Veronica Knox's Blog, page 5

FROSTY MEMORIES OF SNOW

Preview excerpt from ‘SNOW BEHIND THE DOOR’ – the prequel to ‘the Bede Series’

[Before Kit and Ani broke into the decaying ruins of Bede Hall, they marveled at the icebound blue door encased in a thick blanket of frost. Once situated on the third floor, years of accumulated snow gave it the impression of resting on the ground – the Hall’s only entrance. Its doorknob of clear glass looked like a cut diamond the size of a snowball and shone like a lantern with a blue light inside it. The eerie light revealed a scowling face within the encrusted snow that Kit knew only too well.

Father and daughter set down their bundles and baskets, and brushed snow from the door’s escutcheon plate, revealing the face of a man with leaves for hair. “That’s the Green Man,” Kit said. “You can say hello. He won’t bite. In fact, he’s a guardian. He looks gloomy because he has the weight of the world on his shoulders.”

The door coughed and started to breath. “I’d be interested to know what you call frostbite,” it said, sounding put out.

“There’s no need to frighten my daughter, Jack. Ani this is Jack Frost, an old friend.”

The frozen door held fast when Kit gave it a shove, but lumps of snow crumbled away. 

For a moment, the keyhole smiled but it may have been a trick of the light. The face and Ani remained strangers.

“Ani needs to understand the truth about Winter to survive,” Jack said. “Given time, she will save us all.”

“But he’s blue,” Ani said. “Why isn’t he called the blue man?” 

Kit stamped the snow from his feet. “The Winter Room is special,” he said. “It changes the color of things to suit its mood.”

“How can a room be sad?” Ani asked.

“Good luck explaining that,” the keyhole wheezed.

Kit took a deep breath and heaved his weight against the door with his shoulder.

“It doesn’t sulk if that’s what you mean,” he replied. “The Winter Room is the heart of Bede Hall even though it was, is, and will remain on the topmost floor. It was situated under the roof for a reason.”

Jack closed his eyes, released a cascade of shattered icicles, and winked at Ani.

“I expect it was so we could get in,” Ani said simply.]

‘SNOW BEHIND THE DOOR’, the prequel to the ‘Bede Trilogy’ is well underway. With a literary tailwind it should be available in May of 2021 here: https://www.amazon.com/V-Knox/e/B0094K0Q7Y

INTRODUCING SNOW…

…the child ghost of Bede Hall’s Winter Room. She is 9 years old. This is her story:

“I died a very long time ago or was it yesterday? … I think maybe both. My new name is Snow – a name that suits me even though there are days I wish it didn’t.

Apart from a few shy phantoms, I live alone in a house of shadows. My father said they were memories of the past and foreshadows of things that might have been. But that was in the ‘high-winter’ when he’d been out of sorts, and as soon as he saw my eyes brim with tears, he enfolded me in a bear hug and told me not to worry because he had plans to capture the happy shadows of wonderful things yet to be…

…and then he left to find them.”

Excerpt prologue from ‘SNOW BEHIND THE DOOR’, the prequel to the ‘Bede Trilogy’ is ‘almost’ scheduled for launch in May of 2021. It will be available here: https://www.amazon.com/V-Knox/e/B0094K0Q7Y

IN SEARCH OF MERRY…

The double Christmas tree in my hometown of Sooke, on Vancouver Island, Canada

I have wished you all a safe and peaceful Dec 25th. Admission: I tried to use the words ‘Merry Christmas’, however, the word ‘Merry’, tossed so glibly during our current time of humanity in crisis, was a stretch – an automatic muscle memory issued by rote, empty of the true greeting that wishing Merry Christmas was meant to invoke.

And so, I searched my handy thesaurus to find words relating to ‘merry’, and one in particular I could utter with unfettered goodwill. I found it at the tail end of expected synonyms: Happy Joyous Cheery Gleeful Cheerful Jolly Joyful Elated Ecstatic Thrilled Jubilant Pleased Glad Laughing Lively Delighted Exultant Wonderful Blissful Phantastic Enjoyable Carefree Heart-warming Overjoyed Euphoric Excited Over-the-moon Exhilarated Uplifted Strengthened Fortified Encouraged Enriched Heartened Elevated… and then, there it was, the word ‘Supported’.

