.
My solution would’ve been to give all three medals, as the judges obviously screwed up.
Instead, the IOC’s decision is to try to strip Jordan Chiles of her medal. I don’t approve of that at all.
Pat McEnroe, former tennis pro and brother of John, has said the judges are the real problem here. I agree. They did not do the right thing. They messed up. Yet Jordan Chiles and the two Romanian gymnasts have to pay the price for the judges’ inaccuracy and stupidity.
That’s what makes me livid.
There are a lot of things that upset me. One of my good friends’ homes burned down recently; I need to write a blog about that, one longer than this one if possible. (I will mention her GiveSendGo info: https://www.givesendgo.com/GD2AK) If you can help my friend Betsy and her family, please do…ultimately that matters a ton more than any sport.
But the reason I said this today, about Ms. Chiles, the IOC, and everything else, is because it angers me when bad things happen to good people. We expect sports to be as unbiased as possible. We don’t expect the IOC to have their thumb on the scale and do wrong things to athletes who went to the Olympics, did their best, and now are told to return medals (or whatever else).
So, that’s why I wrote this blog about Jordan Chiles. She is an inspiration to many, did her level best, was awarded the medal, and deserves to keep her medal.
The IOC is wrong, wrong, wrong, a thousand times wrong, and should be going after the judges who mis-scored the event rather than trying to get back a medal Ms. Chiles rightfully earned.
A 12-Year Widower Discusses His Life and Grief
I thought this blog was well-written, timely, and might be of interest to at least some of my readers and friends. (Often one and the same, but I digress.)
His path is not the same as my path, but I honor what he’s done and what he continues to do. He has found love again, bless him…but that does not at all mean he’s forgotten his late wife, and it does not at all mean that he’s happy-happy joy-joy all the time.
This is a lengthy blog, but a worthy one. I really hope at least some of you will consider reading it all the way to the end.
More About Dad
Folks, this past week around Chez Caffrey has been a struggle. (I’m not going to lie.) Dad’s death has really thrown me for a loop (or maybe into curlicues; a simple loop doesn’t seem to be enough, somehow, to describe this.) While I am not the executor for my father’s estate, I am trying to look after some of his interests while my sibs are doing other needed and necessary things.
Mostly, I feel like I’m failing.
At any rate, my brother, sister and I discussed what we wanted in Dad’s obituary and my brother mostly adhered to what we’d said (plus what he’d thought, too). (Jim, my brother, is the main person to make decisions. Dad was old-fashioned that way.) Dad loved music, played music, loved sports and was a huge fan of the Brewers, Bucks, Packers, etc. He loved old movies, as I said in my last blog, and he enjoyed listening to show tunes, some light jazz from the early 1940s and late 1930s (think Benny Goodman and his Orchestra and you’re not far wrong) and was a huge fan of Doris Day. (She, BTW, was one of the first actresses to portray an independent woman on TV. She also was a nightclub singer before she got her big break and became somewhat of a wholesome icon.) He knew a lot about DD’s life and career, and honestly mourned her death in 2019.
The thing is, as I’ve discussed at my Facebook page already, the cause of death has come back and it kind of threw me for a loop. It’s going to be “uncontrolled hypertension” that was the underlying cause of Dad’s death.
Why did this throw me? Mostly because my father was still taking blood pressure meds. They apparently had become ineffective — this is something I didn’t know until the medical examiner told me — but Dad was unwilling to either take a higher dose or try a new med. He’d stay with what he knew instead, for whatever reasons of his own, and could not be moved on this issue according to what was written into my father’s chart.
In other words, Dad was what you might call “noncompliant” with doctors. Or at least he’d become that way in the last few years, if that makes any sense.
See, to my mind, had Dad taken no blood pressure meds at all, or refused to take any more, that would’ve made more sense than taking something he knew was ineffective. (I can’t ask him why he made this perplexing choice, either, for obvious reasons.)
Hypertension, when it’s not controlled, can eat into your quality of life. I’ve known this since my early twenties, for pity’s sake. (Partly because my late grandmother had some issues this way, and partly because I was diagnosed with borderline high blood pressure at age twenty-two, I had to get cognizant of this in a big hurry.) When you have high blood pressure that’s not controlled, it makes you feel weaker than you would otherwise feel. It also can make it more difficult to get your rest or to get enough exercise to do your heart any good, because if you feel frail or at least feel off-kilter, most people get more anxious. (I know I do, and I definitely know my father did.) If you’re anxious often, this eats into your available bodily energy supply, and it makes you worry more about things you otherwise wouldn’t worry about.
All I know is, we have eight days to go until Dad’s memorial service. They feel sometimes like they’re both too short and too long. How they can be both at the same time is beyond me, but life is strange…and it’s even stranger after you lose someone close to you.
How have you handled this sort of thing? Have you had any deaths in your family? Any advice for me or my sibs? I’d appreciate it if you want to pass any along, as right now it seems like I’m going down a broken road without a map, without a flashlight (as the skies continue to darken), and as if I’m both deaf and dumb.
A Late-ish May Check-in
Folks, I’m alive and doing the best I can.
