A Writer's Blog
Posted in Characters, Heroes, The Hounds of Annwn, The Ways of Winter, and Works
This morning I got up at 6:15 to do my daily writing. I reflected, as I sat down at my keyboard, on what a wonderful thing fiction was, that I had gotten up early out of a warm bed (and ultimately missed foxhunting later that morning) to write a scene from the point of view of a fifty thousand year old rock elemental, because she had opinions worth hearing about regarding the plot twists of the current book.
Anywhere else, they'd lock you up for that.
I'm slogging through the character names index and a Welsh pronunciation guide (very necessary — sorry to do it to you folks. One of my beta readers is complaining bitterly. I say, could be worse – could be a Russian novel.) This requires me to look up every name and make sure I provide some clue about how to say it. Welsh looks much harder than it is because of unusual spelling conventions. “Gruffydd” is Griffith, “Rhys” is Reece, “Vachan” became Vaughan, and so forth, but there are some genuine problems, too.
To begin with, the name of one of my main characters turns out to be the wrong gender. (No, I'm not telling you which one.) That's fixed now (that is, I fixed the name, not him.) Too bad, I liked that name.
Secondly, you can't just look up Welsh words in a dictionary. Perhaps you didn't know this… Celtic languages share a phenomenon known as “mutation” and are annoying enough to change the spelling accordingly. This means, when you pronounce a word differently because of the influence of its surrounding words or grammatical syntax, you spell it that way.
We're used to this in English for vowels in some of our older words, such as our class of strong verbs. We share with other Germanic languages couplets like “run/ran”, “fall/fell”, “know/knew”. Initial letters, on the other hand, rarely do this in English, so it doesn't seem so bad because we only have a few of them, and the initial letter isn't involved. It's different in Welsh.
Posted in Characters, Romance, The Hounds of Annwn, To Carry the Horn, and Works
I'm at about the mid-way point of my current work in progress, and it's time for some romance. This first book in the series only covers about two weeks, very busy ones, so the most I want to do is have the characters meet each other and begin to form an attachment.
There's just one problem — she's an older woman. As in, he's 33 and she's somewhere upward of 1500 or so. Now, the issue isn't her looks. She's a timeless fae and seems to be about his age. It's not that our hero isn't attracted to her.
The problem is that he's rather intimidated. To begin with, she's a serious artist, one who has had centuries to work on her craft. He understands her work well enough to admire it. But what can she see in him? He's a smart well-educated guy, but she's a serious intellectual. Wouldn't she look at him as a child? Wouldn't all those years of experience make him transparent to her, the way we can look right through a 5-year old?
And yet… He's brave, stubborn, and kind. And he wants her. These are all qualities she admires, and she lets him know. All he can do is stiffen his spine and assume a confidence and equality in the relationship that he doesn't yet fully feel, hoping not to become Nick Bottom to her Titania.
What helps is his realization that this must happen all the time with the fae. With such long lives, they must frequently intermix much older and much younger in couples, and it doesn't mean to them what it means to mortal men
Posted in Characters, Heroes, Plot, The Hounds of Annwn, To Carry the Horn, and Works
To kick off this new blog, I've decided to share a few thoughts about heroic plots involving non-juvenile heroes.
The typical journey of the hero involves a young man who follows a call and leaves his childhood behind him, maturing through action and conflict into a suitable, perhaps even great, adult. The plot is typically done with him once his path to maturity is complete. It's a young man's tale.
In To Carry the Horn, my current work in progress, the basic plot concerns George Talbot Traherne who is drawn from his Virginia countryside life to an otherworld populated by characters from Welsh mythology. George is 33 years old when the action starts. He is already mature, comfortable with responsibility, his character formed. How then can he become a hero, in the traditional sense of the plot?
The answer is in the deficiencies of the modern adult world versus the idealized world of heroic tales. For a youth in a traditional story, part of the challenge of becoming a hero is finding something worth doing, recognizing and growing into his proper place in the world. George, however, lives in a world all too real and mundane, where many of the basic adult responsibilities of manhood are watered down or absent. He has grown into a proper place in that world, but that world is not serious enough to satisfy him. It's too similar to the protected life of childhood that the youth in a traditional tale seeks to escape.
Perhaps if he lived a life of direct action (military, police, etc.) he might feel differently, but he is just an ordinary, good, competent man feeling constrained by the exigencies of modern life.
The otherworld provides him with scope for action, to explode out of his stunted growth into true maturity. He finds something worth the doing and eagerly seizes the opportunity. He can now build a foundation for a life worth living.