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(If you received a PM asking you to read "my most journal entry," it means the one before--below--this one. I highly recommend that everyone read it. It is possibly my best piece of writing ever, and probably my most important so far.)

I did find out more about Israfel. Poe did not make him up. He is in the Koran. He is (like Poe described) supposed to be an incredible musician among angels, and may possibly be the angel that blows the last trumpet. Legand somewhere also states that he was one of the two angels who took Lot out of the city of Sodom, which is significant, because before I knew about him being not just my invention, my angel of this name had an extreme dislike for men wanting to rape angels, which is what the men of Sodom wanted to do. As Luke's guardian angel, he stands in direct opposition to one of the demons who kept an eye on the old Luke and punished him when he didn't do well (by Satan's standards, of course). This demon's name is Sodom (and I invented him, too). He was in charge of the city of Sodom before it was destroyed, and now is at work in the world trying to make every city of the world like Sodom was. And I might say he's doing a horribly good job of it!

by Robin Layne

Jesus wanted a wife very much. How do I know this? I know him!
He came to love the whole world, and has continued to love it over all the centuries.
But only some have loved him back.
Not one woman, but a multitude of people of both genders.
I am not talking about religious people.
I'm talking about people who are his partners in this world.

In the culture in which Jesus lived, a man who wanted to get married
had to pay a price for his bride.
Jacob worked 14 years for Rachel, and he loved her so much they passed like days for him.
Jesus paid the highest price for his bride. He had to lose absolutely everything for her.
He sweated blood in anticipation of what he would suffer for her,
but accepted all the beatings, the death, the Hell, for the joy set before him: His bride.
He proposed a marriage toast on the night before he died:
“This is the new covenant in my blood. Drink. And remember me.”

I don't know whether he had a wife during his life in Israel in the first century A.D.
That has not been revealed to me.
But I know he has a wife now.
Many would prefer to be his girlfriend and not his wife.
They don't want to be that close to him, that committed, that permanent.
They want to stay on the sidelines, not of the world, maybe not even of the church, but of the Lord.
Jesus is love. He is always making love.
He is inside his people all the time.
But they don't always release his reality in their lives or to the people around them.

Did Jesus have a wife back then?
He tells me that is his secret, and winks.
But I know he has a wife now.
She carries him within her like the ark of the covenant,
and like his mother in her womb.
Through intimacy with Jesus, she is impregnated by Jesus,
and in due time gives birth to Jesus.
She carries the seed of the divine nature.
She is God in this world, walking in the skin of many.

Jesus has a wife.
Psst: She's me.
Is she you, too?

This past week have been busy for me as a writer. I attended three different writer's meetings, was active in reading critiques of my short story on the Internet, have rewritten it, and have written a scene that takes place close to the end of my novel. Then I finally heard from the guy who was critiquing my novel by himself and he said he definitely would not read or comment on any more of it because "we're not on the same wavelegnth." I thought what he said in the crits he did was helpful, even though I may not agree with all of it.
As for the groups: The online group is The Prose Nest, part of Authors by Design.com. Its helpful little group includes some successfully published authors. I am honored to be accepted as a part.
The first in-person group I attended this week was a lecture with Willamette Writers about booksellers and reviewers. The reviewer and bookstore publicist emphasized the importance of authors doing all they can to market their own books once they are published.
The second group was my second visit to a monthly critique group. For those kinds of groups, it is large, so they only read the first page of my short story. They wanted to see more description, among other things. I rewrote the story and posted the new version in The Prose Nest.
I made my first visit to a twice-a-month writer's group that had all four of us writing from prompts and also sharing a little of our work if we wanted. I got to have my entire short story read and critiqued, but nobody had much to say because they were unfamiliar with the genre. They are open to my sharing poetry in the future. I will try that; maybe it will be more successful. I will think of one or two to share for each meeting. I actually haven't written any poems in a long time, but I have a whole notebook full written over the years and have been publishing some of them in "Sweet Comfort," the newsletter I edit.
My short story is based on part of my current novel-in-progress, and it's called, "What You Do with Vampires." At least, that's its original title. The monthly group, one with a church called Imago Dei, suggested it have a subtler title. Someone from the Prose Nest has suggested, "Never Beyond Hope." We shall see.

