#cervinae

A big boar grizzly in a dominant pose to discourage other nearby grizzlies from approaching “his” elk carcass.

Rocky Mountain elk (Cervus canadensis nelsoni)

Thought I’d post a writing update for the homies.

I’m sort of re-organising my tumblr so everything is all over the place. I need to re-do a writblr intro post, I need to sort out all my mutuals and everything. Safe to say, its a mess right now. But weirdly enough, I’ve been writing/planning an actual novel. So here’s a lil update for you all.

(image id:/ a dark green woodland clearing with a small baby deer in the centre, the title Cervinae and subtitle A Novel are framing the deer. end id:/)

cw: cult stuff, child death, (i’m not really sure what else so if you notice anything that needs to be cw then please let me know)

Some of you may remember that I posted a writing update for a lil short story I was planning called Cervinae, and in that update I mentioned how this had the potential to be a full length novel but that freaked me out too much so I wanted to write it as a short story? Well, turns out the idea in fact was too big for a short story and so here we are.

Cervinae (a novel)

ser-vin-ay (noun) - a subfamily of deer such as Elk or Fallow etc.

Genre: coming of age, thriller, horror???

POV: first person retrospective

Setting: small survivalist commune in the Netherlands, 1995

Stage: planning

Plot: after her brother dies under mysterious circumstances, Nina and new commune member Maude, take it upon themselves to find the real reason for his death but accidentally uncover a web of lies within the commune.

Characters:

Nina Braams: seven year old Nina knows only the confines of her family’s commune in central Netherlands. she doesn’t care much for other people or conversation until Maude arrives and tells her of the outside world. this intrigues her and she becomes infatuated with the idea of life outside of the commune.

Maude Vos: Maude is a fifteen year old with rebellious outlooks on life and society. she believes everyone and everything is out to get her and so ran away from her home to find a ‘simpler’ life on the commune.

Vince Braams: Nina’s father is a piece of fucking work, god I hate him. he thinks only of himself and the protection of the commune, finding little empathy for others and despises the outside world.

Eline Linden: a young mother on the commune, new to this way of life. she acts as a motherly figure for Nina despite her already having a mother, and is one of the few adults on the commune that is trusted by the children, especially Nina and Maude.

This was a whole journey, oh my days. I would like to point out that I have never written a novel, no idea of mine has ever been fleshed out enough to warrant a novel at all, and I have NEVER planned a novel in my LIFE! Yet here I am, having planned a novel in one day! ONE DAY! I haven’t written any of the novel yet, other than the first two paragraphs I had typed up when this was going to be a short story, and I do still like them it’s just hard not to want to rewrite the whole thing. The original post is still up but I am going to post the extract again on here just for simplicities sake.

Extract:

Maxim’s death was to my dad like the news at 6; he didn’t care. If anything, it was more of a nuisance. He managed a sour pout for a few hours but soon returned to the logging he had been engrossed in moments before. I climbed into the bay-window seat and peered at him through bleary eyes, smearing tears across my swollen cheeks. Behind me I could still hear Mum’s wailing as she clutched his head to her bosom. That was the first and only time I heard her swear.

           My frilled t-shirt was plastered with dried blood, dark red and brown, some of it even stained on my skin. It was all over the bed, the counters, and the rugs. It had bestialised the home and made it hard to distinguish between family and slaughter house. A stranger would think we had been gutting pigs.

Two Fallow deer (Dama dama) bucks, one with mild leucism, in Epping Forest, England