Time and Writing Revisited

The Holidays are over!  Hurray!  As much as I enjoy a good Christmas and Thanksgiving, all the time off for the two girls means that it is very hard for me to get any work done.  Over the holiday we also kept the school gecko and having just returned her to the science lab, I now find my study strangely lonely.  The presence of another creature that eats, sleeps, hunts, and looks you in the eye was keeping me from being lonely and now I feel it.  Sad.

On the plus side, I know can spread the usual flood of papers over the whole eight feet of my desk instead of just four.  Okay, that’s not really much to celebrate.  I have had wand orders to craft and over the past week was refinishing the stewards’ and deacons’ rods for the lodge.  Nobody noticed.  Which just goes to show you that you can pour days of careful work and problem-solving into a job and still no one will notice.  Especially, in this case, because hardly anyone remembered that I had taken them home to taper and repaint.  It turned out to be more work than I thought.  So, now I can look upon the gleaming white and black rods during lodge and feel good about how handsome, shiny, and functional they are.

Sigh.  Lesson of the day.

So, apart from a very small amount of editing on Wandlore (which I am resolved to finish), writing has been on the backburner.  I can’t count web content dithering, or really writing a talk on mentoring for the lodge.  No work on Emily Glass, except a few stray thoughts.  Today I have a phone call and a doctor’s appointment.  Fortunately for the last I have the car, so it won’t take long.

My mood of late has been to spend time reading girl-hero meets magic books.  I was given a copy of Persepolis for Xmas and read it in two days.  What a marvelous book!  How I wish I could write Emily Glass as a graphic novel!  Maybe I can collaborate someday, after the novels are published and famous.  Sigh.  No, stop it!  No negative thinking!  It will be published and I will finish it and I will carry on to the next book.

Been sleeping poorly the last few nights.  Need to adjust my breathing mask.  Something is not right, as Miss Clavelle said.  That state of daytime somnabulism makes it hard to motivate myself.  Fortunately, once I am seated here at the Mac keyboard, my brain awareness and concentration helps me forget the aches and pains and fatigue.  Persepolis, though, what a great book.  Of course, great especially because it is a true life story.  But I also just found the character of Marjane (the author as a girl) so attractive and her situation so full of sadness and struggling.  So smart and beautiful and talented, and yet so tormented by the confusion of losing her national identity and the society into which she fitted.  I was sorry when I reached the last page — which is about the best compliment one can pay a book and its author.

Without resorting to negative thinking, I wonder how I can make my own book so heart-wrenching and true to life in difficult circumstances. Will Emily’s world fall apart as revolution and war intrude themselves?  Or will she be looking on from outside?  Obviously a more powerful story if she is involved in the civil war, the splitting of sides.  But do I want to write a book with the theme of religious extremism?  Many fantasy stories do take current problems and examine them in a safe, fictional setting, allowing us to see our world more vividly.  Even Tolkien did this with the struggle of East and West in Lord of the Rings, but it was not allegory (which he always said he detested), it was more a matter of similarity enough to make the connection if the reader wished to do so.  And there’s the trick.

Setting the story in the future, I find myself spending too much time on retrospection.  Which, in terms of action, is dull.  In Harry Potter, Rowling used the device of the pensieve so that Harry could travel back in time and space to see events in the past to which he was not present.  I am not sure that is the best way to do it.  Another way is to have a story within a story, told my one of the characters, but generally that method seems clumsy and annoying — unless the story is personally very relevant to the main character.  Or one can read a letter, see a photograph, listen to a recording, even watch a video recording.  All of these are possibilities.  A crystal ball, a dream, a vision, or someone else doing any of these could also work.  Better if it is something that happens to the main character.

However, too much retrospection is confusing and disrupts the plotline if the narrator is telling about something that happened before the moment of the story’s action, or even if the main character is remembering.  Over using the technique is bad and I need to watch it.

Another question still lurking for me is how to convey the family of the Birches and Emily’s relationship to them without getting the reader so involved with them that she thinks it strange for the action to switch to school and leave all those characters behind. Which makes me think again of starting the book in media res, at Four Hallows.  End the first book with the start of Imbolc Term?  The alchemist’s secret would not have been fully revealed perhaps?  End after the familiars come?  No that doesn’t seem like the end.  It needs the following action for us to really see what familiars can do.

On the other hand, I could show what familiars do by showing uses of the familiars by older students and teachers. There are some interesting possibilities to explore.  The telepathic and empathic link between familiar and its mage needs to be explored.  Is that enough for the first book?  The second book can focus on the wands they get at the end of the first book.  Is that anticlimactic?  Over summer?  In Autumn?

And that reminds me that when I left off before Thanksgiving, I was still grappling with a way to map out the plot.  Surely someone has figured this out already.  Time to Google…

Time and Writing

The old adage says “Time Flies when you’re having fun.”

I just spent three hours at the keyboard writing steadily and produced nine pages single spaced.  Unforntunately it wasn’t my novel, but anyway, it struck me.  This is why writing is such a slow process.  If we made it double-spaced it would amount to six pages an hour.  The nine pages I wrote this morning was rambling stuff, too long, undisciplined and unrevised.  The revision process is even slower than the first draft — at least if it requires a lot of cutting.

I’m revising Emily Glass right now too and am cutting out a lot.  I am also applying one of the most important things I learned in my Loft class — how to show what characters are doing rather than telling about them.  For years I drilled my composition students with “Show!  Don’t Tell!” but until now, I did not really grasp how that applied to my fiction writing.  In my first draft there was action, but it was mostly Emily and the othrers talking, and often talking about things that had happened in the past to characters who had not been introduced.   Show, don’t tell means don’t introduce a character unless he or she is present in the scene.  I am not sure that is always possible or desireable, but one has to notice it and consider why one is having characters talk about someone who the reader has yet to meet in the flesh, so to speak.

Lesson for the day.