If you read "Introduction to Writing and Characters," you know who Israfel7 is. I just call him Israfel. The 7 was because there was another Israfel on the site. I figured it was another person who made up the name, like I did back when I was in junior high. I invented the name as one for an angel. A couple years ago I developed that angel character further and made a Gaia account for him. As I set out to make him an e-mail, I found the name Israfel was already taken on Yahoo. Another inventor of the same name, or did the word have a foreign significance?
For a while I talked with my character Israfel often. He had a soothing affect on me. One time the Lord said to me, "How do you know Israfel isn't a real angel?" I almost laughed. I didn't believe that real angels went inside people and posed as their invented characters. But God can do anything . . .
I thought little more about it, until the discovery I made in a bookstore last week. I was shopping for Poe poetry because two of my novel's characters, Hugh and Carletta, are fans of his poetry and I needed to know more of it for my story. In Poe's Selected Poems is a poem called Israfel. And it is about an angel! This angel Israfel, according to Edgar Allan Poe, is highly talented at making beautiful music. Although I had not thought that about my Israfel, writing and playing music has for many years in the past been a strong spiritual influence for me. Almost as if I had a muse guiding me when I sang and played my guitar?
I don't know whether Poe also "made up" the name Israfel or whether he heard it from some other source. Please, if you have heard of this angel, or of any other creature or thing by that name, please tell me about it, okay?

I'm posting this entry in Israfel7's account too.

It's been a long time since I've written in this journal. A lot has been going on in my life. I have continued to work on my novel, mostly rewriting and seeking, and finally finding, someone to critique it. But where is he now? He seems to have disappeared. He told me my ending doesn't work xp --ouch!-- when I shared my synopsis with him. I am trying to figure out how to make it better. What is actually written in chonological form is 13 chapters, 10-13 with gaps in them of things I want to put in have but haven't figured out how I want to put them. So once those gaps are filled in it will probably be 14 or 15 chapters instead.
Ever since last June, I have also put out a monthly newsletter for a local activities group. As well as news of activities, I publish poetry and prose by myself and others in the group.
I got accepted into a good online critique group, which is more intimate than critters.org was. The group is called "The Prose Nest" (perfect place for a robin!) and is part of a website called Authors by Design. I am also moderator of the Grammar Dilemmas forum on that site. It's a good and comprehensive writer's site. I spend a lot of time chatting and roleplaying with its members. Now I've also found two other critique groups, one that meets once a month and is fairly large and so only gives me a short amount of time to crit each month. I drafted a short story based on part of my novel ("Blood of the Willing" wink to send in to a contest at Authors by Design (AbD for short). The story is called, "What You Do with Vampires," but the title might be changed. Some people in that monthly crit group think it needs to be subtler. I have another crit group that meets twice a month, which I will attend for the first time tomorrow. I'll bring my short story there as well and see how it goes. Also, I went to a meeting of the major writer's organization in my area, not for critiques, but to listen to a bookstore publicity person and a newspaper book reviewer. It was interesting and informative. How much today's writers have to work to market their own books! I don't think I will be able to do it without a car or a steady chaufuer. (How do you spell that? My dictionary's not on my desk for some reason!) A friend talked about giving me a car a friend of his wanted to give me, but I don't think I could afford its maintennence. Maybe when I'm in a better position to work a year-round job.
I made some changes in my short story based on the crit from the monthly group (a group from a church) and was about to post the new version when I saw my first two crits from Prose Nest members were in today. Reading them makes me want to make even more changes. I think I have a good theme for my novel and short story but the writing needs more work.
Yeah, I want money, but not as badly as I want to write and edit. The whole job and car thing will have to come at a later time. In the meantime, it's all practice, it's all copy, and it's all building my portfolio. That all takes time.
Oh, and in my spare time, I do arts & crafts and clay sculpture and post what I can of that and a little writing on deviantART.com. My name there is RobinLayne.

