Please Welcome Nix Winter
The Knot Universe
Nix Winter
www.myspace.com/nixwinter
A good love story makes me happy. That wonderful feeling of being loved, cherished, wanted, that is a most splendid feeling. I love familiar characters. I don’t think I’m alone in that. I’ve got posters on my walls of characters that I love.
I guess that’s why TV series are so very popular. Anime and manga are like that too.
A lot of ebooks I read have great characters, but the stories are short. Even when the characters are splendid there’s the happily ever after and it’s end of the story.
As a writer, I find I want to stay with the same characters longer, but not always in the same story. I’d like to work with the same characters in different settings. Now there is a normal format for that, but really, stories that go out through publishers do have their advantages.
A slight segue… I read a lot of science stuffs; Discover, livescience.com, and I have a library card. Not that it really gives me any credentials, but the first major I thought about pursuing was for physics. I have since discovered that my virtues lay in imagination, not mathematics. Now, imagination that I’m pretty good at.
So if I imagine string theory (Which in more scientific thoughts is probably a very nifty and useful theory.) is like a lot of lovely beautiful ribbons rippling through time, each eith their own universe on it… or maybe like movie film, ribbons of movie film, with time painted out over the frames, and these lovely ribbons of universe exist next to each other brushing by and around each other softly and in a perfectly natural dance, beholden not to time nor human temperament, then there you have the Knot Universe.
In this universe of swaying ribbons of being, often times life grows the same. The same people are born. They love the same people. Sometimes things can be very different. Jody is a doctor on one thread and a police officer on another. Alin’s a singer in one, an engineer in another. On some threads, maybe they’re not the nicest of people.
Every person has a lot of layers and feelings. Exploring facets through fiction is a great opportunity.
So… that’s where Blue Promises got its start. *smiles* I hope the idea will be an interesting one. Loveyoudivine will be releasing the first book in this series soon! So please take a look at my character profiles and the excerpt too!
http://www.nixwinter.com/The_world_of_Nix_Winter/Blue_Promises.html
Blue Promises
You don’t want to hear my voice
Your words, my hero
those are your words my Heart
Your blue promises whispering
promising me I matter
promising me life
your words
your words cut, leaving me a tatter.
But you’re whispering to me in the night
whispering to me that I still matter
You don’t recognize my choice
Your words, my demon
those are your words my Soul
Your blue promises want to fade
and I’m dying, crying in the ruins
of your blue promises
blue promises
your words
your words cut , leaving me a tatter.
But you’re whispering to me in the night
whispering to me that I still matter
You don’t want to know I’m still living
Your words, my Longing
These are my words, my words
I’m alive, do you hear? I’m living and I’m breathing and my heart’s my own.
I’m living for the promise of the blue sky
Beyond the blue twilight, I come from where make our own blue sky
I’ll make my own, my Baby, I’ll make my own blue promises
Buses do not move fast enough. It was a good day though, really good. He had twenty dollars in his pocket from busking earlier, before his appointment with Shanika, and if all went well Kaily, Jesus, and he would have about 300 dollars a piece by Monday. If it went well, they could get other gigs, and maybe even a recording contract, and Jody would hear his music, sometime.
Alin held to the bus post with both hands, watching shops go by on the outside, barely hearing the crying baby in the seat right up from where he stood. There could be a place for him in the world that was his, some good that came out of him that wasn’t about blowing anything up, wasn’t about anyone dying. Humming his new song, he could barely keep his feet on the ground.
Every time he sang ‘Blue Promises’ he felt more alive, more independent. For so long, depression had only been kept outside his most innermost heart by thoughts of Jody. Jody had saved him when he was supposed to kill him. Jody might not have always wanted to hear him talk, but when he did listen, Alin had felt as if someone were really listening.
Not that he hadn’t written other songs, too, and he liked those songs as well. ‘Blow Me Up’ was a fantastic song for cleaning too, or doing anything he really didn’t want to do. Kaily didn’t like ‘Hurry Up and Die’, but he didn’t think she really got it either.
Since he’d come back to Earth looking for Jody, he’d written out ten notebooks of songs he’d kept in his mind when they were in the war. A lot of it was about Jody, but he didn’t figure anyone would get that, not anymore than they got that the hippy looking dude with long hair and a honey tenor singing on the street corner was an ex-mecha pilot.