It’s been a tough year so far around Chez Caffrey. Some years are like this; I am aware. But lately, I’ve had many thoughts of my friend, the late writer Ric Locke. His last blog post was called “This Ain’t Workin'” and sometimes I wonder what was going through his mind as he wrote that.
See, he knew his body wasn’t responding to the medications he and his doctor had tried to improve his health. He was tired of fighting, and who can blame him? He’d been through a lot, and deserved his rest…yet he was writing a sequel to his excellent novel, TEMPORARY DUTY. I’m sure he didn’t want to leave that unfinished. But there’s a time when you know there’s not much left, and it gets harder and harder to push that knowledge away.
That’s my best guess as to what Ric thought, as he wrote his final blog.
Mind, if it’s up to me, this is NOT my final blog. I have many, many things that remain to be done, and many stories to finish up, too. I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon, but as the doctors seemingly have no idea at all what’s going on with me, I just don’t know anymore. What they do know is this: exhaustion.
Yep. That’s all they know.
As the US doesn’t have a policy like most of Europe, where everyone gets a certain amount of paid time off — mind, even if we did, as an independent writer/editor I wouldn’t, but still — the best I can do to fortify myself is to read books that make me laugh while doing whatever I am able to do of a work-related and family-related nature. Observe nature in its fullness, which includes (as I live in Racine, WI) great views of Lake Michigan. Talk to people and be kind — because rudeness just doesn’t cut it with me — and hope that the exhaustion will recede, bit by bit.
So, while I’d love a vacation (fruity drinks by the seashore optional), as that doesn’t seem in the cards, I will instead continue to do the best I can.
If you’d like to drop a line below, telling me what’s going on in your life, I’d love to hear it. (I get tired, sometimes, of shouting into the void and hoping somehow that the void shouts back. Yes, a small joke, there…)
A Brief Bloglet, May Edition
Folks, I have been editing up a storm for the past week or so. Almost no writing has taken place, so I had no news to discuss…then my Uncle Ralph died yesterday, and everything seemed to hit the fan at once.
Mind, my uncle had lived a good, long life, been married for decades, had children and grandchildren and even a few great-grandchildren. But he was a kind-hearted gentleman of the old school, and I’ll miss him.
It’s good when someone passes away in the fullness of age, especially compared to when someone dies too soon, too young, or too suddenly. But it’s also hard, because no one wants to see their loved ones pass on.
In my uncle’s case, he was dealing with several health problems that had significantly limited his life. But when he felt well enough, he and my aunt (who has survived him) still were able to laugh and talk and love one another. There was a wealth of memories there to discuss, and I’m sure more will surface over time, as the whole phrase about “may his memory be a blessing” definitely seems to apply.
Anyway, it’s time for rest, then more editing awaits.
Oh, and as it’s May now, the only song that comes to mind is “It Might As Well Be Spring.” So here’s a YouTube video that may amuse you from Doris Day, someone I usually don’t reference even though she was a fine singer with an excellent range. She gets a lot of the feelings across that I have right now, including hope, frustration and wistfulness, which seems the perfect way to end this bloglet.
Welcome, April Readers! (Or Something…)
It’s April. The temperatures are rising, slowly but surely. The ground is starting to thaw. There are more birds chirping; there are more critters coming out of hibernation; there are more people getting out and about, perhaps for the first time in three years, to remind themselves that spring has sprung and the world has been made anew.
(At least, the world turns on its axis, and we only have one April per year. But I digress.)
So, welcome to you, April readers! What are you reading, and why? What are you planning to read, and why? What are you looking forward to the most, in a book or out of it?
Plus, I have the usual questions of, “What’s going on with you? What are you concerned about, this fine day?”
As for me, I continue to recover from the nasty facial bacterial infection (say that three times fast; I dare you). It’s a slow but steady climb. I’m able to do a bit more, week by week, though I would prefer to be able to do a great deal more as that would be much easier than this incremental progress.
Still, life does not work that way. We do things slowly, sometimes, or we don’t do them at all.
Same thing for my writing. I’ve been able to get a bit done, here and there, which beats nothing by a mile. But it’s not what I had hoped for at the start of this year; no, it’s not.
Still. I move, but slowly, and yet I move. (Didn’t Galileo say that? Maybe he should’ve, if not. Going on…)
As for other news, I still haven’t settled on a cover concept for the novella I told you all about several months ago (that I hoped to get out by the end of last year). I am working on it, mind you; I at least know what type of book it is, and I’m paying attention to other books that seem somewhat close in category to post-apocalyptic romantic suspense. (It actually is closer to post-apocalyptic military/romantic suspense as one of the two major characters is an Army Sergeant First Class. I hope to do justice to the military men and women I’ve met along the way, too. But I suppose that would’ve gone without saying…never mind.) I also need to finish two more Elfyverse stories so I can have five or six of them and put them in a collection; that’s on the backburner, but it’s one I return to now and again, parsing out various things, making prose notes, and then going back to my editing (already in progress) or writing the other things that are demanding to be written right now, thank you.
At any rate, I continue on. It’s slow. Sometimes I feel stuck in reverse. But I make whatever progress I can, as I can, and will continue doing so as long as I am able.
May it be true for yourself as well.
