Sometimes when I want to work on a book but my writing brain is too tired, I’ll do a collage of the book to help stay involved in the story world. Howver, for the Theodosia books, I decided to try something else–an altered book, which is basically a bunch of collages inside the pages of an old book. This altered book is really more about helping me stay fully immersed in the world, while giving my mind something else to focus on besides the words on the page. Plus, I can’t even begin to tell you how much fun it is!

So first, I had to find the right book to alter. How thrilled was I to find the above book at the library’s used book store–it’s even a translation of an Arabic poem! How perfect.

This first image was my first experiment. It’s very simple,  just a mood piece for the first book, touching on picking up Mother from the train station.

This next picture was trying to evoke the sense of showdown I knew was coming in Book Two, involving the Dreadnought, the Serpents of Chaos, and a certain prophecy regarding a red sun…

And lastly, a scene in the catacombs, with all those mummies…

While I will confess to being all thumbs when it comes to art, I do love collaging. I love the whole “found” thing aspect of the art form, the junk turned to jewels element of taking used and discarded trash and scraps and using that to create something beautiful and evocative.

It reminds me very much of writing, actually.

As a writer, I collect mental junk, a face here, a look there. The snippet of conversation I overheard at the restaurant. The scolding I heard the mother give her son at the grocery store. The surprising sight of a teenage punk driving his 80 year old grandmother around in his hyped up jalopy. A sunset. A birdsong. A remembered feeling from when I was seven years old. This is the sort of stuff writers collect in their heads, where it rolls around for years, decades sometimes, until it becomes tumbled and smoothed and juxtaposed with other things and becomes something entirely new.

I’m sorry I’ve been so quiet lately! I’m busy working on Theodosia Four, Theodosia and the Last Pharaoh. However, here is this month’s chapter excerpt for Book Three!

WARNING, This chapter of Book Three, Theodosia and the Eyes of Horus, MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR BOOK TWO, Theodosia and the Staff of Osiris. So if you haven’t read that yet, STOP RIGHT NOW. The rest of the chapter is up under the cut in order to protect those who haven’t read Book Two yet.

Chapter Three – Scorpions on the Loose

BOTHER. I had hoped to avoid another meeting with the supreme master of the Arcane Order of the Black Sun for a while longer. Say, a lifetime. In fact, that’s why it had taken so long for Will to coax me out to the Alcazar to see Awi Bubu; I’d been trying to avoid Trawley. He was mad as a hatter and convinced I was a reincarnation of Isis and had mystical powers. Of course, that was all nonsense, but even so, he had a nasty habit of snatching me off the street.

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