Terpsichore and Dance

One of the central big themes underlying book one of Emily Glass is that of Dance.  I’ve assigned one of the nine muses to each of the books in the series 1-9.  Terpsichore is the muse of the Neophyte year at Four Hallows because Dance is the art of working together in coordination, joined intimately in music, movement, the body, mind, and emotions.  Dance is also foundational to magick and I am thinking about taking more dance lessons myself.  It has been years — largely for lack of a willing partner.  But my daughter at eleven (and nearly since she could walk) has loved to dance, just taking a song and choreographing it and then working it out.  I’m sure when she’s about fifteen she will love to have me come to school dances with her…

The deep structure of dance is what interests me.  The word “music” means the actions of the muses, but we naturally look to Terpsichore for the full-body inspiration, especially in modern Western society.  Our folk dances are now hip hop, trance dance, disco, and so on — and the club scene in every city are our temples to the muses.  In E.G. Emily discovers how magical dance can be — something she really already knew from her childhood because she and her cousin danced all the time.  In some ways, Dance serves the purpose in this schooldays novel as team sports does in the traditional Tom Brown, Mallory Towers books.  There will be sports too, but the focus on dance and deportment that the boys and girls receive in their first year lifts sport to another level too.  For they come to be able to use their magic when playing sports too.

By this I’m not suggesting casting curses on opponents or enchanting balls during the games.  That sort of magic is considered unsportsmanlike just as any other sort of cheating.  It is malicious and one lesson the young teens are learning is not to be malicious because it has consequences, especially for the magicals.  Highly sensitive to the astral forces underlying physicality, magical children must learn to guard themselves against such forces acting on them or undermining their own magic.  The uses of deportment and dance in sport are on both the physical level (body control and coordination, rhythm) and on the astral level — forces of  will and desire are passing between magicals all the time and can be used to slip around the defenses of others without malice.  It is the same thing on an astral level as dodging a tackle in the material plane.

Fencing plays a major role in the school, and one reason for this is that the sword is a magical implement and its use, like that of a wand, is not merely (or even mostly) on the material plane.  It is the astral and mental planes in which the sword’s power lies — the ability to fool the opponent and slip past her guard.  This is not simply a matter of physical quickness and technique; it is a mental game in which the two astral beings (the fencers) are joined and their minds touch.  The game involves anticipation of the other’s moves, and clear reading of her emotions.  These are the astral abilities of prescience and empathy.  Moreover, the fencers must become astrally aware of their opponent’s perception of them — you reading how well the opponent is reading you.  The mental reading is reading what the person is thinking, strategizing.  The astral reading is intuiting what the other person is intuitively feeling and desiring.

The relevance of this to dance should be obvious.  Similar skills are required.  The 12-year olds are first taught to dance in groups, not couples, and given individual instruction and help with the art and specific dance steps and movements.  The goal here is to develop the astral and mental connection requried.  When this is taken to the next level of couples dancing, the style is to dance not touching physically.  This focuses the magical child’s soul on mind into the interaction with a partner.  The children are allowed to dance touching and more slowly at age 15, and this then focuses on ballroom style dancing, and becomes potentially more erotic.  Some are now experiencing feelings of attraction and infatuation and may be engaged in sexual touching (if they can find any privacy).  But many at this age are still unsure what is happening or how to deal with it. The study and practice of dance helps them to understand so they can make rational choices, even while their emotions and bodies are throwing them non-rational urges.

This is not done in order to encourage the 15-yr olds to get involved romantically or sexually.  It is done to teach them how to manage sexual feelings of attraction, which are communicated through body language and astral power on the emotional level.  The teens are taught to examine these feelings and understand them, control them, and then have fun with them.  This prepares them for becoming sexually active at age 17 or 18. The expectation is given that the students at Hallows will not have complete sexual relations until that age and it is discussed openly and in classes, so that they understand the reasons not to simply give in to the body’s urges.

Now, in Emily Glass and the Alchemist’s Secret, the dance theme and the use of dance literally and more metaphorically, connects to the plot of Emily’s self-discovery, and also to the secret agent who is pursuing her and pursuing the Emerald Tablet.  The agent is involved in a metaphorical dance with Aurelius and his side. The metaphor of a fencing match or a chess game is also apt.

From the Loft

I am taking a class in children’s lit writing at the Loft Literary Center.  I am the only guy, but I am dealing with that.  Just feel conspicuous.  Read the first half of chapter one yesterday and received some good feedback.  To summarize:

1.  The story needs to start immediately with the p.o.v. of the main character, not a minor one.

2.  Avoid confusing your reader.

3.  Don’t introduce characters until they actually do something.  That means figuring out where else to introduce the Birches.  So, remove the exposition in ch.1 and it will be a better length.

4.  chapters that can be read in 15 minutes will appeal to teachers reading in class.

5.  Don’t switch p.o.v. unless there is a chapter break or some other break.  The reader wants to stay in the main character’s head.

The fifth point is one to think about, because it has implications for what can be shown.  True, many books keep the main character always front and center and anything that happened when he/she was not present, must be related or deduced.  Mysteries are often of this sort, sticking to the detective.  However, on TV or in the movies, that is not the case.

My teacher was objecting to an instance where I suddenly, from one paragraph to the next, was relating the thoughts of different characters.  While one can relate the thoughts of another character than the protagonist, it is not a good idea to do so while the main character is present in the scene.  Confusing, and disrupts the reader’s identification with the prota.

Another interesting point that emerged was that (in the very small sample), several of the readers were not sure if Prince Nodd and the other elves were going to be “real” people in the fantasy world or just make-believe people, as in the girls’ game.  I think the part that threw them was when I wrote that the girls had visited Prince Nodd.  It had never occurred to me that a reader might think that this prince — the elves in general — were going to be simply part of the story, as they are in Tolkien or a hundred of his imitators.  No one, I think, was aware that I was introducing Celtic deities.  So, I need to take that into account.  Linnea never expressed confusion.  I wonder why?

