Half Past Forever: A Glimpse into Eternity
Thank you for hosting me today, Sherrie.
I recently experienced my first foray into the M/M Romance Group's summer writing event on Goodreads, this year titled Love's Landscapes. It was by far the largest fiction-writing event I've ever taken part in, and while challenging at times, it turned out to be a gift for myself as well as for my letter-writer.
(For those who don't know, this writing event works by having group members find photos they like and writing a request letter to serve as a writing prompt. Authors of all experience levels can choose to participate by claiming a prompt.)
This is the image and letter that spoke to me:
This man I'm kneeling before isn't someone I know well, matter of a fact we only met three days ago. Yet he tells me something that's hard for me to believe, he tells me he is immortal. That’s not all though he seems to believe I’m the man he has dreamed about for thousands of years, that I’m his mate. The more I think about it the more I believe, well I believe that he isn’t exactly human I’m not so sure about the mate part. Still I can’t imagine what’s supposed to happen now.
Requests: please; have story taken place in current time period 2014, tell how they met, characters in late twenties early thirties, no instant love but should be a happy ever after.
This hit on so many of my guilty pleasures’immortals, destined mates, and happily ever after. How could I resist’ The men were almost completely in shadow, too. I could make them whatever I wanted.
Knowing that this was just for fun and wouldn't be going to a professional publisher gave me a freedom I didn't expect’the freedom to experiment. Of course one should be willing to experiment with their writing, but it's hard not to get caught up in your own insecurities when you know it's up for professional review. I still don't think I went crazy, but you could say I at least let my hair down and my thoughts wander. Out of it came a character I really want to revisit: Levin, the immortal.
There are a lot of creatures in mythologies and folklore around the world that live forever, most of them through some sort of evil power. I wanted to take one and expand on those potentially dark origins, and thrust this unnatural creature into the world of humans.
By the time the story, Half Past Forever, gets started, Levin is more than a thousand years old. It would have been impossible to tell his entire story in the month and a half I had to write it, and admittedly harder to identify with a man who lives forever. So we follow Callum, the destined mortal, instead, and get the first glimpses of Levin's many years along with him.
The possibilities for those years are endless. Maybe one day we'll know the beginning and middle of Levin's story, but for now, we can have the happy end of it.
It begins with the joining of two separate paths...
But the instant he’s through the door he feels it. It’s the pulse of the universe aligning every star just so to center around this one moment, around him. It’s all everything he’s seen and heard and smelled and tasted before, but never felt.
He feels it now.
The floor circles and sprawls around him, wide and deep and drenched in the blue that haunts his dreams. He understands now what it was, what it’s been all this time. A stage rises in front of him. He feels the music beating in his bones and rooting his feet to the ground.
He’s lived forever, and only now does he feel the clock begin to tick.
Every motion of his routine was just muscle memory by now, and as it neared the end he caught sight of a dark figure at the back of the room and right in the middle of the floor. Callum couldn’t make out his features from here but he could tell he was staring, and he thought it odd the way he didn’t move at all.
It wouldn’t be Monday without a creep hanging around, he supposed, and he finished his dance by tossing his tearaway shorts into the crowd. God, those things were awful. He had never expected to be back in them four nights a week, but then he’d never expected that the budget crisis for social workers would result in him losing his job, either. Life was just full of surprises.
A few more groups of people had wandered inside by the time Callum made it down to the floor and his mood improved marginally. Pasting on a flirtatious smile, he headed for the tables to go make some new friends, scouting for the bigger spenders- and then stopped short.
The man doing his best statue impression was right in front of him. He was tall, with light eyes and fair hair that glowed in the blue phosphorescence of the club lights, and a dark coat that hung at a perfectly tailored endpoint at the thigh. He was still here, still staring, still as a ghost. Callum half expected him to disappear if he blinked - he almost wished he would, then maybe those eyes wouldn’t be lancing right through him.
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