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Desire is a familiar angel to a pre-published writer. It is at Desire's bright sword-point we sit down to write, or not at all, because who would do that to themselves if there weren't something spiky poking them? We write because we want to.

I wrote and Falling, Fly to tangle with Desire - with what it means to want and not get, with what turns desire into craving or addiction, and what takes it away. I wrote Olivia, the angel of desire, who has fallen so far from her pure state that she's completely out of touch with what she wants for herself. Even though everyone who looks at her wants her, they never actually *see* her because her appearance alters to conform to each person's ideals. Because she sustains herself on what she inspires but can't experience, she's a vampire. But because I was interested in the difference between wanting and being wanted, she can only feed on those who desire her. Because she let me wrestle with these things through her, she is an angel. Because I wanted to write, and to write and be published, Olivia knows a god who will tell her no.

With their painted-on pentagrams and plastic skulls, these vampire metal bars still mirror the introverted nature of the genuine beast. Elaborately dressed, artfully constructed presentations of personality, every one of us here eats alone. Vampires are inherently solitary creatures.

"Everyone you don't love tastes the same," I complain to my sister.

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Writing is hard, and re-writing is harder, but I'm a staunch believer in Nabakov's assertion that a writer's pencil should outlast its eraser, so I've learned to play with my manuscripts. I had a lot of fun weaving secret little jokes into the story and finding places to hide tiny Easter eggs. If I've done my job well, neither the ones a reader catches nor misses will distract from the narrative, but just add a touch of color where visible. Some of them are so corny, I probably wouldn't confess even if caught. Some, I thought I'd share.

Jokes don't work once you explain them, but chapter titles, for me, are almost always games. In chapter one of and Falling, Fly, "What You See" does a few fun things for me. First, it is what you see, being the first chapter, so that's satisfying just on its own. Secondly, I'm playing with the expression "what you see is what you get," because that's clearly not the case here. I'm also using the expression to call out early on what will end up being one of themes of the book.

In this book, I'm interested in exploring how seeing a thing changes it - from the physics of Heisengberg to teen girls with a Vogue magazine. And I play throughout the book with the question of who sees and who is being seen. And who watches.

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When your toddler enshrines a toothpaste tube between your sheets and saves sandwich triangles in your running shoes "for later," the veneer of logic that clads a complicated twenty-first century life can begin to crack and let seep a wild and extravagant chaos. You can almost start to feel the invisible millions of germs that the parenting books insist are teeming on every mouth-level surface. I don't know why it was that these fine cracks and swarming wee beasties yawned wide enough for the underworld to swallow me, but they did, and I was nearly lost, in the middle of a summer field. 

 

Hell, it turns out, has redecorated since Persephone's day, and Dante's orderly, concentric rings have yielded to a sickening vertigo in which there is no center, as I, capable of seeing every question from too many perspectives, lost all perspective. I got too dizzy to make any progress, even if I could have determined which way forward was, in a place where every step we've taken since the Industrial Revolution looks like self-destruction.

Gone too is the elegant fitting of punishment to crime that looks like destiny fulfilled, a certainty I could envy the damned.

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The Irish relationship with the past, I discovered on my week-long driving tour of the country, is distinctly different than mine. It's both much closer and more indifferent. On my second day, leaving the medieval holy complex at Glendalough, I came across a wild cascade of rock strewn over both sides of a steep valley.

Discarded, I assume, by a retreating glacier, the smooth, dark stones range from pebble- to house-sized. Some had once been piled into small structures but have since resumed the tumble, so that I don't know whether I am walking among old homesteads or holy shrines. There's no plaque or annotation, but the ruins feel domestic to me, and I stand for a while in what was once a doorway, imagining what it would be to see your man come home across such ferocious terrain, or your children playing in the detritus of so ancient and colossal a power.

In Cashel, County Tipperary, the unimaginatively named Rock of Cashel bursts from an otherwise gentle landscape. The earliest definitive evidence its habitation dates from the 300's, but I expect people have lived or worshipped from Cashel's impressive vantage for as long as the island has had people.

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I don't intend to try and convince the IRS of this, but one of the real perks of being a writer is the amount of retroactive research you discover you've already done. When I took week-long driving tour of Ireland in 2005, my interest was in genetic (if not genealogical) research. An adopted child of obviously Irish extraction, I was aware of watching for some glimmer of recognition of familiarity in the landscape and faces, but primarily I was there for the beauty, the whiskey, the time alone, and the music. A writing career in general (and and Falling, Fly, in particular) were still several years and a failed online retail venture away.

A measure of planning put me at the Stone- and Iron-Age sites Newgrange and the Hill of Tara on my first day of driving, half a year away from the solstice Newgrange was built to mark. Although neither place made it intoand Falling, Fly, Newgrange makes a brief appearance in my next book, In Dreams Begin.

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Skyler White is one of our guest bloggers during the week of March 1st. If you have any questions for Skyler White, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some more information about and Faillng, Fly:

An edgy, erotic blend of fantasy and romance-from a debut author whose star is on the rise.

In a dark and seedy underground of burned-out rock stars and angels- turned-vampires, a revolutionary neuroscientist and a fallen angel must pit medicine against mythology in an attempt to erase their tortured pasts...but at what cost?

Olivia, vampire and fallen angel of desire, is hopeless...and damned. Since the fall from Eden, she has hungered for love, but fed only on desire. Dominic O'Shaughnessy is a neuroscientist plagued by impossible visions. When his research and her despair collide at L'OtelMathillide- a subterranean hell of beauty, demons, and dreams-rationalist and angel unite in a clash of desire and damnation that threatens to destroy them both.

View our feature on Skyler White's and Falling, Fly.