Clearly, thought, I cannot expect my young readers to understand at once that these make-believe people are divinities or the Tuatha.  It is necessary to sort of iris-out from Emily.  That is, show her immediate life with the Birches and maybe in the town, and then expand out to include the school and then the larger world of wizards and the Tuatha.  What I was trying to establish and the Willow scene was that Emily and Sabrina were already in touch with the elves, the Tuatha, before they realized  what it meant and that imagination is the first sign of magic.

Another good point that one of the class brought up was whether the Britishisms work.  After all, I am an American and will likely be publishing to an American audience.  Should I go back to the idea of a fantastical America?  When world-building is involved, the reader has to endure a certain amount of confusion about the world until he/she figures out what is intended.  On the other hand, the reader has certain expectations from other books that will interfere if they introduce misreading the cues.  The wizard school in York Dales is very like the Hogwarts Scottish setting, though that was much more vague.  The question is whether Brits will think it is laughable for a Yank to be writing a book with such a setting.

If only I could go spend some months in Yorkshire.

If only I could pay the bills!

So, how to make it clear that we are in a world with Celtic myths, and establish the Kingdom of Northumbria and so forth so that the overall setting and time will be clearer.  Of course, I don’t want the reader to necessarily know about the future aspect of the setting.  That can be explored later, when Emily has some sense of history.  Linnea has a very sketchy sense of the past at eleven, and that is normal.  Still, traditional schools did lay more emphasis on memorizing the names of kings and so forth.

The feudal setting sets up expectations too — like no bicycles for example.  If I get the reader believing we are in a fictional “middle ages” and then throw in a bicycle, that will be jarring and may even make a reader toss the book aside.  So, I have to make sure the bicycles are there at the outset.  On the other hand the horse-drawn carriages have to be there too.  That will get them thinking it is in the 19th century, which is wrong too.

So, what do I do?  Introduce the world?  Can I still start with action on Emily and then digress into an exposition on the world? How can I do that while still writing in Emily’s p.o.v.  ?  What prompts her to think about the world in those general terms?  Daydreaming in the classroom looking at the map?  Looking out the window to see carriages and carts and bicycles?  Is Mamzelle Lacrosse then lecturing on the political bodies of the Parliament — the House of Lords, the House of Burgesses, and the Convocation of Druids?  Is there a house of Commons? or Crafters and Crofters?  The Crafter class are really the Burgesses, working in towns.  The Crofters own land but are not knights — they serve the Knights, who are the Lords.

But here again, can I convey the generalities so that the reader of the first chapter will understand the world enough, without boring them with too much detail?  I can do that a little by having Emily be bored by it, but will that work?  Will 12 year old readers catch the political organization — that is, notice it enough to see it fleshed out later?   And will they understand that it is not simply a feudal setting?  Well, the audience is more likely to have read fantasy feudalism than they are to know diddly about the actual middle ages in Europe.

I suspect these days even British children are not taught medieval history until long after 12.  That means that, for example, the quasi-medieval character of the wizards’ world in Harry Potter was being read byyoung readers as just pure fantasy.  I was seeing it as bearing the trappings of the medieval world in its clothes and lack of technology, but the target reader would not have made that connection, or thought that it was unhistorical and poorly explained why the wizard world was that way.  They would simply accept it.

Well, more bones to gnaw.

Alferian

On the School-University Setting

Many novels are set in boarding schools.  It’s a whole genre.  Many are also set in universities.  They are usually in the Mystery genre.  But I have realized that my own Emily Glass novel and its planned sequels are a combination of the two.

The boarding school novel generally deals with growing up.  The university mystery novel tends to deal with spies, murder, or both, and the usual motives of infidelity, jealousy, envy, or greed.  So, combining the two, I am setting the “growing up” story inside a larger setting of the adult world, of which the university is a symbol – or what do you call it?  Synecdoche?  (Ooooo, spellchecker doesn’t like that one).

The university is, of course, also a setting for a growing up plot, or Maturation plot, only at an older period of life.  I am not aware, off hand, of any novels that approach the college-life phase of growing up.  Are there any?  There are certainly novels of character or manners that deal with young people around that age, but not in a university setting.  The Jane Austen novels are not so much about teenagers as they are about making the transition from being a young lady at home with parents to marrying and starting a new phase of life.

Oh, I’ve thought of one, sort of.  Brideshead Revisited.  It takes place partly at Oxford and then the characters grow up.  But even in this case, they do not grow up in university, through education.  Oxford is merely a sort of backdrop to allow the main characters to meet across barriers of social class.

It may be that in Brit Lit the “leaving home” motif was more appropriate at twelve with boarding school because that is when it happened — the beginning of the boy’s separation from the domestic sphere of mother to the outer sphere of men (and in this case Empire).  School is used almost always in stories as a place where education is merely a backdrop for the relationships between and among characters.  That is partly because nobody wants to read a story that describes the main character learning Latin, or biology, or economics, or even literature.  It’s an intriguing idea to try, though.

A novel in which the main character is 18 and off to Augsburg College with dreams of being a writer, struggles with love, sex, and his own egotism.  How he changes for better or worse by reading Victorian novels and Romantic poets, and studying in Britain for a year, studying art and history.  Would such a story hold any interest for a reader, unless there were a murder mystery in it too?  As a bildungsroman, would anyone believe that education builds character?

I think there is no American tradition of this.  I wonder if there is in Germany.  In America the predominant attitude has always been anti-intellectual.  Hard work, muscle, sweat, the self-made millionaire — those are the virtues of masculinity that are lauded in American culture.  Schooling (lower or college) appears in some stories as a way that rural-born characters are changed but the sense is that this change is a mixed bag because the character returns home and is perceived as full of himself, thinking he is better because of his education, etc.

Willa Cather includes education in some of her novels.  It doesn’t fair too well in The Professor’s House, where the professor of the title needs to get away to Mesa Verde to build his character.  Universities are seen as a place where the teachers stagnate.  Not as places of adventure and intellectual growth.  Maybe they do get mind-numbing in their present form.  But my stories hearken back to the Renaissance universities and their eager, sometimes violent disputations about the nature of God and reality.