Oh, and the reason Lucas' last name is different in each of his fake obituaries is that in my stories he often went by different names. He was over 250 years old, after all. How could he have a valid I.D.? He took many different identies, according to what job he was doing at the time. (In the sequel to "Blood of the Willing," "The Vampire's Daughter," he will call himself Lucas Whyte.)
His real name, his original surname, is Fleeland. As a bad guy, he always hated this name because he felt it indicated he was a coward. When he got in trouble, he was indeed good at running away. I gave him this last name because of the scripture verse, "Resist the Devil, and he will flee from you." Luke, like the Devil as I perceived him during my second manic episode, could run away with the speed of a cartoon character.
How would he inherit such a name, anyway? I imagine it has something to do with his family fleeing to the New World for religious and/or political freedom. His parents were devout Christians, but I have not decided what denomination. They lived in the Colony of New York. And as you will learn in detail if you read Luke's journal, he was killed in the Revolutionary War, experienced the flames of hell while in the grave, and later dug himself out as his body rebuilt itself. That was how he became undead. Before that he was a live vampire, due to drinking a vampire's blood. My fiction--my rules!

Boy, it's been a long time since I've written in this journal!
I haven't been inactive on Gaia, although my time on the site has slowed down as I have been focusing on other things--and other sites. To bring any possible readers up to date, I have much to share.

I haven't explained much in this journal, but I have been PMing some people I've met on the site. Some understand what I'm going through, some think it's just plain weird, and others are apparently in-between.
The fake news articles below were an offhand and creative way to explain the disappearance of one of my characters, "Iceman" Lucas, commonly called Luke. He had become very real somehow and, being a villain in my stories and in the writings of his own journal, began to be related to harrassing influences within me. I became very sick for a few months, physically, mentally, and spiritually. I attacked all levels to the best of my ability. On the spiritual side, I was teed off that one of my own characters seemed to have become a demon. I tried repeatedly to cast him out, but he didn't leave. Finally, I created an angel character (known on Gaia now as Israfel7) to kill Luke off in a roleplay with one of my daughter's friends (yeah, I'm old enough to have a daughter--45, to be exact). It was fun being an angel instead of a wicked vampire and rescue the people Luke was trying to destroy in the roleplay. After that, I avoided talking about Luke and didn't use him on Gaia. Eventually I used his avatar to play some other people for a while, in my Eldon High School roleplay (hosted by another of my avis/characters, Darrell Calendri). Luke's avi played several cops and a police chaplain.
Something happened in June that is even harder to explain. To the best of my knowledge, God did an interesting kind of miracle within me. I was reading a book about spiritual deliverance. I read about "dissociation," which the author said everyone does to some degree--at the minutest level, it is daydreaming. At the highest, it's multipersonalities. The writer explained that children who suffer severe trauma often develop alter personalities just to survive it. He also said that girls who are sexually abused often develop a male alter. He said alters were not demons but that they could sometimes be demonized, just as any person can. He said that some people have to have the same demon cast out of every alter before they are set free.
Jesus said to me, "Hypocricy leads to insanity." As mentioned in "Introduction of writing and characters," Luke in my fiction worked as a "professional hypocrite." Some things about him seemed related to images and ideas I had during my first manic episode (I have bipolar disorder, or manic depression). Some of these images and person ideas were male, some female, some good or neutral, some bad.
Next thing I remember Jesus "resurrected" Luke for his own purposes--that is to say, he reached into my mind and pulled him out to talk to him. For you cannot actually kill a character who exists in your head. All you can do is bury him. Luke had carried a lot of my negative stuff, and burying him worked for a while, but not forever. What followed was the first in a private therapy session between me, Jesus, and Luke. The Lord asked Luke questions about my childhood abuse as if he had been there, which I thought was strange, since I only invented him last winter. For whatever reason, Luke was in touch with emotions and insights that I lacked. Luke was even mad at me at the moment that I was numb over the things I had suffered.
Other stuff has happened, some of which I don't even want to go into. But what I gave up for my own sanity God has restored to me in a new form. I can still have my villain in my fiction, but the Luke who relates to others on Gaia and who talks with me in my mind is different. He is a Christian now, no longer a vampire. He is my alter ego, here to help me, an invisible brother. I have been using his avi most on Gaia for sometime now, but gradually I have been using mine a little more.
My novel got stuck in chapter 10 last winter. Since then, I have been further developing the characters and writing scenes for later in the book. I just finished an extended synopsis to tie it all together on paper and ultimately in my mind. Now I am figuring out what to write in that 10th chapter, while I also rewrite Chapters 2 and 3. I think Chapter 1 is ready for others to read now. I was going to post it on LiveJournals, but their word processor is so limited I may just e-mail it as a Word file attachment to the people who want to read it.
I am also submitting material for a sub-domain in "Den of Insanity," hosted by a guy with the screen name of Kahz. His graphics for my main menu button ("Robin's Nest" wink and my Robin's Nest menu are superb. He has posted my updated version of my quotes from my book, which are more extensive than the ones on my Geocities webpage, but he apparently has not yet added the pictures I sent to make it more appealing. I hope eventually that page will be at least as attractive as the Geocities page or the Robin's Nest menu.
I am doing other writing projects, most of them not fiction. I will start ringing bells for the Salvation Army next week. I've done it before for many years. I sing carols while I ring. Both I and passers-by like the singing, but I don't like the cold or the cigarettes people smoke near me. I desperately need the money, though. Finances have reached an all-time low and I don't know how we are going to survive. My mom says there is always a way. I suppose so, but I am a worry wart. I want to know what will be; waiting is hard. I would appreciate prayers.

