Chapter 1: The Home

Anise Devane just moves into her new home only to find some odd things about it.

The road to my new home was bumpy and long. I looked out the window from my cab and watched the trees go by. I smiled a little as I saw the wind start to blow up the colorful leaves that were lying on the dirt road. They swirled around within the air and landed on the back on the ground behind us. Oh yeah, I could totally find myself living here and practicing my magic for a while.

"So, what brings you all the way down here? Young women tend to go off to the big cities, not small towns with nothing but forest for miles." My driver tried to make conversation. I settled back into my seat and looked at her through the mirror.

"I inherited the mansion up this road. My grandparents left it to me in their will and I have been looking for a more secluded place surrounded by nature. It may help me work more productively and it's peaceful up here. I have a greater chance of finding what I'm looking for here too." I explained.

The driver kept glancing back and forth between me and the road. "So, you're their granddaughter, Anise Devane. They talked about you fondly whenever we met in the town festivals. I'm so sorry about your grandparents. What are you looking for exactly?"

I returned my attention back to the trees. "A plot of land to grow herbs and plants. And to grow as a person myself." I answered as honestly as I could. I couldn't tell her that I was a witch and I was going to plant plants for my magical practices. We witches are a lot more free to practice than we were many years ago but it was still a little bit of a taboo topic to talk about with normal humans.

"Well, you'll definitely find peace and quiet up here. Welcome to Hazelview. Small town, small people and a whole lotta nature. You'll fit right in in no time." She chiperily described. "Here we are!"

I looked out the front windshield to see the small mansion my grandparents have left for me. The foliage was covering a majority of the grey shingles and the curtains in the window were drawn back. The steel gate would've looked menacing if it weren't for the flourishing vines wrapping all around the bars. I remembered this old house. So many memories. Even if the mansion was huge for one person alone and secluded in the woods, it still looked warm and welcoming.

The taxi driver pulled into the white gravel driveway and stopped the car. I got out and looked up at my new home. The driver opened the trunk and started to unload my luggage for me. "Here you go, sweetie. Hopefully, your moving truck will arrive before you run out of clothes to wear."

"Thank you so much. How much do I owe you?" I asked as I reached for my wallet in my back pocket.

"Nah, free of charge. You're one of us town folk now. If you ever need a lift, just give me a call. See ya later, neighbor." She declined, finished unloading the trunk and sped away before I could insist or even say thanks.

I grabbed my bags from the ground and began to drag them inside the house.I pushed the gate open with my shoulder and made my way to the large, oak door. I put my bag down on the porch and fished around my pocket for the key.

The door swung open slowly once I unlocked it, creating a loud squeaking noise. I made a mental note to fix that soon.

The house was a bit dusty and there was a lot of furniture that was left behind. The wood would need to be shined again and the walls would probably have to get a new coat of paint. The house was on the older side, dating back a good century or so. It's had a lot of work done since when it was first built. It was always known as the Devane house. Always have and always will be.

I went up one of the staircases that elegantly curved towards the wall. As I walked up, I could see all the old pictures that decorated the wall. There were old, antique pictures of my grandparents, the generations before them and the generations after. At the very top of the stairs I could see my moms at their wedding and a few more family photos including me.

I finished looking at the pictures and headed to one of the upstairs bedrooms. Upon opening the master bedroom, I noticed that the room was incredibly dusty. If I was going to sleep in the room for the night I would have to clean up a little and get some fresh air in.

I settled my luggage on the king sized bed and went to open the window. It took a bit of strength but I was eventually able to get it open. The room already started to feel a lot better. But if this one room was like this then the others must be in the same condition.

Instead of unpacking immediately and resting, I went downstairs to find the broom closet. I grabbed a clean rag and some polisher to start clearing away the dust. I traveled from room to room, opening windows and rubbing down the old furniture. To my surprise, a bunch of rooms were pretty decent. They weren't as dusty as I expected.

In fact, the bedrooms almost seemed recently lived in.

I shrugged it off, remembering that my grandparents would occasionally run a bed and breakfast out of their home for extra money. They must've cleaned the guest rooms last before they passed away. As my grandparents got older they began to sleep in smaller, separate beds. It would explain why the master bedroom was so bad.

I continued to make my way through the house, dusting and cleaning anything I could reach and opening windows to air out the house.

The house creaked slightly with each step and sometimes it did it by itself. I knew it was an old house but it almost sounded like someone else was living here still.

Again, it was probably just nothing. It didn't stop me from being a bit nervous though.