I heartily wish you the continued nurturing support of loving family members, close friends, casual acquaintances, anonymous smiles, budding companions, caring colleagues, and the greater community of anonymous unselfish strangers committed to following the exacting rules of strict lockdown for the long haul.

May we be thankful for the support of endless entertainment on tap, a plethora of inexpensive e-books, inspirational stories, ground zero health workers, law enforcers, medics, modern medicine, scientists, truck drivers, postal workers, and essential workers manning the supply of food.

And in my hometown of Sooke on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, uninterrupted heating, clean water, sanitation and power, telephones, ferries, and the internet. 

Like so many families, my children and I have been separated due to adhering to essential social distancing since Covid descended eleven months ago. Merriment strikes a sour note during a season of devastating losses and hardships.

May we truly make merry next year, loud and clear. 

TIME OUT OF MIND

Two extraordinarily mismatched minds are still better than one when telepathic twins,at odds over science and the supernatural, fight a curse of snow.

[The expression ‘running late’ preceded Bash’s mad dash down the rickety servants’ stairs. She was in no doubt the guests assembled in the red library would wait for her, and equally certain there’d be no escaping Lady Nan’s wrath. Her grandmother could never abide anyone being late when she was alive, and now, ironically as a ghost, she was technically ‘the late Beryl Stratford Smyth’, and more of a strict matriarch than ever.]

BASH’S MESSAGE   BEDE HALL, England – January 15, 2018

“Kit, can you hear me? I’m too keyed up to focus properly but here goes. I’m guessing you’re a little keyed up yourself. Anyway, in case you can hear me, I’m in the Winter Room. I thought perhaps the vibes in here would make it easier to connect.

Being on constant high alert has everyone on edge. Emotions are running high, and if you can imagine such a thing, Lady Nan is skittish, and the Hall is more out of sorts than ever.

Jack sends his love every day. Apparently, dogs and cats and a certain ghost pal of yours, communicate freely. Jack talks to Anubis who talks to Taraq who talks to me. Don’t do anything daft. I’m running late. Over and out. Time travel is natural metaphysics. Mystical phenomena are to be expected.Talk soon. Please try to concentrate.” 

KIT’S MESSAGE c. 1500 B.C. EGYPT

“Bash, I’m thinking of you. If you can hear me, please say hello to the Pidge and Taraq for me. Sometimes, I can almost hear their harping voices on my shoulder. I only wish I could hear yours, and yes, you DO harp. I’m stabilizing enough to begin my, of all things, alchemy lessons. How ironic that I will have to learn magic to resolve the logical problem of destroying our enemy. Yes, I know, I simplify, and you amplify, which is why we should have made a perfect team. In any case, I wish you were amplifying right now so I could hear what’s happening at home. I worry about Jack. And I miss you chiding me for… well, anything at the moment. Time travel is complex astrophysics. Temporal glitches are to be expected. Talk soon. Please try to concentrate.”

[A shrill squawk of phantom bird laughter resonated near enough to make Kit swivel around expecting to see the head of a brightly colored parrot, angled accusingly towards him, eying him with unblinking authority – a sound most assuredly delivered by an audible hallucination of his father’s testy bird named Pigeon, that used to read his mind at the most inopportune moments according to his perverse sense of humor and his innate ability to spew offense.

A distinct screech and the echo of Pigeon’s favorite word, ‘Pooh,’ faded like smoke into the distance, followed by silence.

Kit smiled. Funny how irritating things could lift the spirit when recalled through the perspective of time travel. Bash called Pigeon irascible, but then her hobby had been pulling people up, correcting them by using fancy words, egged on by their grandmother, Lady Nan. Bash’s word games, for that’s what they were, used to annoy him but the thought of being chastised again for his obsession with science and his denial of all things magical made him smile. ‘I guess that’s what’s meant by the good old days,’ he thought.

With a slam, a memory broke Kit’s concentration. He was back in day one… again, dropping from the portal in the Great Sphinx, landing on scorching sand. For an instant he lay curled in a heap like a newborn child. But a few deep breaths sent him crawling instinctively, wriggling on his stomach like a soldier to reach a safe distance from danger. He elbowed his body forward, inching his way through sand that grew increasingly painful until he rolled onto his back for relief. Kit was of two minds: stay and face his worst childhood nightmare or go home, a failure. But the unforgiving sun had other plans.]