Wouldn't it be nice if I could make a living writing?
My parents told me I never would be able to. They said that a great author must do something like sell shoes for a living while he writes the great American novel on the side. But according to a lot I read in "Writer's Digest" magazine, many writers do make a living writing. I bought the lie, and now I believe I can't make money from articles because I can't afford a car to get from place to place for interviews. But who knows what is to come? To quote gollum, "We shall see . . . We shall see . . ."

Attorneys are battling over the estate of Lucas Freeman, who perished when his theater burst into flames earlier this month. They cannot agree upon his actual net worth, what debts he owed to whom, or even his true identity. "The more we look into this man's background, the less we can pin down," said lawyer Harlan Blackman. "We uncovered multiple false I.D.'s, have not been able to trace his ancestry, and cannot confirm even his age with any certainty. He certainly looked as if he could have been 22, although he seemed quite articulate and well-educated for that age."
His bank's safe deposit box contained a will with one clear request in case of his death: that he be "cremated to the finest ash possible, and the ashes strewn in New York Harbor by the Statue of Liberty."


((As part of his torment in Hell, Lucas is allowed to hear this information. He screams, "I didn't write that!!! That wasn't my signature!!! Izzy, damn y--" But here where justice is perfect and instantaneous, all curses return to their givers immediately. Flames engulf him and the agony silences his curse.))

(Feb. 6, 2005) Lucas Fleeland, known on Gaiaonline as Iceman Lucas, died Friday, February 6, when the New York City Theater he owned mysteriously caught fire. Firefighters were amazed that although the building burned to the ground, nothing around it was damaged. The young and wealthy director/playright tended to draw mixed responses from audiences and acquaintences. When his housekeeper, Lupe Enriques, returned to the blackened building later Friday night, she was in tears. "It was my home as well as my job," she told reporters. "Where will I go now? And yet--it's strange--it's terrible, I feel--like I'm waking up from some kind of a spell. As rich as he was, he didn't pay me much. Except--like tonight, when he told me to go out and have a nice dinner and he was with--Why did I tell everyone he was so kind? Is he dead? No, I must not speak evil of the dead!"
Two neighbors said they saw a bright light suddenly appear for a few seconds inside the upstairs living quarters. "Realbright" one said, "--I mean, like--extra-terrestrial bright. Don't give my name." About seven minutes later, 9-1-1 received a call reporting the fire.
The cause of the fire has not been determined. Witnesses said it errupted suddenly, but firefighters found no traces of fuel.
"Tragic for poor Senor Fleeland," said Enrique. "Such a brilliant young man. So young, and so much promise wasted."
Fleeland had no known living relatives, and it is not clear to whom he wished to leave his inherited fortune. He was 22.