The reason universities are so dull today is that so many people believe we have answered those questions in their broad outlines.  God has been explained away as an anthropological curiosity not to be reckoned with in academic life, and Reality has been likewise fully explained by the physicists and chemists.  In the Humanities, the Human Condition is a bit old fashioned and quaint, having been largely replaced with statistical studies and textual analysis of cultural artifacts (such as novels).

So, by that modern world of education, the university is not a place for soul-searching and the discovery of the enchantment of the world.  It is a place worthy of Thomas Gradgrind in Dickens’ Hard Times, a place of facts and formulas and minutiae, a place for discovering not God and the nature of spiritual reality, but a place for discovering the latest new medical treatment for cancer, or the latest economic theory, or perhaps a new sort of genetically engineered rice.

Am I too cynical?  Well, I don’t know.  Can you have too much cynicism?

[The Cynics'] philosophy was that the purpose of life was to live a life of Virtue in agreement with Nature. This meant rejecting all conventional desires for wealth, power, health, and fame, and by living a life free from all possessions. As reasoning creatures, people could gain happiness by rigorous training and by living in a way which was natural for humans. They believed that the world belonged equally to everyone, and that suffering was caused by false judgments of what was valuable and by the worthless customs and conventions which surrounded society. (Wikipedia, “Cynics”)

This could be a description of Druidry today.  Finding a natural lifestyle and eschewing wealth, power, fame.  Not so much health, however.  I think the Cynical view of health is that you should not think you are hot bananas just because you are healthy.  Nor think that life is miserable because you are ill.  Illness is part of nature, not a punishment or something to be proud about.

Now, I don’t live a life free of possessions, nor do any of the other drewish folk I know.  But there is a heightened awareness of our materialism, consumerism, and pack-rattishness, that perhaps sets the druwish person apart from the madding crowd.  When I overcome my clutter and collections, I shall no doubt be happier.  At any rate I will have less to dust.

But, of course, the simple life is not the life of school either.  Not schools as they are found in our culture.  So, in depicting a druid school and university it is my goal to draw a contrast, to show a Western educational institution that is like a Buddhist monastery, or even the ideal of the Cistercian monastery — seeking simplicity in life and a minimum of personal possessions in order to be free to cultivate the powers of the spirit.

There is definitely an underlying theme of contrast between our current culture and its institutions of higher education and the imagined druid culture of my stories.

Action and Violence

This week while working on the plot of the book, I had the idea that I could actually split out the three plotlines I was including into three books.  They would be:  1.  The Discovery Plot of Emily adjusting to her changed life at Four Hallows and the grandmother she has never met, and being in the secret world of the wizards.

2.  The journal plot revealing in the end her grandfather Aurelius incognito at the college.

3.  The emerald tablet plot in which someone is either trying to kidnap Emily or trying to steal the emerald tablet.

Thoughts…

If I did this, then the first book would be even less like Harry Potter 1.  It would in effect take the orphaned protagonist to the wizard’s school and show how she and her fellow neophytes struggle through their probationary year.  In this plot by itself, the climax would come with the apearance of  Emily’s familiar, which is the sign that a neophyte has discovered her talent and can continue at the school.  Along the way, we wonder and worry about which of her friends will go on and who may be sent down, as her aunt Anne was.  Emily deals with her grandmother’s stern and distant personality, and with the spy who seems to be trying to get at her for some reason.  By the end of the book, in the falling action, it can be revealed to her that she is heiress to the Glass estates and most importantly the Otherworld Door in Skye.

This first book, according to my thematic outline has (as the first nine books all do) a Muse Theme and a Virtue Theme. The first book is Terpsichore and the virtue of Silence and Truth.  Emily learns how to use her body and spirit in coordinated action with others, through deportment, dancing, choir, lacrosse, tennis, and cricket.  The Dance is central, as a metaphor and literally. She learns of the function and uses of dance and also how it relates to the magical life.  These lessons about nuvra (Brittic for prana) are foundational to magic.

Also, she is first instructed in elementary Glamoury, so learns to use her imagination actively as a magical tool — the true wand — not think of it as foolishness or idle daydreaming as she was taught at her aunt’s house.  This is not merely window dressing, a background to the main action, as is that case in Harry Potter.  It is integral to the Discovery plot as Emily discovers not only how magic works, but also her particular talent.

The two threats that create the dramatic tension are 1. that Emily might not pass her neophyte year, and 2. that the spy migh harm her.  However, there is little or no violence n the story.  The physical danger that comes at Gaping Gill does not resove into fighting much less death.

I do not want in my stories the sort of emphasis in HP on “zapping” adversaries and killing curses.  The adversaries of the protagonist are not trying to kill her but find a way to possess her lands.  In book 1 they are just trying to ascertain whether she is in fact the daughter of Hamish and Claire Glass.  I want to focus on matters of ordinary life, particularly education.

Reading a little about the Children’s book market and the general field of Children’s lit, it seems to me true that today’s magical stories are almost always about children running from and fighting magical beings with no adult help.  My desire is to write stories that show children engaging with magical beings, finding themselves to be magical beings, and receiving kind and wise guidance from adults.

Consider the adults in HP.  Unlike most school story novels, the teachers are not all bad or adversarial.  Usually, the teachers are at best an indifferent background to the more interesting extra-curricular antics of the characters.  Children’s lives in the classroom are regarded as dull and tantamount to prison.  Enid Blyton in the Malory Towers books is more positive, but the main purpose of the teachers is to be the object of practical jokes.  Only the headmistress is a wise and benevolent adviser, and this in the larger dimensions of life and character.  In Jill Murphy’s Worst Witch series the potions mistress is the main adversary, and the other teachers offer very little in the way of help.  Mildre Hubble, the protagonist, gets herself in and out of scrapes, no thanks to the adults.

This stereotype of teachers as aloof and clueless about their students and downright uncaring about anything but their attendance and performance in academic matters is unpleasant.  However true it may be in too many cases, this is not the student-teacher relationship that I want to highlight.  In HP Dumbledore is a helper who withholds too much information from Harry and Harry asks too few questions.  This is defective on both scores.  Students should be shown eagerly asking questions and teachers, generously answering them, to expand the understand of the student.

