Rookdale

I was on the hunt for Rookdale this evening and finally found the typed 109 pages of the manuscript after discovering 59 pages of edited text in a binder in the dining room and knowing 'd written more than 59 pages! It was a relief to find the 109 pages on a USB drive.

This is the partial novel for which I drew a detailed map of the entire seacoast village! The map is even colorized! That map has been sitting on the dining room table for over a year.

I'm thinking that after Memento Mori:Garnet & Quella goes through editing and some rewrites I'll get around to finishing Rookdale, a story about witches in New Hampshire (or maybe it was the coast of Maine...I'll have to check that since New Hampshire really doesn't have that big of a coastline...so it may have begun in NH just after Salem and then those involved moved north into Maine.

Anyway, the origin of this story was a short story called The Cat's Tale, that may not have been published an any anthology yet. It's about a young female witch who is annoyed by a neighbor's yellow cat, Leo. He hisses and swats at her when she walks past the fenced yard, so she decides to use a sell to transform the miserable cat into a pig which will be confiscated since farm animals are not allowed in the neighborhood per town ordinance. Well...the cat escapes and turns up on the roof of her garage. She lures it into her bedroom and down to the kitchen where se mixes the potion she's made and has in a vial with a can of tuna fish and feeds it to the cat. Well, the cat transforms, but it doesn't transform into a pig! She's unwittingly drawn into a family feud that dates back to the 1600's when a wicked magistrate condemned Mercy Cooper to death for witchcraft. Only Mercy, it's said, transformed herself into a crow and pecked out the eye of the magistrate as they were coming to haul her away from her farm home.

I think I'm finally ready to finish this novel, once I get Memento Mori: G&Q polished up for publication.

Then maybe I'll be able to turn my attention to the long neglected romance novel Spindrift.