About Books: The Search

 

One of my interests is the Middle Ages. The problem is, I’m a bit lazy about research. The result is that anything with a medieval flavor to it ends up being fantasy.

I’m okay with that. Fantasy is popular.

So it should come as no surprise that I have written – albeit several years ago – a fantasy novel with kings, queens, princes, pirates a haunted woods, a boy who may or may not be fae and a quest. As soon as I get a cover, I’ll be publishing it – so if you know someone interested in doing book covers, let me know.

I also like studying foreign languages. At one point I started to learn Russian, but then I returned to college full time, and couldn’t continue my foreign language studies.

When I finished my college studies, I was interested in learning Welsh. While I can say more things in Russian – perhaps 20 things, and I still don’t know how to ask for the bathroom – I really like the interesting spellings and pronunciations of Welsh. I’m probably the biggest non-Welsh advocate for the Welsh language going –at least in America.

It should come as no surprise that I’ve not only used my love of languages, but also put a bit of Welsh spelling and Russian pronunciation in a blender in order to create names and places in my fantasy world. A writer needs a hook to stand out from other writers. (And don’t worry, there’s a pronunciation guide at the end of the book.)

The British Royal family in the 1980s and ‘90s kind of sparked the writing of this book. My being left-handed also played a role.

Imagine a place where left-handed people learn to read and write upside down and backwards. (Ink, you know. And so they can take dictation so that the person dictating can read it at the same time.) 

Their scarcity makes them prized. The fact that they can master writing upside down and backwards, resulting in beautiful penmanship means that they are the only people in this kingdom who can become scribes.

Now imagine that one of the best scribes is the second son of the king. 

This sort of thing doesn’t usually happen. In fact, when he is made master scribe of the kingdom, there is some grumbling from masters and journeymen alike. Having a member of the royal family as a scribe has never been done before.

The industriousness of his youngest child makes it all the more painful for the king to discover that the heir is a slacker. He thinks nothing of throwing money around for the entertainment of his friends, but also doesn’t care that anyone can best him in any of the studies or weapons he’s supposed to have mastered – including his younger brother. Even his twin sister can beat him at most things.

Oddities don’t end there. In this kingdom, the Princess twin sister of the heir would become the heir should anything happen to her brother. In fact, if she’d been firstborn, she would have been the heir. 

While this is no big thing in the 21^st century, in the mid-1990s, when the tale was first written, this was cause for smirks, head shakes and the occasional, “Yeah, right.”

Having been denied things in life for no better reason than the lack of a Y chromosome, I have always been sensitive to fairness. I’ve never been in the “girls are better” camp. I’ve always been in the “we’re all better” camp. 

Just try to deny me something for no better reason than I’m “just a girl” and you’ll discover that fencing and kick boxing weren’t wasted on me.

To say the king is irked by his eldest son’s behavior – especially since it had to be brought to his attention by the boy’s instructors – is an understatement. 

He demands the boy relearn every one of his studies, from history of the kingdom to proper use of the bow and arrow to horsemanship, beginning immediately – destroying his chances of a planned liaison with a certain maid, attendance at the next ball and an evening of fun with his cronies. 

The king will hear no excuses. The heir is answerable to whichever instructor has him in his/her charge. Furthermore, he will be addressed as a commoner until he learns his skills, and failure to do so will result in his being disinherited.

Needless to say, the heir isn’t happy.

As the story progresses, an accident occurs in which the heir is injured. During his recovery, he decides he must go on Search.

Search is dangerous. One has a horse and whatever food, clothing, weapons and other goods one can carry on said horse. The searcher enters the great woods looking for whatever he is led to. 

Many don’t return. Those who do are never quite the same. But no member of the Royal Family has ever gone on search. It isn’t certain they are allowed to. But the heir insists, threatening to sneak off if he isn’t allowed to go.

The quest is very much a D&D activity. As such, it would be recognized by gamers as well as historians. That is what the Search is, without the dice. The heir’s adventures on Search are very much "real life in a Medieval world" activities – or at least the sort of thing we’ve seen in movies.

The heir’s ultimate fate and his true character are brought out in how he handles his fate.

I Wish

 

 

Ancestry.com is a wonderful thing, something I never expected anything from except perhaps to discover a few ancestors. It delivered so much more than that.

My parents’ generation of our family all grew up in South Philadelphia, second generation Americans. They were city kids, a bit more streetwise than I ever was, but then, I was the protected female offspring who wasn’t allowed to do many of the things my brothers were.

