E. P. Beaumont

I liked to run about and to climb trees and to dance. The dancing became rather more formal, of course, and some of it we learned from vaudeville and from films, and some from the people that papa knew. 

Papa was a traveler-between-the-worlds himself, which is how he’d come to bring home a wife from Oklahoma. Mama was the one responsible – or mostly responsible – for our dark good looks. Ireland meets the Cherokee Nation, with maybe a side-excursion to Mexico and (it was whispered) Africa. She was the sort of “mysterious half-breed” who could pass for nearly anything, and did, just as I have. Italian or Armenian, some said, or (I laughed when they said that) Japanese, for those who’d never seen one, or Indian, as in Indian-from-India. So it went, in those days: you’d best pass for something that called itself white.

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As I begin revisions on The Shape-shifter’s Tale, I will be posting character interview excerpts for the main cast of the novel. This week’s excerpt comes from the interview with Sophie, the narrator’s great-aunt.

Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.

I live in many worlds. There is a version of me who lives in the autonomous commune of Minneapolis and St. Paul (they never did change the old names), and another who lives in the America that never entered the second world war; then there’s the one who ends, so far as I can tell, in the general strike of 1933-35. The mirrors open onto an infinite gallery of worlds, and I don’t know all the tricks of navigating it. A labyrinth of mirrors… a wilderness of mirrors, someone once called the intelligence services. But this is rather different. There’s a lot of nonsense talked these days about how perception trumps reality; that’s the line of stage magicians and professional liars. It’s a truism and it’s also a treacherous principle on which to order one’s life.

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As I begin revisions on The Shape-shifter’s Tale, I will be posting character interview excerpts for the main cast of the novel. This week’s excerpt comes from the interview with Sophie, the narrator’s great-aunt.

Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.

My name is Sophie. In all of the worlds I know, I am one of three children. There is me, and there is Helen, and then Francis Patrick. We were all born in the teens of the century, … the century that’s been, the twentieth. All three of us remember the Great War, though very dimly. I remember the glancing light in father’s saloon, against the mirrors, and the strange visitors. 

I don’t know whence came those mirrors, but I do know that I learned their secret rather early. It was no secret to me, at least, and mother and father both looked at me with their sly expression; Francis Patrick had a touch of it too, but only a touch.

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As I begin revisions on The Shape-shifter’s Tale, I will be posting character interview excerpts for the main cast of the novel. This week’s excerpt comes from the interview with Sophie, the narrator’s great-aunt.

Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.

What shocked me was that my father raised his hand to my mother. I saw that, and I saw as well that she suddenly wasn’t there, but across the room, and she said that she would not live like that. If he didn’t care for what their daughter was—and she might add, that my sister was her father’s daughter as well as her mother’s—then he could leave. She said that with tremendous quiet, dignity like stone. A queen couldn’t have given her will more weight: it was a cathedral, or a mountain, when my mother said no.

So my father left. Not too much later, England had a witch-finder general for the first time in three hundred years, and laws that had grown dusty in the law-books sprung to life once more with all the malevolence of long-dead inquisitors. 

And when the witch-finders local and particular constituted themselves, my father was among their number.

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As I begin revisions on The Shape-shifter’s Tale, I will be posting character interview excerpts for the main cast of the novel. This week’s excerpt comes from the interview with Trevor, Emma’s cousin.

Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.

Then there’s the other thing they call love, which was rather longer in coming. There were girls my age, but they were not our kind, nor we theirs. No one ever spoke it aloud, but it was understood, and I certainly understood it, when their eyes would light on me briefly and then move on. I kept mine averted, though I wouldn’t be able to tell you why. I was big and clumsy, still getting used to my father’s frame when I was fifteen and sixteen and seventeen. There were girls in my dreams, who were made of sunlight and warmth, and whose faces I never saw. They sat close to me, and stroked my face with their hands, which were warmer than mere skin, and sometimes opened their arms to me, and touched me skin to skin … and then I woke, in sunlight and chill, knowing they weren’t real, or not real yet.

And then the crisis was on us, the danger, when my little sister began to become … what she was, and my father saw it, the day that she was down on the floor on all fours talking to the cat, and turned into a cat herself, which the cat took with a degree of calm that told him it had been going on for some time. 

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As I begin revisions on The Shape-shifter’s Tale, I will be posting character interview excerpts for the main cast of the novel. This week’s excerpt comes from the interview with Trevor, Emma’s cousin.

Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.

I loved my mother, and my father as much as he would let me. But the first I really fell in love was when I was ten, and I got a baby sister and a kitten in the same day. I remembered my mother lumbering and heavy through the months before she went to hospital, and then there was this little bundle. My mother, holding her, looked like the Madonna in the old church pictures, and then she looked like my mother, whom I loved. I worried, as a wee lad might, if she loved the little one more than I, and then she gave her to me to hold, and I forgot the question entirely, as those dark eyes opened in that little face and fastened on mine in recognition. She was mine, and I was hers.

The kitten and the little sister grew up together… 

… and what I don’t like to think on, died on the same day. He was on in years, a fat sleepy old cat who adored her and was adored in turn, and he was burned with her as her familiar.

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As I begin revisions on The Shape-shifter’s Tale, I will be posting character interview excerpts for the main cast of the novel. This week’s excerpt comes from the interview with Trevor, Emma’s cousin.

Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.

I was twelve, the traditional age of apprenticeship, and my little sister was two, when my mother called me to the workbench and said that it was time. I had loved to watch her, of course, when I was small. She had a magical touch, she did; there was nothing, living or not, that she couldn’t heal. She made broken things whole. And our neighbors were poor like us for the most part, so they couldn’t afford the folk who could do it the ordinary way. She had the touch, that in another day and time would have made her holy.

What it made my father… was suspicious. He looked askance at her, in spite of the money it brought in, for people did pay her what they could, for the animals she made right, for the electronics that mysteriously worked again, for the delicate gearing of antique watches and the untangling of barbed wire and the curing of slow weary ills. 

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As I begin revisions on The Shape-shifter’s Tale, I will be posting character interview excerpts for the main cast of the novel. This week’s excerpt comes from the interview with Trevor, Emma’s cousin.

Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.

This house is a fortress and a prize and a trap. I’ll sacrifice it willingly if it will draw the fire of our enemies and thereby reduce their strength. I think it will be a while before they figure out the secret, and in any case there is no way that they can defend themselves against it except to cease their attack. Which they won’t, of course. 

A tar baby, Teresa says with a smirk. The house is a tar baby, and of course they won’t let go of it once they have their claws into it, just like the fox in the folktale. It will be a point of honor to keep throwing utmost force at it.

Teresa’s smile is genuinely predatory; Trevor merely looks ill.

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As I begin revisions on The Shape-shifter’s Tale, I will be posting character interview excerpts for the main cast of the novel. This week’s excerpt comes from the interview with Emma, a forensic pathologist who returns from excavating mass graves abroad to find witch hunts unfolding at home.

Weekend Writing Warriors offers eight-sentence excerpts from a variety of writers; see the other excerpts here.

Publication Update: The Vampire Variations challenge story, now titled In the Laboratory of the Night, will be released in mid August from Glass Knife Press. At that time I’ll post a roundup of all the Vampire Variations stories currently available.