Action and violence and shoot-em-ups with pure evil villains may sell books, but my experiment is to see if readers will like books about magic that do not depend on these massive Good against Evil struggles, but show the characters simply dealing with the kind of real-life decisions and choices, pains and joys of normal life.  The presence of magic in thikind of world that is neather a silly joke, constantly tongue in cheek, nor a world of looming threat, is more appealing to me.  Anne of Green Gables with magic.  But, of coure, this does not even make sense to people when I suggest it because the pre-conceived notion of magic is spells and curses and magic rings and al that.  There never is any attempt to understand how magic works in a natural philosophy sense.

Magic is still, almost always, set up in opposition to science and technology.  Rowling makes the gesture of suggesting that magic can be studied scientifically, but strips it of its spiritual foundations.  The magic of HP, despite many puns and joking references to actual magical history and folklore, diverges from both almost entirely.

I’ve taken the step of setting the story in a modified parallel future, but for the most part, I want to give the readers the real folklore and the real history of magic, and the real tools to understand the whole Art.  HP’s world is split into the muggle world which is a parody of our ordinary world, with adults being largely stupid, and the wizard world where the adults and children are often stupid, corrupt, self-serving, or downright cruel.  Yet, for example, do we see the actual results of Draco Malfoy’s upbringing.  We see his prejudice and we see him trapped into serving evil ends through blackmail.  Do we really see his character as an only child raised rich in a family of bigots who engage constantly in emotional abuse?  A family that includes connections to the Black family (his mother’s side) a family full of wizards who have used magic to get what they want from other people, to dominate, control, and take.

Draco Malfoy has so much potential as an interesting character.  Slytherin House has so much potential as a study in our values.  But instead of doing that, the character and the house are just treated as stereotypic, half-comical, badguys.  They mostly engage in cheating.  The emphasis on the real core of Slytherin House — ambition — is lost.

But I am troubled by my own daughter’s incredulity that “normal life” can be combined with “magic.”  She is heavily into the Sisters Grimm books now, which are tongue-in-cheek modernizations of the Grimms folktales.  They are humorous and also full of action and physical threats to the girls.  Compare this sort of story to some books I love:  Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, Goneaway Lake, the Nancy Drew and Tom Swift series (the latter was my favorite at age 10), or even Dr. Dolittle, the Hugh Lofting series the main “magic” of which is that the doctor can talk to animals and the animals are much more intelligent that we should normally give them credit for.  I ought to re read Dragonsong about the girls harper and the fire lizards.  That is magical realism and involves Menolly going to school at Harper Hall.

So, to lunch…

Future History

In Emily Glass, I have created a setting which is in the future 500 years but is much like the culture of the 18th century in terms of technology and populations.  It is post-industrial and recovering from centuries of chaos and decline.

At the same time I’ve changed some things in the history of the setting.  So, for example, the Romans never successfully conquered Britain or southern Gaul and the druids remained the center of intellectual power and education in those lands.  This has some consequences, one of which is that the tribes of Prydein (Britian) did not unite into a Roman-style monarchy but continued with a system of local tribal government led by kings and a High King over them all as occurred in Ireland.  So, Ireland, Scotland, and England-Wales are Three Kingdoms each with a High King or Queen, and each relating to the other more as kin than as enemies.

With Boudicca triumphant over the Romans and Roman occupation lasting only a few years, the British people were strong enough to prevent the takeover by the Angles and Saxons. Those migrating peoples were defeated militarily and forced to integrate into the dominant society as immigrants, not as conquerers.  The union of the Saxons and the Britons was also able to effectively repel the invasion of William of Normandy, so that he never became King of England.  Normandy remained a powerful French duchy. Another result is that while the hatred of Prydein for France goes forward much like it did in our historical timeline, Scotland (Alba) and Ireland (Eire) were never the victims of the Norman conquests or the attempt to subjugate those lands to an English King.  This means that Prydein is not plagued by war with Scotland and does not reduce Ireland to a backward and oppressed subject.  Eire retains its medieval glory and grows from that to be an equal partner with the other two High Kings.  It also means that feudalism and tribalism continued and evolved into increasingly better connected and more unified relations as the modern industrial world unfolded, so that feudal titles did not become mere hereditary honors, as they had by the 19th century in England.  Nor did the nobles fail to take their due share of the industrial riches generated by the growth of cities and towns.

The Industrial Revolution met the Three Kingdoms as a strong and intrenched system of classes — the five classes of the old Celtic tribes, namely: the warriors, the druids, and crafters,  the crofters, and the servitors.  In this way, by what we regard as the period of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, the class system was even more firmly in place than in our timeline.  But the power of feudal lordship was divided among the druid and warrior classes, not established around warriors only as the Normans did.

Then we reach the Age of Empire and the Three Kingdoms send explorers and colonists to North America.  Only I’m not calling it America.  It was named after the Norse explorers Vinland, so that the whole continent was given that name eventually.  The colonies that were established by the druid countries settled as new kingdoms and reproduced the feudal system of organization that persisted in the Three Kingdoms and in the Brittic lands of southern Gaul.  Christianity did not gain an absolute hold over all of Europe because of the persistence of druids. Some of the Celts were converted and some were not, but the druids provided resistance to the tactic of converting whole tribes or kingdoms by baptising the monarch.

There is an underlying religious competition, but the druids are not aiming at conquest and conversion.  One effect of this is that the druid-led colonists of Vinland did not have the Roman-Christian idea of conquest and imposing Roman civilization upon the native peoples of the new land.  The druids sought to create a working system of mutual trade and friendship with the Native American tribes in the Eastern half of the continent.  The French empire retained ownership and development of Louisiana (stretching from the gulf north and west to what is now Washington State.  They gradually lost land through war with the Celtic kingdoms in the New World, but not all at once as in the Louisiana purchase.