WHEN TELEPATHIC TWINS AT ODDS OVER SCIENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL FIGHT A CURSE OF SNOW, TWO MINDS ARE BETTER THAN ONE

The Bede Trilogy Book 1 of 3 ‘TWINTER – the first portal’ by V Knox is available here:

Book 2 of 3 ‘TIME FALLS LIKE SNOW’ by V Knox is available here:

Book 3 of 3 ‘TOMORROW AGAIN’ by V Knox:

*is scheduled for launch in January 2021 – it will be available as a Kindle for under $3 here:

THE CATERPILLAR METHOD

The caterpillar, in ‘Alice in Wonderland’, advises Alice (at a loss to tell her story), to “start at the beginning… go onto the end, then stop.” Smart Lepidoptera! A story is a chrysalis of transformation. A first draft must become a butterfly to take flight.

That said, the exact number of pages to tell a whole story from start to finish remains the prerogative of the author. I write long.

Short stories, novels, or epic trilogies, a dedicated storyteller writes to represent their truest self without cowering to trends. Lewis Carrol nailed it; there are no set rules. Did I mention I write long?

Alice’s caterpillar fails to mention the commitments of years studying story structure, the hurdles of developmental editing, graphic design, formatting, marketing, or attempting to force well-rounded stories into square genres. Such are the realities of Indie Publishing.

Lewis Carrol’s Alice fell asleep reading, followed the magic running by, and descended to the subconscious realm of Wonderland. Carroll’s ‘nonsense verse’ broke through the boring rules of language and delivered wisdom the perpetual child within us understands. Alice recited a muddled account of events in a nonsensical stream of poetic consciousness.

Language has never been more creative or mystical or wise until A.A. Milne’s, ‘Pooh’, wandered out of the Hundred Acre Wood. The rest is literary history – literary gold.

And now, with December 2020 hindsight, the mad hatter’s famous ‘un-birthday’ has become ‘a very unmerry Un-Christmas’, and the population is as helpless as a kitten up a tree. Even a Cheshire kitten with a contrary sense of humor.  

The truth is, fictional realms aren’t created in a day, the best stories are created whole without skimping, and counting pages is an unworthy method for measuring a good book.

Read from the beginning go on to the end, then stop. And that’s the long and short of it.

I wish you all a delightfully long merry book to inspire 2021. I highly recommend ‘The House At Pooh Corner’.

THE ‘SENDING’

The cat flap in Sara Goodman’s kitchen glowed green and began to rock gently, in time to the clock on the wall ticking the last few seconds to midnight.

The flap swung more urgently until it froze, fully open, wide enough to welcome a yowling green mist that entered the cottage and materialized into a sleek black cat wearing a single gold hoop earring. The ghostly ‘sending’ padded silently across the floor, spun gracefully, thinned into a long green string, and slipped through the keyhole. 

Once in the street, it resumed its feline shape and streaked down the country lane towards Bede Hall, startling a lean fox emerging from a skeletal hedgerow. The fox stared at the disappearing vision and sniffed the distinctive splayed pawprints of a cat with extra toes. 

The sending approached the long tail of an ancient stone wall curled protectively around the Hall like a dragon’s tail, shielding a sacred rowan from the Isle of Lindisfarne, the only vestige of green untouched from the unseasonal scorching winds of a perpetual hot spell.

The rowan stood, proudly in league with the Roman wall, overseeing the despoiled back gardens as the cat landed, light as a phantom, and padded a length of Hadrian’s Wall holding its tail high like an antenna. It positioned its back against the silver moon and stared up at a small window under the eaves that flashed with intermittent sparks of purple and green light.

After its eyes transformed to the perfect shade of purple, the cat closed them, the better to concentrate on its home – the temple of Bast in ancient Egypt. It lifted its head, yowled once, and shivered its tail wildly to clear the mental pathway strangled by sibling rivalry.      

Bede Hall’s Winter Room remained cloaked in a fog of self-importance. Inside, Bash, the newly declared Mistress of the Green, quizzed an evasive boy who lived behind the wall, but the intensity of her energy effectively blocked the incoming S.O.S. the sending had come to unscramble. At dawn, a defeated feline shadow slunk over the brown lawns parched from two years without rain, entered the old maze, and disappeared.

Bast, a giant cat goddess with the head of a lioness, received her servant’s report. “Ma’am,” ArtuRa, growled, his fur bristling, his ears flattened in shame. “Kit’s parrot, Pa’a, followed me to England and his incessant squawking disrupted my mission. I was never heard, much less obeyed. I have failed, Majesty.”