When my parents’ generation grew up, they all moved out to the suburbs. Most of those relatives moved to Delaware County, PA. My parents moved to Bucks County, on the other side of Philadelphia, instead. Whenever he was asked why he didn’t move to Delaware County, my father would reply – with a bit of truth as well as irony – “Because it’s too damned close to the relatives.”

Granted my parents grew up a block away from each other, and their cousins – my dad had many – all lived a block or two from each other. You couldn’t walk to the corner store – or the corner bar – without bumping into a relative. Everyone knew what everyone else was doing.

When I grew up, the relatives barely knew my brothers and me, other than what we looked like from the annual Christmas card, where the three of us were posed in some scene (Santa’s elves, flying in spaceships over the city, delivering Christmas wreaths in the snow while a ceramic deer looked on).

We visited some of the relatives once or twice a year, and others a few times in my lifetime, but they seldom, if ever, came to our house. When they did, they looked at us and our surroundings as if they were visiting a strange planet and we were the resident aliens.

Even though they lived in the suburbs, as did we, their neighborhoods had sidewalks; ours did not. Our neighborhood had summer homes on stilts, and those houses had outhouses; they had weekly streetcleaners coming down the street. Even though we didn’t live on or near a farm, some neighbors had chickens and roosters, and one had ducks. Our area was really more rural than suburban.

All of my grandparents lived in the city. They were first generation Americans whose parents came from Irish stock. My mother’s parents had both died long before I came along, so my dad’s parents were the only grandparents I ever knew.

I’m sure if I’d asked my grandfather, he would have told me about his family. He was a good one for a story. But he had a stroke when I was about 9, and was difficult to understand after that, so by the time I was old enough to think of the questions, he couldn’t give the answers. He died when I was 10.

My grandmother never seemed to want to talk about anything to do with Ireland beyond saying her parents were born and raised in Ireland – especially if you mentioned that her maiden name was English. Since we only visited them on a few holidays a year, and my grandmother, after feeding us kids milk and some of her wonderful cake, got busy with making dinner and talking with my mother, there never seemed to be a chance to sit down with her and find out the family history. By the time I was old enough to want to delve into family history, she was living with my uncle’s family and later was in a nursing home, so I couldn’t really get information from her.

I heard that someone had had a family tree done – this was in the days before the internet – and I set about getting a copy. First I was told my father’s aunt – the only remaining one on his father’s side – had it. I wrote to her, and her reply was wonderful. 

She referred to me as her namesake – I wasn’t. We didn’t spell our first names the same way, and my mother was adamant that I had not been named for her, of all people. She was delighted that I had written, and knew all sorts of things about me, apparently from other relatives. She didn’t have the family tree. She said one of my uncles had it, so I wrote to him, and he sent a copy.

I wish I’d asked the aunt if I could come visit her. It didn’t matter to me that other people in the family didn’t like her – my mother said that although the woman was childless, she told everyone else how to raise their children. I would like to have spent an afternoon with her and learned what she knew of the family history. But I didn’t think of it until years later when I actually had a car, and by then she was dead.

I always knew my mother’s family better than my father’s because we visited them more often. My mother’s identical twin sister was a prolific producer of children, so we were at their house at least once a year, and her other sister lived near them. My mother’s brother lived in the outskirts of the city, not far from us. I knew the stories, but when it came to the people, my knowledge ended with my mother’s grandparents.

Armed with the family tree from my dad’s side, I had a bit more history, but without the stories. Our family had actually married into part of the family tree that went back several more generations to a Lord Someone-or-other.

I had always assumed my family came over because of the Great Hunger (what most people mistakenly call the Famine). I was wrong. They didn’t leave Ireland until the late 1880s.  Having survived two potato crop failures, I wondered why they left.

With the advent of the internet and Ancestry, I got some of my answers. They did not come from the website itself; they came from an email on Ancestry from someone who turned out to be a third cousin.

Because of that email, I had the opportunity to meet both the sender and many other third cousins who live in England and Northern Ireland. I am Facebook friends with many of them. I consider that knowledge and those friendships a gift.

I love discovering relatives I never knew I had. And when I have the opportunity to meet them, it’s thrilling to me.

Recently, I met another of the distant cousins with whom I’m Facebook friends.