Another effect of the feudal system is that while the Rights of Man were introduced as a social reform, the kingdoms did not evolve into the United States because there was no colonial overlord against whom they needed to rebel.  They were always free and independant of the kings in Prydein, Alba, and Eire.  Instead of revolution, ties of kinship were cultivated and a lucrative trading system.

The kingdoms of New Belgica, New Nederlands, in the northeast were joined in trade and alliance with the Brittic kingdoms of Sylvania and Virginia.  Florida and most of the Carribbean remained in the hands of the Spanish, who while also Romano-Celts developed along lines closer to those in our timeline because the Romans occupied Iberia successfully.  So, the Spanish Empire was enormous — the whole of the southern continent which was called New Hispania, and the lands north as far as Mexico and what is now Texas.  This vast Empire was eventually fragmented along geographical lines, but the Empire in Vinland remained intact.  Its capital was in the oil region called Tehania (our Texas) which covered the lands down to Guatemala and west to the Pacific coast (including what is inour world California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado.  Utah became a separate Mormon state.  The Pacific Northwest became the Brittic Kingdom of New Cymri. In between these various political divisions the Native tribes of Vinland continued to inhabit and defend their lands with the help of their druid allies.  So, the threat to the American Indians came from Tehania in the south, but the Great Plains were not converted completely to European-style farming.  Only when Tehania conquered Louisiana did this occur, south of the border of a large Indian territory stretching from the Pacific coast across the Rocky Mountains, and encompassing the Great Lakes.  Other native tribes were given duchies within the feudal system of the Celts, and were permitted considerable autonomy.

If then industrialism and exploitation of the land proceeded through 2/3 of what is now the U.S.A. it resulted in the same kind of climatic change we are now seeing.  The Oil Age brought about global warming and the druid countries were implicated in that industrialism based on Oil.  However, the druids and ovates successfully convinced their people of impending disaster and their culture prepared for the end of cheap energy.  In the Oil Wars that followed, they were able to withdraw and so remain out of the conflicts for the most part. When the ice caps and glaciers of antarctica and Greenland melted and changed the climate and the course of the oceans currents, the civilization of the Oil Age collapsed in a matter of one decade.  The age of warlords that followed, still centered around possessing oil to run war machines and build explosives.

Inexorably, the population shrank, natural disasters made the plight of coastal cities worse, refugees overwhelmed the cities of the interior sparking armed conflict, and the attempt to solve the problems by military force and capitalist competition ended destroying both capitalism and mechanized militarism.  Cast back to the technology of the pre-industrial period and with much knowledge lost, people in the West had to start again, and now were on a more level playing field with the peoples of Africa and the world that was never fully industrialized before the collapse.

My query is this:  How would the people of Prydein think of the people of Vinland, after this catastrophe took place?  800 years after the first European pioneers and colonists crossed the Atlantic, would they think of Vinland as a fallen great power?  Or would they even generalize about people from the continent?  Would they see them as allies who help them survive the two world wars?  For these are the products of the Oil Age and Nationalism that replaced feudalism in much of Europe.  France and Germany, Italy and all of Eastern Europe adopted the idea of Nationalism while the Celts did not.  So the clash of Nations in the two World Wars was as before, but the Gauls and the Celtic peoples of the Three Kingdoms in the Isles, came to the aid of France as the lesser of two evils.  A civilized rapprochement had occurred between France and Prydein after Napoleon’s defeat.

One may well ask whether the French Revolution would have happened withouth the influence of the American Revolution.  I think it is all right to assume that it could have happened even without that model.  Prydein and the others were not, after all, the powerful domineering Roman-style Empire that the British Empire became in our timeline.  Less unified, and without an innate faith in their right to conquer other peoples and civilize them, the course of the 19th century would have been different.  France would have felt less threatened by Prydein than by the rival Germans, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese empires.  After the world wars, all of Europe became more united in their fear of the growing power of modernizing China.  But the Deluge and the Collapse brought that new world order to an end and globalism gave way to localism.

Nationalism, Capitalism, Communism, all were seen as the failed ideas of the Oil Age and looked back upon with revulsion much as we may look back now upon the Spanish Inquisition.  It seemed like a good idea at the time, but in retrospect anyone can see that it was horribly misguided by a philosophy that undermined humanity.  So too with the accepted wisdom in the 20th century (or as it is in Wizard’s Reckoning, the 100th century).  Those strivings for gigantic conquering systems that would control both all the people and all of the natural world, turning them to power and profit — these systems were revealed in the Decline and to the few remaining scholars of the Dark Age, as systems based on preposterous assumptions of Humanity’s “destiny” and the ideology of Christian conquest and conversion.

So, after all that happened and recovery of order was begun, how would a teenage girl think of a girl who came from Vinland?  What associations would they have?  The Red Men?  Had their culture remained simple and close to the earth?  Had it served as a guide to the druids of the 97th and 98th centuries and remained so into the 101st?  That would all be 500 years in the past.  Their associations would have to be based on more recent history, more recent news.

But What?

Harry Potter 6

Saw the film version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  I thought it was brilliant.  I love being immersed in the cinematography of Hogwarts  and I liked the way the affections between the main characters grow.  That said, further thought and re-reading the book makes me realize that some very important subtleties were left out.  Moreover, for some reason best known to themselves, the writers of the film took away the climactic battle at Hogwarts at the end of the book and inserted an entirely made-up battle in a swamp next to the Weasleys’ house, the Burrow.

It may be that they thought the film would be too slow for the modern kid audience if there wasn’t any violence in the whole movie till the end (apart from Draco breaking Harry’s nose).  Which brings me to the bone I have to pick with these books and the films even more so.  There is too much emphasis on violence.  Magic is used as a labor-saving device, a form of entertainment, or a weapon.  And the foreground of the stories is the weapon idea.

While this idea is prevalent in fantasy novels — especially since they all started resembling Dungeons and Dragons — it is utterly disconnected from the real history of magic.  I would really like to have the chance to ask Ms Rowling if she believes in magic or has any experience with it.  She uses it mostly as a device for creating dramatic tension, but also seems to pull her punches by making magical and physical wounds easy to repair.

