Finished! Well… just the first draft, actually.
Yes, it’s been a while since my last post, but several things have happened. First the bad news. My father found a part-time job. Well, that’s not the bad part. It was a good job in an office, something a little different for him, and he was really excited about it. But then two days ago, the police came to see him. The brother of the man he killed had been to see them over Papa being released and claimed that his sister, who had testified for my father to get him released, was mentally incompetent. Apparently she had had some problems a few years ago and been institutionalized for a short while. Anyway, it was enough for them to come get Papa and put him behind bars again. For now, he’s still in Bucharest, but there’s talk of shipping him off to Codlea. Codlea doesn’t want him because they have too many prisoners anyway, so Papa’s staying upbeat. He told me even if they do send him back, it won’t be so bad. He’d missed the gardening he did while in there before, and it’s planting season right now. He sounded convincing, but I know he’s brokenhearted. I cried all night when I found out, and I hated my mother for being off in Scotland with a new husband and not here to help him. I got a lot of sympathy from the Roma, particularly Drina. The Roma, they know about the police and prison thing.
Time for feeling good, but still no time for celebration, not yet. I finally finished the first draft of Carpathian Vampire. Yea!! It ended much differently than I thought because I realized that the last two chapters are actually the first two chapters of Volume Two. I have been through the novel again editing it on my computer, but then, on the advice of my publisher, I printed it out, and now I’m going through it again, ink pen in hand. Amazing how different editing on paper is as opposed to editing on a computer screen. Now I’m bogged down in a couple of areas that don’t seem quite right. Have some work to do. I had to get over the “this is all crap” syndrome, but my publisher had warned me about that. I haven’t plotted Volume Two yet. I just have a good beginning with ominous implications, but no ideas where it’s going. I have inklings of my character’s future from the short stories I published in Tales of the Carpathian Vampire, but it’ll just have to ferment so that I can find where it wants to go. And it does seem to have a direction of its own. That’s the way with this story, it seems to have a life of its own, and I just have to search to find it. It’s not as if I have to make it up. I hate to see trauma in my characters’ lives, but it’s their story, I’m just telling it.
I took my last few chapters to Dragos, my translator, and he’s all pissed off about me writing in English now. He says it works best when I write in Romanian and let him worry the English, that my sentences are more complex, but I’m developing my own preferences for the way to say things. It was David in Edinburgh who gave me the confidence. I spent a couple of nights with Dragos while we worked on the translation, but I can feel us growing apart. He’s still jealous of David and has a tendency to sulk. Get over it, I tell him.
I have been communicating with David a little more. He’s thinking of coming to see me, but I keep telling him that he doesn’t know what he’s up against. It’s not as if I have my own home and car or anything. He keeps saying that he’s self-sufficient. Men. What they won’t do to see a girl.
Spring is here, summer is coming, and the Roma are on the move. We’re packing up and getting ready to leave this communal house we’ve been wintering in here in Bucharest. Can’t happen soon enough for me. Landlord’s complaining about more people here than he rented to, so he wants us all out. I’ve been trying to talk them into going north to Sinaia where Carpathian Vampire is set. Would be nice to see the place again. Might lose a little of its mystique though. Lots of tourists for the Roma to scrounge for coins, maybe a little folding money, and whatever else might find its way into their possession. I could use a new computer.
Always have Papa in the back of my mind. And here I am feeling like a fugitive again myself.