On my last trip to the UK, I didn’t ask anyone over there if we could get together because, having done so before, and having been met with excuses from a few, I thought perhaps I was being a bother, and they weren’t as interested in our meeting as I was.

I was surprised when two of the cousins I’d met before wanted to get together. But even more surprising was that another that I hadn’t met before reached out to see if we could meet. It surprised me, then, toward the end of our afternoon together that she said, “Well, I guess you can cross me off your list now.” I hope she was joking. I am never quite sure, when people say things like that, whether or not they’re serious. I genuinely liked her, and would be happy to get together again, just as I was very happy to get together again with the other two cousins.

The thing I haven’t yet discovered is why everyone else from our family who left Ireland went to England, while my direct ancestors came to America. I wonder, if someone asked them why they didn’t go to England if they would’ve said, “Because it’s too damned close to the relatives!” But so far, I haven’t discovered a reason.

I would love to be able to afford to get the kind of in-depth family history that people who appear on Finding Your Roots get.  It’s possible, but I think I’d have to win the lottery to be able to do it. Of course, they wouldn’t be able to surprise me with a famous relative. I already know about and have met the Broadway actress in the family.

About Books: Wolfbane

 

 

Have you ever read a story and thought, “I could write that better!”

Perhaps not the entire story, but certain aspects of it. While that may sound terribly conceited, sometimes an author doesn’t quite hit the mark, and it can be frustrating for the reader, especially if it’s a favorite genre.

This was the case when I read Stephen R. Donaldson’s first Chronicles of Thomas Covenant trilogy, a series about a man with Hanson’s disease.

In this novel, Covenant slips into and out of an alternate world. In this world, he is free from his disease. His wedding band is made of white gold, and the people in this world believe that the white gold wielder has special powers. Thomas is reluctant to use these powers, and only when he is put in a situation where he has no choice does he ever use them and save the day.

I found Covenant to be a bit of a drama queen over the white gold. I understood why his wife left him. He was annoying and prone to whining, and overall not a very good role model for a hero.

At the time I believed you should plug through a novel in a series because the second one or third one might just get better.

I was wrong. The time spent reading those novels is time I will never get back. Yet, it wasn’t a worthless exercise. As I read the books – I’m told the author improved with subsequent novels, but after an entire trilogy, I felt he had his chance and he blew it – I kept thinking of how I would have done things differently.

As far as I was concerned, Thomas Covenant took himself far too seriously. True, Hansen’s disease is no laughing matter, but landing in a place where you’re completely free of disease is a chance to show a little humor.

A source for ideas was, of course, The Twilight Zone. Slipping into an alternate universe seems perfectly normal to anyone who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s watching Rod Serling’s weekly program. There was always the possibility for your consideration of this sort of occurrence actually happening.

And of course, the individual slipping into the universe would be alleviated from some illness or other difficulty. Of course, one must pay the piper, so to speak, and a price of some sort would be exacted.

I had seen many Twilight Zone episodes where being in a strange place resulted in meetings with monsters or worse. But the characters were plucky, and even if they screamed at first, they pulled themselves together and solved their problem – unless they were eaten by the monsters.

So, putting Rod Serling and Stephen R. Donaldson in a blender with some strawberries and a shot of vodka, not to mention late night radio, I created my own story. And before you take umbrage at my “stealing” an idea from elsewhere, even Shakespeare’s work is of questionable originality.

I offer for your consideration: Wolfbane.

Enter Tristan Devereaux, overnight disc jockey on a progressive rock station in the 1980s. Still in his 20s, he has everything going for him until he develops an illness the doctors can’t figure out. Something is wrong with his blood, a disease so rare it doesn’t even have a name. But until they can figure out what to do for him, his best option is to receive transfusions periodically.

Tris is a free spirit who doesn’t want to be tied down, especially with medical issues. He believes he is owed as long a life as most other people. He’s lived his life as a fairly decent person: not perfect, but not a trouble-maker, either. He certainly shouldn’t die before his own parents.

He pulls inward and starts avoiding many of his friends just to keep them from realizing he’s ill. As a way to lighten the mood, because his illness requires blood transfusions, he calls his late night radio show, “Vampires into the night.” Unfortunately, there aren’t any Vampire songs, so he begins his program each evening with “Werewolves of London.” In the 1980s creatures of the night were as in vogue as rock bands that looked like the members were vampires or werewolves.