When I stand back and look at what actually happens to the main characters through the book series, most of them ought to have died long before book 6.  This means that Rowling uses the threat of violence and death as a plot motivator, but magically manages to undo every threat so that her characters can carry on without even a lingering scratch.  One can perhaps be thankful that Dumbledore got his hand burned to a crisp destroying Voldemort’s horcruxes, but the whole method seems queer to me.  No question that it is entertaining, but it begins to seem like every other superhero movie that is out these days, with heroes doing impossible physical feats, surviving explosions, fire, drowning and anything you like.  Entertaining to a point, but beyond that point, I find myself wishing for something more like real life.

What is the point of making a fantasy novel like “real life” you may well ask.  Of course not.  That would defeate the purpose of escape into the world of wish-fulfilment or nightmare, as the case may be.  The Harry Potter books and films successfully evoke both those aspects of fantasy.  What they do not do is portray magic in the context of real life.  And that is what I am trying to do.

That is why I prefer to call my stories “magical realism” to use the term Borges and Marquez use of their work (or the critics do anyway).  In this kind of fiction we see the ordinary world as extraordinary and magic as commonplace.  But not quite commonplace, only accepted as a real part of the world. Accepted as much as any other art.  Very few people will say “I don’t believe in poetry” or “I don’t believe in music” or “I don’t believe in dance” or “There is no such thing as painting.”  People do not usually try to explain away the marvel of the dancer or the painting as if they could not really exist and must be either lies or hallucinations.

People do, however, try to describe all of these arts without reference to their magical effects upon people.  They are described in material terms and in vague ideas of artistic genius and audience response, but not in terms of enchantment.  The reason?  Because our very language has been stripped of any vocabulary for discussing the world in magical terms.  Not only have the religious authorities and the scientific community successfully educated everyone in the West to disbelieve in enchantments, but our language (English at any rate) lacks any orderly terminology, a discourse of magic in which the phenomenal world could be interpreted.

It is there, but it is very little known and it is obscure because it makes due with metaphors and completely novel definitions of ordinary words which are hard to understand.

That is one thing I am trying to address.  It is interesting that Ms Rowling builds this vocabulary to a degree.  She has invented words and incantations and ways of talking about magic as a factual subject.  The problem is that  the terminology relates to her fantasy magic and not to real enchantment.  In stead of understanding the spiritual effects of herbs on healing or circumstances, Ms Rowling invents strange new “magical” plants that do not exist in our world.  The world of magic seems oddly segregated off from the rest of life.  We may dream of living in that world, but we know we cannot because it isn’t our world.

Can I write a world into which readers will want to escape, and yet a world they will recognize is their own world too, so that they will come to see the world around them with a new eye — to see the wonder and enchantment in nature and in ourselves?

About the Title

Titling a book is one of the most difficult aspects of novel-writing.  The working title of Emily Glass and the Alchemist’s Secret bears an obvious similarity to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.  The similarity is intentional because my desire in this book is to treat the philosopher’s stone, alchemy, and school better than did J.K. Rowling in her books.  By “better” I mean only to give them serious consideration as real magic in the western magical tradition, and school as a place where actual magical philosophy could be learned.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked the Harry Potter books and films and am entirely envious of the illustrious Ms. Rowling.  I no more expect Emily Glass to be the same kind of phenomenon as Harry Potter that I expect bags of gold coins to fall from a blue sky onto my patio (mind the umbrella, please…)  It is only that the effect upon me of reading the books was to make me wonder how a druid school would work and how it would differ from Hogwarts, and to try to make fiction emulate a reality that I fondly desire.  The world of Harry Potter with all its horrors is not a world I should like to see come about in real life.

I fear that the title is too imitative of the many Harry Potteresque series that have appeared since the phenomenon, riding the wave, as it were.  The nod to Harry Potter is intended to cue the reader that I am doing something different with similar ideas, not imitating my predecessor.  However, I don’t know if readers will get it.  I’ll let a publisher decide that one.

The actual reference is not in fact primarily to Harry Potter but to Nancy Drew.  I have shared these books with my girls and we love them, despite their old-fashioned tone and formulaic elements.  I used to love the Tom Swift series when I was a boy too and it was based upon much the same kind of formula — a mystery plot with just a bit of science fiction for seasoning and interest.  Of course there is the whole idea of “inventiveness” and “engineering” as part of a real boy’s repertoire — hard work and daring, but intellectual work with a practical application (and economic payoff).

In Nancy Drew, of course, the emphasis is on a model of feminine intelligence and daring that in some ways quite undermines the usual gender roles for women at the time those stories were penned.  Both series are part of the larger genre of book series for boys or girls designed to present didactic messages about what a productive and good person should be like.  Malory Towers by Enid Blyton is in this same family of novels that intend to teach character by example without any irony.

The more recent Confessions of Georgia Nicholson (going on eleven volumes) is arguably also a school-days novel, a bildungsroman for today.  However, it is packed with irony right down to the fact that the girl heroine is narrating the story through a tremendously self-absorbed stream of consciousness.  It is as if the whole string of novels was the product of a teenage girl tweeting her every thought, moment by moment on Twitter.

I do not think I have the capacity for being so hip and modern.  But on the other hand I do like my characters a little more ambiguous than Enid Blyton’s or Caroline Keene’s.  A touch of darkness and stupidity better reflects the reality of life, and may temper the lessons about character.  Irony is so tricky — as indeed the irony of my title exemplifies — because readers can so easily miss irony and take you in earnest.  I like satire, and love the Georgia Nicholson books, except for the exasperating cliff-hanger endings.  One does begin to wonder towards book eight where on earth the series is going and how long the same sort of patterns of behavior can be repeated without becoming tiresome.