Bast resumed her everyday persona, an Abyssinian housecat the size of a brontosaurus, and purred loudly. She licked her paws and closed her eyes. “Then it was for the best,” she said. “Pa’a is wise. He knows what’s best. We trust him. You did well.”

Babs, the goddess’s pet lioness, presented herself from behind a pillar. “So, at least the sister is promising, then,” she growled with distain. “Thank the Aten that one of the twins has the feline instincts necessary to ground the mystical energies of a time portal. A ‘topsy-turvy world’, Kit called it. Whatever that means.”

“Britannia is fast becoming a desert, Bast replied. “Not an acceptable climate for delicate Englishmen.” She yawned, deferring to a parrot’s timely intervention. “Eternal summer was never the curse’s intention. It was much worse.”

“Perhaps living in a desert will toughen them up,” Babs growled. “Kha said Bede Hall is the last stronghold of Pangea – he dubbed it ‘the defining bastion of time’.”

Bast’s eyes flashed open. “Bede Hall has always been steadfast,” she declared.

“I believe the word is obstinate,” Babs snarled.

Bast’s great tail thumped the floor in anger. “Be kind, Babylion,” she admonished, using Babs’ proper name. “It’s not easy being green on the inside when one’s verdant landscape has been turned into a wasteland, leeched of chlorophyl, literally ‘desert’ed by the rainy season. And with its Green Man’s whereabouts unknown, the Hall’s back is against the wall more than ever.”  

Christopher (Kit) and Bathsheba (Bash), grandchildren of Bede Hall’s eccentric matriarch, are rival siblings at odds over science and the supernatural, trying in vain to transmit timely messages through 3,000 years of static. It falls to the Great Sphinx of Egypt, the rules of twindom, the law of nine, and a colony of mystical cats to resolve a longstanding curse with a mythical predator, in a landscape where history is positively ancestral.

The Bede Trilogy Book 1 of 3 ‘TWINTER – the first portal’ by V Knox is available here:

Book 2 of 3 ‘TIME FALLS LIKE SNOW’ by V Knox is available here:

Book 3 of 3 ‘TOMORROW AGAIN’ by V Knox:

*is scheduled for launch in January 2021 – it will be available as a Kindle for under $3 on V KNOX’s AMAZON author page.

SOMETIMES, SCIENCE FICTION IS SIMPLY A MYSTICAL LOVE STORY… SOMETIMES IT TAKES TWO LIVES TO MAKE ONE WOMAN!

Delphi Sharpe, an autistic teenage orphan with the extrasensory ability to converse with birds and paintings, has a tenuous grip on reality. After she falls in love with a boy named Cecco who calls to her from a 500-year-old painting, Delphi strives to find the family she senses in dreams, believing her mother is ‘THE MONA LISA’ and her father is ‘DR. WHO’.  

Fated to live out her days in an asylum, Delphi’s uncanny gift catches the attention of a ruthless art collector, the owner of a cutting-edge cybernetics institute, who adopts her.

For three years, the liberated Delphi grows up as a pampered pet, housed in luxury, navigating an alternate reality where renaissance paintings communicate with her through mental telepathy, and the real world where she works authenticating and restoring paintings for an unscrupulous art syndicate.

When Delphi has a freak near-death experience that leaves her comatose, she is kept alive as a valuable investment to preserve her psychic abilities for the future. For fifty-two years, the institute redoubles its efforts developing artificial intelligent hybrids hoping to mine Delphi’s brain, but Delphi reincarnates before she can regain consciousness. When she eventually wakes, Delphi discovers her memories have been downloaded into an android created in her likeness, designed to withstand time travel, programmed in order to retrieve lost paintings from the distant past.

Trapped, Delphi’s spirit bargains with her new incarnation, beseeching ‘it’ to find her lost love, but as Delphi regains control over her mind, the sentient android evolves organically, and the dual lifeforms become rivals with conflicting purposes. Delphi wants to reunite with her lost love and rest in peace with her beloved, but her sentient counterpart intends to exact revenge on the art syndicate that exploited them and self destruct.

