Fjallind Launch Party

The second county in Idhua has been launched!  On Friday night the country of Fjallind was introduced with a small dinner party and reading of “The Sorrow of the Lady of Sorjaey.”  Fjallind is in the far north-west of Idhua and has a Nordic flavor.  To that end we had a menu which started with sourdough rye bread with homemade soured cream, pickled onions with fresh dill and smoked roasted mushrooms.  Our main course was honey-roasted root vegetables (parsnips, rutabagas, turnips, carrots and beets) and seitan “reindeer” meat with dumplings in sour-cream gravy. It is somewhat amusing to me to be making up a culture and cuisine and then to be adapting vegetarian versions of the dishes.

Later we had a dessert of crepes with wild blueberry sauce and honeyed whipped cream while we read the story.  Below are some pictures as we passed the story from person to person.  To add to the experience, one of my friends, PF, who attended, had set the song from the story to music.  It was a lovely surprise to add to the evening.

A verse of the song:

Into your keeping, Lady of Midnight,
Myra of the wayfaring roads;
Keeper of travelers and singer of stars,
One last breath, before I am yours.

Incidentally, this story is the one I submitted to the Fairwood Writers' workshop at Norwescon in April.  I am excited to see what sort of comments and criticisms I receive on it.

S, D and I listening

D and PF listening

SF reads as M listens

Epic Dream Inspires Writing

    Occasionally, I have dreams which have many qualities of an epic story.  I usually jot them down – some of them I have used as bases for stories or am saving for ideas.  As I was finishing my work on Eonia and began to turn my thoughts to the next country (which at the moment is still unnamed) I had one such dream.  I had already begun gathering bits and pieces of this new country in stories I had written, but the elements I was toying with didn’t yet fit together.  The bits I had come up with was that there were a people who were nomadic and very secretive.  They had a martial magic which was unique in Idhua, yet it didn’t make sense that they would be in any kind of lasting conflict with their neighbors.  I was just beginning to puzzle over the elements I had already given myself, when this dream offered some interesting solutions to some of the problems. 

    In the dream there was a kingdom, ruled by a Queen (who in the dream was my housemate M) that was plagued by demons.  I was some sort of sorceress who was trying to help the Queen save her country.  In an episode near the beginning of the dream I received a magical crystal sword which I gave to the Queen’s champion, who was my brother.
So far our battle against the demons had not been going well as our weapons were fairly useless against them. Our only reprieve was that they had not figured out how to stay in this world for any length of time.  The Queen’s champion went to fight the demons with his new sword and I, as the royal sorceress set up a sort of monitoring spell to help him.  The new sword was very effective, but, while they were fighting, the demons were pulled back to their own dimension and the champion was pulled too.
 

     However, somehow my spell on him remained intact and I went running off to find my sister, N.  She was also a sorceress and we began preparing a spell to summon our brother back from the demon’s realm, while at the same time helping to prepare an evacuation for the entire castle, which apparently was about to fall off a cliff because the demons had weakened the foundation.  Our spell was successful (which was surprising, seeing as how cause and effect can be very warped in dreams,) and having rescued our brother, we turned our attention to the evacuation.
 

    At this point the dream sort of degenerated into a common trope for my dreams: organizing things.  Most of the people were out of the castle (or house as it had become), but I had a vague sense that we would be heading out on the road in a quest like manner, rather than meeting up with the other evacuees. I determined we would need to take camping type gear. I was in the kitchen of the house and I was getting a little hung up on making sure we had silverware, a cutting board and knife, napkins, dishtowels and soap and an oven rack to prop over a fire for an open flame cooking rack. I was a little frustrated at our lack of useful rations – but when I grabbed the peanut butter I remembered the Emergency Kit I had made up for winter (a real project and I dreamt of the exact plastic crate I used).  My epic dreams often have an episode like this – everybody else will be discussing how to sneak out of the city, or retrieve the magical artifact and I am off making sandwiches.  :)

    But back to the point: I felt there were the bones of an interesting story with the demons, the magic sword and the different realms.  I was also intrigued by the sibling element, as I have not written about siblings for a while.  But besides the elements of one story, I found that idea of a people plagued by demons gave some interesting answers to a nomadic, warlike people who nonetheless were not fighting their neighbors.  The idea that I am exploring now is that in the distant past their ancestors started summoning demons to do their bidding, but at some point the demons figured out how to cross into the human world on their own, though they could never stay for long.  They are attracted to the blood of the sorcerers who first summoned them and so the people keep moving to prevent the demons from getting a “fix” on their location.  Obviously, the idea needs a lot more thought and fleshing out, but at the moment I am enjoying trying it on – and enjoying that my dream gave me some solutions to this next phase of writing.

Book Release: The Wise Man’s Fear

Last Tuesday, M and I went to the book signing for The Wise Man’s Fear at the University Bookstore. Fortuitously, we got really good seats – center in the second row. The event started at 7:00 pm, I arrived at about 5:00 pm to scope it out and save a spot for M, who was working until 6:00. Even two hours early, the chairs set up were nearly full, and by the time the event had started there were people crammed everywhere. The other nice thing about getting good seats was that the front rows got to go through the signing line first and, since my day job starts at 5:00 am (I’m a baker), I was very grateful to get my book signed earlier rather than later (and I am sure it was much later for some folks).