In the Nancy Drew books, the heroine never ages.  Like Tom Swift, Nancy is always the eighteen-year-old titian-haired detective in the convertible.  We don’t wonder where the series is going because it never advances.  There is no bildungsroman, no series story-arc.  The books stand alone and can be read in any order.  They teach by positive example, not by showing a character who evolves into a better person or gains maturity.  The choice of 18-year old protagonists is cunning because they are technically adults but still teen-agers with whom younger readers can more easily identify.  They have girlfriends and boyfriends, not spouses or children or embarrassing love affairs.  Sex never enters the picture, nor any of the other changes that the teen is really grappling with.  Instead they offer a refreshingly clear and happy vision of young achievement and good character, without any of the hormones.

I am not going to leave out the hormones from Emily Glass, but I am also not going to focus on them to the exclusion of almost everything else as in the Georgia Nicholson books.

But the title.  It is ironic.  But you won’t know the full irony until you get to the end of the book.

Editor’s Feedback

Not editor’s comments on Emily Glass, but on my other project in the mill, the Wandlore book.  This is a book about making magic wands and about their inner workings.  It is, so far as I know, the only treatise on the subject in existence.  In my first draft I tried to bridge the gap between fiction and non-fiction, but the editor reading the ms. didn’t seem to like that.  And I now agree.  It is too much to ask of a reader to grasp the whole art of magic in a book about wands.  Especially that key, the melding of ordinary reality with imagination.

The long and short is that I have decided to remove all of the elflore from my wandlore book.  It’s unfortunate, in a way, because my wand work is built entirely on elvish lore.  But, alas, publishers and probably readers as well won’t be able to accept information attributed to sources which (to them) do not exist.  I thought I might do it, but my first editorial reading did not accept it.  Their response as readers was that I was presenting a mythos and system of correspondences that was made up by me.  Sigh.  Even though I devoted considerable ink trying to explain.  Editors, it seems, even of metaphysical publishing houses, do not believe in Elves.  Despite all the books published on Faeries, actually getting magical information from Faeries seems to be unacceptable.

But I am not really disappointed about it.  Actually, getting constructive feedback from an editor is great and completely necessary, especially to one like me who is really a novice writer.  It also confirms my feeling that to say what I want to say, I must write fiction.  That is the only way that such things as elflore are acceptable.  Possibly those who know me accept my contention that I have learned from elves, but nonetheless it amounts to the same thing as saying that I made it up, and claiming that it is an elvish tradition just sounds like I am trying to puff up my ideas by attributing them to someone grander and more mysterious.  It is just the same as all the writers in the field of magic who have attributed their own ideas to a more famous precursor.  Crowley claimed to be the reincarnation of Eliphas Levi, who was an accepted magical authority (for some  anyway), Madam Blavatsky claimed her ideas came from the Hidden Masters in the Himalayas, and Douglas Monroe has claimed that his ideas came from Merlin, or ancient Welsh magical documents that no one else has seen.  Even the ancient writers of hermetic texts who published them under the guise of being written by Hermes Trismegistus, did this trick.

But today it is just seen as disingenuous, or downright fraud.

So, it is good to learn that fact.  I won’t stray down that road again.  It is fun to make up humorous fictitious sources for your knowledge and play with the serious-minded insistence that all knowledge must be attributed either to prior established authorities or else personal experimentation.  It’s the scientific way, not the way of the poet.

I’ll keep my personal mythology in my fiction henceforth.  In any case it is more interesting to readers to have my wandlore connected to reading they may have done on Celtic divinities and myths.  It is no good trying to explain in that book what gods are.  The problem is that in magical practice, some novices have a very confused idea about what divinities are and indeed there is no theological consensus — so far as I am aware.  But to explain how one enchants a wand or talks to trees or invokes the divinities of the four quarters and so forth requires the reader to grasp such metaphysical and cosmological concepts.  The breakdown of the opposition of within and without, heaven and earth, supernatural and natural, all are a part of magical praxis and so of wand enchantment.  The fact that the readers of my manuscript didn’t get it tells me that I did not do a good job communicating.

I expect some of the same rejections of Emily Glass by editors who will read it and see nothing except an imitation of Harry Potter.  They will not understand the subtleties of the world of real magical philosophy and will say I am being intolerably didactic to try to explain it in fiction.  No one, they will say, wants to pick up a novel and then be lectured about magic.  The young adult reader doesn’t want real magic.  She wants fantasy magic, wish-fulfilment and adventure.  They very probably won’t get that I am trying to write magic into a fictional world the way it is woven into the “real” world.

It would hardly surprise me if an editor failed to understand what I was attempting to do.  I don’t do a very good job of explaining it.  If the person being addressed knows nothing of real magic, and thinks that “magic” is just a literary device used by children’s writers, then it will be very difficult to get across the idea that magic is real.  The whole point of books like Harry Potter is to set magic apart as something that is not part of our real, mundane world.  That is what makes pretending that magic is real entertaining.  If magic actually was something we all believed in, would we find stories about it entertaining?

I can only think of the Arthurian Romances and the old myths.  The listeners to those stories presumably did believe magic and the Faerie realms were possible, and they evidently thought it entertaining.  Even in Shakespeare’s time most people believed that magic worked in the form of witchcraft.  The Church’s rejection of the practice of magic was based on the belief that it was real.  It was not until the protestant churches began to ridicule Catholic sacraments that magic in all forms was questioned.  Then, with the rise of materialism and the clockwork view of the cosmos, it became fashionable to reject magic as unreal, along with ghosts, and even gods.

But is the modern fantasy  genre of today based on the insistence that magic is only a thing of fiction?  Do I even need to worry about such questions, given that I am writing fiction anyway?  The stories are not intended to be taken as real by the reader.  They are intended only to approach the quality of ancient myths, rather than the humorous comedic approach to magic that one finds in most young adult fantasy novels.  (Or so I imagine, given that I haven’t read more than a tiny fraction of all the young adult fantasy that has been published.)

Editors’ feedback is part of the writing process.  I hope that I can get more feedback from readers before sending my manuscripts to a publisher.  Again, I want to enroll in classes at the Loft to learn more about the “business” of publishing and marketing books, and about the expectations and tastes of today’s readers.

Is there really any hope that I will succeed and be a good novelist?  It seems like I am too old to learn the craft in a really professional way.  But, Dum Spiro Spero, as I say.