Consciousness is no longer artificial. The new ‘AI’ incorporates Delphi’s Autistic Intelligence, and state of the art time travel becomes transcendental. The two ‘art whisperers’ are deadlocked. Delphi is unable to meet Cecco without a physical body and becoming human requires a soul. For true love to prevail, one woman must eventually supplant the other. Untimely sacrifices are required on both sides. But reincarnation is time sensitive, and sometimes it takes two lives to make one woman.

‘The INDIGO PEARL’ and ‘PEARL BY PEARL’ is A MYSTICAL ROMANCE BETWEEN YOUNG LOVE AND OLD SOULS available as a Kindle for under $3 or in print version, here:

AUTISM, SENTIENT BIRDS, and the GHOST of a PRINCIPESSA

A MYSTICAL ROMANCE of YOUNG LOVE and OLD SOULS

Delphi Sharpe, an autistic teenage orphan with the extrasensory ability to converse with birds and paintings, has a tenuous grip on reality. After she falls in love with a boy in a 500-year-old painting, she strives to find the family she senses in dreams, believing her mother is ‘THE MONA LISA’ and her father is ‘DR. WHO’.

EXCERPT from ‘THE INDIGO PEARL’ – book one of two:

“When I was born my wings were too small to defend themselves… as if a white butterfly had alighted between my shoulder blades. Within the hour, they withered and fell like rose petals. At least, that’s what I assumed. But I was mistaken. They were folded tightly into an invisible bud, dreaming. And sometimes, when tropical breezes stir the treetops or I track a flock of geese across the sky, my phantom wings quicken and purr. When I’m angry, they bristle and hiss. It’s as if I’m carrying a kitten on my back.” – Delphi Sharpe

EXCERPT from ‘PEARL BY PEARL’ – book two of two:

“I see him… the boy spirit. My sweetheart, Cecco, walking towards me as if seen through a pane of frosted glass. But I look closer and smile. He’s not walking; he’s approaching. The two things are very different.

I beg him to stay longer this time. “No, Carissima,” Cecco says. He takes my hands in his and shakes them hard. His eyes are serious, almost cruel, and what he says next terrifies me. “A ghost can still die, Cara.”

Both novels in ‘The Pearl Series’ may be purchased for $3 each, here:

A RENAISSANCE TREATISE OF UNDYING LOVE

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Love survives five-hundred years of dust to rekindle the bittersweet romance between the ghost of Sandro Botticelli and a retired art history professor.

As a teenager in 1967, I’d been the poster girl for romantic dreamers in love with love. But even then, I knew in my heart I was destined for vicarious love in my dotage because I had fallen in love with a man who couldn’t age. Forty-six years later, I had to see him one last time.

“So, on this, the longest night of the year, I listen intently to the shadows, deep in my own midwinter when it’s most fitting that I pay heed to the ghosts of my regrets. Feeling perfectly young on the inside with the irreconcilable difference of old-age on the outside is a war of physics, and like most fear-based prophecies, it was bound to be a self-fulfilling one.”

“Forty-six years ago, when Sandro Botticelli’s self portrait first stared into my eyes, soul-to-soul, I almost believed in heaven. I blinked first but I’ve never once looked away.”– Linton Ross, the winter solstice, December 21, 2013

Life can be an immortal comedy that leads from obsession to seduction.

‘ADORATION – loving Botticelli’ is available in print or as a $1Kindle here:

THREE TIMES THE CHARM

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The Bede Trilogy spans 8 years, following a pair of telepathic twins from preteen to official adulthood. Kit and his sister Bash, at odds over logic and the supernatural, fight increasing feelings of sibling rivalry when faced with a challenge beyond their tender years.

Turning thirteen had been an eye opener. Kit turning a blind eye to magic for 3 more years proved as futile as his sister’s unwavering dismissal of science. Winning the ‘key to the door’ at twenty-one promises to be a mind-blowing experience, especially when the door in question is a mystical entrance to a future cataclysm of fire and ice.

ALL THE TWINS WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS PEACE ON EARTH!

The logistics of 3 books begged the evolution from easy reading to literary prose for the advanced reader which makes The Bede Trilogy a magical realism time slip adventure for children of all ages.

Book 1 of 3 ‘TWINTER – the first portal’ by V Knox is available here:

Book 2 of 3 ‘TIME FALLS LIKE SNOW’ by V Knox is available here:

Book 3 of 3 ‘TOMORROW AGAIN’ by V Knox:

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*is scheduled for launch in January 2021 – it will be available for under $3 on Amazon Kindle.