Patrick was a funny and engaging speaker with a very conversational tone. He was very interactive with the audience and I really admired his way of fielding the more silly, inappropriate or unanswerable questions. “That’s a really good question,” he might say, “I wish I had time to answer it. Next?” But he did it in both a humorous and gracious way.

One of the questions he did answer, which I found particularly interesting, was about keeping track of the enormity of his world – which, as I mentioned in my review of The Name of the Wind, is very complex and well realized. He said that he does have some notes, etc. but that a lot of it is in his head. I spent a bunch of time figuring out how to keep track of Idhua and lit upon making myself an encyclopedia for it, so I am very impressed that can keep all that in his head.

I have not started The Wise Man’s Fear yet, for fear (ha!) of becoming immersed in it and not getting my to-do list for this week finished. However, I am planning on picking it up this weekend. Patrick promised the next book will be out in 100 years (but probably sooner), so I have some time to finish this one. ;)

Roses at the Beach - Photo Shoot

Last Sunday we grabbed some costumes and props (mainly some gorgeous roses) and went to Golden Gardens on the Sound to take photos.  I did a romantic sort of get-up and M did steam-punk.  My sister, N, and other friend, S, didn’t want to do the fantasy thing, so they wore more normal clothes.  It was really cold – I was fine in all my layers but that bluish skin on my sister – it wasn’t just the light!  Sadly, my camera was on the wrong setting for a while so the picture of me came out too dark – but then we figured it out and the rest were much better.

Sunset

Roses at the Beach

"I must go down the the sea again..."

Across the sea

M dreaming

On some distant shore

S laughing at the cold

Book Review: The Name of the Wind

The Name of the Wind

Patrick Rothfuss
Daw (2007)

When I was given The Name of the Wind I felt a little bit daunted by its length.  It’s not that I don’t enjoy long books, but I have tried to read too many (fantasy) books that are massively long without having good enough pacing, plot and simplicity (or complexity) to sustain the page count.  I was very pleasantly surprised with The Name of the Wind.  Rothfuss has created a fascinating, complex world and an interesting and nuanced set of characters with which he deftly spins into a story that is at times humorous, sad, exciting, unexpected and always engrossing.

The book consists of multiple layers of stories – in the present the protagonist Kvothe tells the story of his life to the Chronicler who has come to coax it out of him.  This present is infused with a sense of gathering gloom as demonic creatures are discovered to be reemerging and tales of strange happenings filter down into the little village where Kvothe is tending an inn.  As his history unfolds, the mysterious layers of Kvothe’s life begin to emerge.  He is recognized at the beginning as a myth – a man who has faced the strangest things in the world, who is a magician, actor, musician, begger, storyteller and many more things just hinted at.  Perhaps it is this voyage of discovery that makes the tale so compelling.  Rothfuss carries the reader along in the creation of a legend, showing us at once how the life of this mythic character is far more mundane and yet just as astonishing and magical as the tales that are told of it.

Layered within the story of Kvothe’s life are legends of the world he lives in, and like his life sometimes they hold more truth than they seem, while other times they are illusions built upon an ordinary base.  They are interwoven so skillfully that I never lost track of what story I was in or how they were relevant to each other.

At times Kvothe seemed to know a little too much of everything – and, perhaps, given his dishonest tendencies, maintains the moral high-ground with too little effort.  Additionally, his love interest Denna, was a little too unreachable for me.  She was one of those female characters that fascinate the male character with her distance and elusiveness.  She is the flesh and blood personification of Dulcinea: “she’s made of flame and air,” and as such, she is too easy to idolize and doesn’t provide any counterpoint to Kvothe’s fantasy of her.  She could very well be all in his head, which might make her more compelling than as an intangible free-spirit with hints of tragedy about her.  However, this book is only the first in a trilogy and so there is still a chance for her character to become more fully realized in herself, and not just as a object of desire for Kvothe.

The next book, The Wise Man’s Fear, is coming out at the beginning of March, and Patrick Rothfuss will be in Seattle, at the University Bookstore.  My housemate, M, and I are planning on going to hear him talk.  I am eager to discover the next installment of this compelling story.

Submit to The Amber Grimoire

The online Fantasy Journal, which I started last year with my writing group and some other friends, is looking for submissions for our next issue.  The deadline is March 1 and the theme for the Summer Issue is “The Wild Wood.”  We are looking for poetry, short stories, art and book reviews.  Go to Submissions for more information or check out our first issue "Genesis."

Finished Eonia

  This week I finished my fourth country "encyclopedia" entry and short story.  The country is called Eonia and is based loosely on Greek and other ancient Mediterranean cultures.  The rough draft of the short story "The Amulet of Aranos" has taken me longer than I would have liked, mostly because I wrote it going in one direction and then when I shared it with my lovely writing group, Phantasme, the ladies there pointed out the direction that I should be going, or I seemed to want to go.  Of course they were right, so I went back and did a massive rewrite, and then a less massive rewrite, and am finally ready to share it with them again.
  I will be continuing to edit and refine "The Amulet of Aranos" but I am also going to begin my next country next week.  It is a north-eastern country in Idhua - just about directly across the continent from the first country I did, Lendhlay.  It is as yet nameless; I had a name for it that no longer fits, so I am going to have to think about that for a while.  Here is a map of Idhua with the finished countries shaded in: