My Great Hobby-Novel

Friends,
    No pictures quite yet, but speaking of the macabre, I’ll taunt you with a snippet from my hobby-novel, with which I play on occasion. Being that my ‘work’ is visual, I find writing a fine flight into play. My ‘book,’ which may well never advance beyond scraps & bits, is a... what to call it: a grotesque, perhaps, concerning a deranged liturgical artist, a woman who’s lost half her face to fire, and a mighty strange sanatorium with it’s own chapel. The deranged artist, Philip Waithe, is painting murals in the chapel, which have to do with my Fiendish Plot. It’s set around 1900. 
    I toy with this dubious opus in first person; a journal for each main character. While I don’t consider myself quite as deranged, and certainly not as homicidal,  as the artist depicted, it does give a place to ‘use’ my own creative processes and curious adventures.
    From Deranged Philip’s journal, which he scratches on the scaffold in the Deranged Chapel, as he lies on a narrow scaffold board in the dome:
...

Philip Waithe, date unknown:

“I have lain seven  hours with Lazarus, and still I cannot see his face. I have caressed the winding cloth with ocher and sienna, touched the feet with a merest sliver of vermilion, yet the head where the spirit must look out remains blind.

It cannot be forced.

I look away. I shift on my narrow bed, and am held in an arc of scarlet tipped quills and gold. I  spread my arms into nothing, feel the fever bleed out, feel my breath settle, still. I say, Beloved, make me transparent. I wait, I lose thought, quiet my spirit to a flawless water.  I see.  I see reflected there the Descent into Hell.

I have drawn it on the East wall.”
...

Comments

[~joanna]

FOReST,

You have a very gifted way with words, like your visual work, you create with such passion from the heart.

You are definitely a painter of words...

Thank you for sharing...

[Eirewolf]

Wow.

I'm not so much into the macabre, but I'd read your novel, based on that snippet alone.

[Forest]

Ah, thank you Joanna! I do love words... a slightly different pleasure from our visual endeavors.

My, thank you dear Eirewolf! Watch out -- if I should actually finish it, that may come back to haunt you...

[Colleen]

Enveloping and leading =0)