The entire house was mostly dust free and promised that I could rest easy tonight without suffocating. While I was cleaning the house I found my grandmother's Witch Room. She left a bunch of mason jars with herbs, plants that were slowly dying in their pots, and other materials scattered around like crystals and feathers and inks.

I went back to that room and looked through the scattered papers along the floors and shelves. They were all in Irish Gaelic with little English words scattered here and there. Old sketches flooded the papers as well.

I gathered them all up and stacked them on top of the wooden table. I promised myself to check them out later after I got settled into the house. It was getting late and I haven't eaten since the morning. I had to call my moms too to let them know I was safe.

Pulling my phone out of my back pocket, I called up a pizza place to order something quick. I was told that my mushroom and bacon pizza will be ready and delivered in less than thirty minutes. After thanking the person who took my order, I sat down at the family dining table on the first floor to Facetime my moms.

It only took about two rings before they picked up. My mom's red, frizzy hair was in a sloppy bun and she was wearing a black tank top covered in dirt. She probably started cleaning the house as soon as I left. She tended to clean when she was stressed, nervous or worried.

Her cool, ocean blue eyes lit up through the screen as she saw that I was perfectly safe and managed to make it to the mansion. "Hi, Ani! Oh, Olivia! Honey, Anise is on the phone!"

I could hear my ma run towards mom, excited to finally see me after waiting for me to get here. Her face appeared next to mom's, almost pushing her out of view. Her walnut wood skin was covered in sweat and showed signs of being slightly sun-burnt. She was most likely working in the garden before I called. "Anise! Oh my gods you're alive!"

"Yeah, Ma. I didn't die on the way here. Thank you for worrying about me. Once I got here I cleaned up some of the dust and opened the windows to circulate the air." I joked and explained.

"My baby is growing up! I already miss seeing her freckles that are scattered across her nose and cute cheeks, Avery!" Ma exclaimed to Mom, talking about me like I wasn't listening.

Mom pushed her away so she could have some camera time. "Don't you think I'm gonna miss her asking me to help dye her hair dark purple? I miss our baby too, ya know! Anyways, Ani, make sure you call us whenever something goes wrong, okay? Your ma and I love you very much and we want to help you get used to living on your own."

"I'll send you some boxes of purple hair dye, herbs, books, and cookies every month, Ani. If you need anything else that you can't afford on your own just call us and we'll send it over." Ma continued, her smoky quartz eyes tearing up.

I gave a small giggle and smiled. "Got it, ma. I'll be fine. I'm nineteen for crying out loud! I can take care of myself so there's no need to worry."

Mom frowned. "Of course we're gonna worry! We're your moms!"

The doorbell suddenly rang and I hovered my finger over the hang up button. "My pizza is here. Gotta go! I'll call you guys when the moving truck and handyman gets here. Love you!"

"Love you too, sweetie! Enjoy your pizza." They said goodbye. I hung up and went to answer the door.

I paid for the pizza and tipped the delivery guy. As soon as they left I close the creaky door and headed to one of the living rooms to watch some television. My grandparents should've had Netflix on all of the televisions as an app since guests would've most likely requested some modern media.

Turning on the TV, I sat down on a dusty, pink rose couch and tried to enjoy my pizza and Earth documentary. Most people my age weren't really in to documentaries, but I personally found them fascinating. It was like reading a nonfiction book but much quicker and much more entertaining.

Due to me watching mainly documentaries, my brain is filled with all sorts of facts from science to history and anything in between. It definitely made high school a breeze for me. It also helped convince my moms to let me take online college classes instead of going to an actual college.

An hour later, the cities episode ended and my pizza was completely gone. I checked the time and saw that it was 7:00 pm. Like the responsible adult I was, I got up, cleaned my mess and went to get ready for bed.

I decided to inspect the master bathroom before stripping down and using it. It would've been terrible if I noticed mold or spiders while I was bathing. To my astonishment, the bathroom was perfectly polished and cleaned. The marble counter was clear and dust-free, the shower was sparkling as well as the freestanding, claw-foot tub and even the towels seemed fresh.

Perhaps my grandparents still preferred to use the master bathroom?

I grabbed my bath essentials and began to draw up a bath. While the tub filled up with warm water, I put some music on from my phone. The sound echoed through the massive bathroom, almost drowning out the sound of the running rush of water from the faucet.

With a little bit of bubbles, some candles and crystals and some rose petals that I packed with me, I was ready to relax.

I slid right in and adored the quiet time I was able to have. There weren't a lot of opportunities to relax like this back when I lived with my moms. But now I was able to take a bath like this whenever I wished.

Just as I poured some lavender shampoo into my hand, there was a loud creak and footsteps from outside the bathroom door.