One night, tired and in need of blood, he stumbles in his living room and falls to the floor. A growl coming from nearby alerts him to the fact that suddenly he is no longer in his living room, but in a woods somewhere, and a wolf is chasing him. The wolf is huge and gaining on him. He has no weapon, so he runs to a tree with low enough branches to climb up, and scurries up the tree high enough to keep the wolf from reaching him.

The wolf jumps and snaps, snarls and paces, but he can’t reach Tris. The young man doesn’t understand why the wolf wouldn’t just get tired and go away. But this wolf is on a mission, and eventually settles on the ground below the tree.

Looking around, Tris sees no one who might be able to help him. Night is coming, and he doesn’t want to spend it in a tree. After a while, as he’s trying to come up with a solution of what to do, he realizes he’s not wearing the clothes he came home from work in, but an outfit that looks more like something from a Robin Hood movie. He didn’t have time to think about how that happened, but he begins to search for pockets in his clothes, to see if he has anything that might help. He finds a dagger.

The dagger isn’t much, and he doesn’t think it’s big enough to kill the massive wolf below him. He moves to the lowest branch, and the wolf appears to be sleeping. Tris has to do something. Without thinking he jumps down from the tree, landing squarely on the wolf, and jams the dagger into its neck. Then he does something he can’t believe: he begins drinking the wolf’s blood as the wolf struggles to get free.

Tris doesn’t have time to be horrified by his own actions. He works instinctively to get the blood he desperately needs.

Finally, the wolf stops struggling, and Tris is sated. He sits up, finally realizing what he’s done, and glad that there was no one to see him. He wipes his mouth, cleans off the dagger and is about to go see if he can find a town or people somewhere to help him.

He’s kind of amused at his decision because he believes he’s still on the floor of his apartment, and this is all a dream. He doesn’t need to do anything, just let the dream move at its own pace.

Gradually he becomes aware that he’s not alone. One by one, people who are all several inches shorter than him, all wearing the same drab garments, come out from behind trees and bushes to surround him. Once a large group has gathered, they begin haling him as the Wolfbane, the killer of the wolf that has been terrorizing their village for months. A cheer goes up, and they heap praises on him.

At first startled, he quickly becomes annoyed because he’s just spent a few hours in a tree, and realizes these people, whoever they are, have been hiding and watching him all this time without anyone lifting a finger to help him.

Finally, they manage to cajole him into returning with them to their village so they can welcome him properly.

The whole episode strikes him as the craziest dream he’s ever had, but since it is a dream, he goes along with it.

It has to be a dream. These people are plain, simple folk who seem to live in the Middle Ages, yet their houses have holographic fireplaces that actually give off heat, sophisticated kitchens with heating and electrical sources he can’t figure out. They have a town council and a town witch. In one sense they seem modern, yet they don’t understand the simplest ideas of 20^th century living. But it’s his dream, so he’s going to run with it.

Before he can figure out the ins and outs of this new society, he wakes up in a hospital, and everyone wants to know where he’s been for the past few days. People had gone to his apartment, but he wasn’t there until that morning, when they found him lying on the floor, barely alive.

He tried to give evasive answers. He knows if he tells the truth, they’ll assume he’s crazy, but he has to tell them something. He claims he doesn’t know, and they think he’s as mad as they would have thought if he’d told them the truth.

He does finally tell someone about his adventure, and even though they don’t believe it, they continue to try to help.

Over the next several months, he has a few more experiences with this alternate world. He tries to find things there that wouldn’t be in his 1980s world, and tries to bring things back with him to prove he isn’t mad. He develops relationships with the townsfolk, both good and bad, and tries to convince his friends there is another world he goes to.

His doctor doesn’t understand when he disappears and comes back seemingly well. He confides in her about the strange village, and insists he doesn’t believe it himself, that it’s just a dream. Yet he is well when he’s there, and in the real world, he’s quickly losing ground to his disease.

He finally tells her he’s decided that he’s going to go permanently to the dream village, where he can live a different sort of life than he ever visualized, but one where he’s no longer the slave to an illness. And yes, later I used a similar plot twist in the Unicorn novels.

Since she can’t talk him out of his decision, she decides wants to witness his going. He seems to fade as he’s lying in a certain spot on the living room floor.

But just deciding to move to an alternate universe isn’t as easy as it might seem. Outside the village, a pack of wolves, brothers to the one he killed, have come for revenge. If the disease doesn’t kill him, the wolves might.

How does it end? You’ll have to wait until the book is published.