There were just things that were and things that weren’t. The five mecha pilots were heroes and had a hero’s welcome in the Solar system. Jody was chief of security for Madam President. Kix was a busy businessman, with his very respected life-partner, Trace. Sean ran a special operations program within Knights of Justice. Everyone was where they belonged.
It felt like the first time he’d ever really felt like he was where he belonged though, on the non-express bus with all the windows open and late afternoon Los Angeles coming through those windows. He was a singer. He wasn’t death anymore. He wasn’t a terrorist or a prisoner, or a whore, or an orphan. He was a singer. He leaned against the pole he was holding and let the heat wash over him as he watched the people move through their normal lives and he could see himself being part of that too, on their radios, their audio players.
The house was over a boarded up store. Alin felt the very slightest twinge of guilt sometimes as he let himself through the black painted steel bar door and into the stairs that lead to their apartment. The owner of the shop had been nice enough, selling whatever manner of junk to the neighborhood. His kid though had been an arrogant bastard who sold items of less legal status when his dad wasn’t around. Alin wasn’t a big fan of organized legal solutions, but he did think pain was instructive. The kid moved to Miami; the owner shut down and moved to a retirement community. It wasn’t his fault the kid had been a lazy punk willing to sell other people a little bit of soul death.
The place above the shop, well, at first Alin had been traded protecting the property for rent. Then the owner’s cousins had moved in. Nice people, even if Alin didn’t understand English the way they spoke it. They said he had an Laxlan twang that made words fat and slow. He thought that the California sun had made their tongues run like butter down the noon sidewalk. They were strange in some ways. Pale skin in the winter, dark in the summer. The mother’s hair was stiff like Japanese, but pale blond, just a little more yellow than Alfred. So maybe there was some French in their blood. He didn’t know.
Then they rented out one of the other bedrooms to Alex Hadrian, a man with skin so dark he could have been mech’s cousin. He had dark eyes, shiny as glass and always watching everything. He’d sit up on the roof with his cane and a tall glass of iced tea and talk the town he’d lived in as a child, write lines of colorful poetry, and sit there for hours more. Alin had no idea where he got his money from, but the man had been his friend many times over.
Alin’d come home drunk one winter night, rain thick in his braid, clothes smelling of grease and cheap food. He’d brought a bottle of wine with him and it has been Alex who’d found him on the roof singing love songs to Jody Mark.
The old man’s voice had seemed dusty, in some aged and wise kind of way. As the rain had started again, running down Alin’s face, failing to wash away a day spent acquiring frustrations and building up rage, the old man had said. “Boy. you’re killing yourself in a real hard way. What is it you really want?”
“I want to sing,” Alin had replied.
The next day, he hadn’t remembered the day before, just that moment, and how bad his head hurt. He’d taken up singing on street corners, doing his best to entertain and seduce money from passersby. He’d made more money than he had at the restaurant. He was a great deal happier.
That day to this day, it was the best mission of his life! He threw open the door and did his best stage entrance, arms over his head, hips thrust forward, “Ladies and Gentlemen! Let me present Blue Promises!” He paused there for a moment.
Kaily looked up at him, an eyebrow arching, her fingers pausing from the chat she was typing in. “AG?”
“Come on! Applause!” he strode to her chair, crossing the room in a few steps. “I got us a gig! A real gig, five hundred a night, two nights, at the Strobe.”
“AG,” Liza asked, “Did you go talk to Sean?”
“Nope, I got a gig at the Strobe.”
Jesus dropped his cup, dark eyes wide, “I can’t do that. I’m sorry. I just can’t.”
Alin’s mouth dropped open. “What do you mean? You’re my guitarist?”
“I’m sorry.”
And there it was.
Great excerpt, Nix! Thanks so much for joining my party!
Thanks for the excerpt, Nix.
What really excites me is the knot universe theory. I have a similar thought on different dimensions.
Sounds to me like you also like reading reference books. My hubby actually introduced me to Sci-Fi 20 years ago. Before that, I didn’t know some of my strange thoughts had a name!
Nita, thanks for having Nix.
Julie