My heart sped up, my breathing stopped and I froze. There was no way that that was just the wind or the house settling. Unless I was going crazy, that was a stranger.

I stopped the music on my phone and sat in the bath in silence. I wasn't a particularly brave person so taking the time to muster up some courage to see if there was an intruder was necessary for me. With a few deep breaths and a reassuring nod to myself, I got up and grabbed a towel to cover myself with and began to check out the noise.

I opened the door very slowly and peered out. It didn't seem like anyone was in the bedroom and there was no evidence that anything was tampered with. I opened the door wider and noticed something on the wooden floor in front of me.

Bending over, I picked it up and held it in my hands. It was brown fur.

It suddenly hit me. During the few times I visited my grandparents I noticed that a few stray cats would occasionally roam around the property. Most of the windows from when I opened them up were still open. One of the cats must've found their way in and began to explore the mansion. 

It was possible that the cat stepped in a particularly creaking spot in the floor and scared itself, causing it to run away. I knew that I would get freaked out if I heard a foreign sound seemingly coming from nowhere.

Hopefully, the cat would find its way outside without me intervening. The last thing I would want is to scare the poor thing with my presence.

I shrugged and went back to my bath. I wasn't able to enjoy it like I first did but it was still kinda pleasant. My time bathing was over within several minutes and I drained the tub. The only thing I packed as pajamas was an over-sized shirt that said "Inconceivable!"

Within a few minutes, my teeth were brushed and my purple hair was let loose from being in a tight bun all day. I changed the sheets on my bed with fresh ones I found from a linen closet. I made sure that all the windows were closed and all of the doors were locked before getting into bed.

Man, I was so tired. It's been a long day and I still had a long list of things to do. The moving guys and handyman were supposed to show up sometime tomorrow, I had to do some grocery shopping and budgeting, clean some more of the mansion and more.

It was best to get some sleep and be ready for all of that in the morning.

I rolled on to my side to find a more comfortable sleeping position and shut my eyes. Before I could fall asleep, I could feel the bed dip from extra weight and a body hovering over me. I snapped my eyes open and looked up to see a strange man with deep red eyes and white fangs inches away from my face. I couldn't help but scream.

"AHH!"

Reviews

[JayG]

Some things jumped out at me, that I thought you would want to know about—things that are holding you back, if interesting a publisher is your goal—or hooking the shopper if self-publishing is on the menu.

But before I begin, a bit of reassurance: Nothing I’m about to say relates to your talent or potential as a writer, good/bad writing, or the story. It does relate to a misunderstanding we pretty much all leave school with, though.

To show the problem, look at the opening paragraph as a reader must. It’s five declarative sentences in a row. Someone unknown, in a voice the reader can’t hear, is talking TO the reader:

• The road to my new home was bumpy and long.

Long is relative. If this person is traveling by horseback, ten miles is long. If by car, and the road is “bumpy” thirty miles may be thought of as long. Or if expressed in time, it could be hours or days. My point is that the reader doesn’t know who we are in time and space, where we are, or what’s going on.

And this trip isn’t happening to the unknown and un-gendered protagonist as we read. It's being reported by the narrator, who's talking about it, not living the scene in real-time. So while the line makes perfect sense to you, who know the situation and the backstory, the reader, lacking context, can get only the fact that someone unknown is going to a place he or she thinks of as home, for unknown reasons.

Not exactly the start you intended, but remember, the reader has only what your words suggest to them, based on their background, not your intent.

Will you clarify the situation? Perhaps. The reader can’t tell if you will, or just screwed up. But either way, you can’t retroactively remove confusion. So here on line one, what you intent, and what the reader gets, diverges. It's a problem you share with pretty much every hopeful writer, though, so you have lots of company.

• I looked out the window from my cab and watched the trees go by.

I know you didn’t mean to, but you just told the reader that the trees moved. But forget that. Why would a reader care that someone they don’t know is watching trees? I can look out my window and see trees. I’m certainly not going to pay for fiction to learn that someone else does, unless I know why it matters to the scene in progress.

My point? You’re telling the story from the outside in, talking to the reader ABOUT the situation. But when you read a romance, do you want to be told the protagonist has fallen in love? Or do you want the author to make YOU fall in love, for the same reason? No way in hell can we do that by talking AT our readers. We need to make them feel as if they’re living the story in real-time—as-the-protagonist.

• I smiled a little as I saw the wind start to blow up the colorful leaves that were lying on the dirt road.

You’re thinking visually, mentally watching the film version of the story, and as you do, you’re narrating the director’s track—storytelling. But can that work? No, for several reasons.

First, the reader can't hear the voice of the narrator or view their performance. Have your computer read this aloud and you'll hear the problem (a useful editing trick, in any case).

Next, life and film are experienced in parallel. Were this film, the viewer, in an eyeblink’s time, would see: the moving vehicle and the trees; the age and gender of the protagonist, their dress, which indicates their social status; They’d know the time of day or night and the season; They’d know the protagonist's mood by their body-language and expression, and learn if they had anyone with them. And all that comes in a time-frame measured in milliseconds. That’s why we say a picture is worth a thousand words.

But on the page? Everything must be spelled out, one item at a time. So anything you include damn well better matter to the plot, setting the scene meaningfully, or developing character. But what, in that paragraph does that? Why tell the reader that the character plans to practice magic when they don’t know what magic is, in terms of this story. They don’t know if the word “practice” literally means s/he’s trying to get better, or practice means using it.

When you read this chapter, it makes perfect sense. But you cheat. You know the character’s gender, age, intent, and history before you read the first word. You know what’s going on and why. So as you read you fill in the blanks. And as you write, because things are so obvious to you, you create those blanks. It can’t be helped, because of that misunderstanding I mentioned earlier.

What is it and why does it happen? You’re attending college, now, because professions are acquired IN ADDITION to the general skills we call The Three R’s, that we’re given in our school days. But isn’t Fiction-Writing a profession? And if it is…

The misunderstanding? Because the profession is called Fiction-Writing, and we learned a skill called writing, we naturally, assume that the shared word means the techniques of the two are related.

They’re not.

Go back to your school days. Did one single teacher mention that a scene on the page ends in disaster for the protagonist, and why? If they didn't, will you do that? Did anyone explain what the elements of a scene on the page are, and why they differ so greatly from one on stage or screen? Without knowing that, how can we write one?

Unless you’re unusual, the answer is no to all those questions, because such things are part of the skill-set needed by the fiction-writer. Think about the ratio of assigned reports and essays, compared to the number of stories they asked you to write. That will tell you the kind of writing you learned. In fact, because you’ve practiced it year-after year, till it feels intuitive, and weren’t aware that another approach was needed, this story is written using those skills. It’s fact-based and author-centric. And that author-centric label isn’t because of the first person pronouns, it’s because the narrator is TELLING the story from the comfort of their desk-chair. In short, it’s the nonfiction approach to writing, with the goal of informing the reader.

But fiction’s goal is to move our reader emotionally. That reader wants the story to be so real that if the protagonist falls while running the reader feels pain. And that takes a skill-set that’s emotion-based and character-centric. But that skill-set isn’t taught, or even mentioned in our grade-school days, and I’ve not seen a creative writing course that changes that. In general, in undergrad CW class, they have you read an overview chapter on fiction, then write a story, which is critiqued by the class-members, who know no more about writing than the one who wrote it.

But the fix to get you writing fiction that sings to the reader? Simplicity itself. Just add the techniques of fiction to the skills you already possess. Of course, simple and easy aren’t the same, and we are talking about a profession, so it takes time, study, and lots of practice. But that’s true of every profession, so it’s no big deal. And if you are meant to write, the learning will be fun. If not? Well, you'll learn something important, so it’s win/win.

Having been there more than a time or two, I know this is far from what you were hoping to hear after working so hard on this story. And in effect, I’ve just told you that a favorite child is ugly, so it’s hard not to react. But on the other hand, you now know something that over 90% of hopeful writers never learn. And since you can’t fix the problem you don’t see as being one… Or, as Mark Twain put it: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

So…if you’re still with me, an assignment:

First, you might want to dig around in the articles in my writing blog for an overview of the issues that force fiction-writers to use a different approach from that of nonfiction.

Then, pick up a copy of Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer. It is, by far, the best book on the nuts-and-bolts of writing fiction I’ve found to date. He won’t make a pro of you. That’s your job. But he will give you the understanding and the tools needed if it’s in you. It’s an older book, and he talks about your typewriter, and like so many men of his time he assumes that the serious writer is male. But that being said, the man was a genius, and he’ll have you slapping your forehead and saying, “But that’s…it’s so simple. Why didn’t I see it myself?” For a kind of lite version of his teaching, Amazon sells audio files of his day-long workshops on writing and character generation, boiled down to two, one hour lectures, for about $6, under the title, Dwight Swain, Master Writing Teacher.

But the thing to remember about writing is that it’s not a destination, it’s a journey, one we all take at our own pace. So if every day you write just a bit better, and you live long enough…

Hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/