The Bewildering Pine - Inspiration Is Found All Around - 4th Friday Post - January 26th

Hi Everyone!

It's time for my fourth Friday post again.. Fourth Fridays area peek into the world I am creating for my fantasy novel titled, "The Ledgerkeepers"


I'll be focusing over the coming moths on the things/places/tales from our world that have inspired my fiction and stories for this book.

Some of you know I began the world building for the book over 18 months ago. A slow process that I immersed myself in fully. I was well aware when I began that I might only use 1/10th of what I create, at least in the first book, but I needed it all to have the world make sense to myself as the narrator.

Choosing what to show is not difficult. Most of it is dictated by the characters actions and the setting they move through but there are always some bits of coolness that you just want to have in there no matter what!

So with my plan being to unveil the near complete Bewildering Pine map here next month, I wanted to talk abut about what inspired that map from our own physical world.

I knew the world was going to be set in a post cataclysmic landscape. The entire geography shifting and leaving many of the inhabitants of the pre "Great Upheaval" world in survival mode. How that might shape this world physically was a lot of fun to ponder.

The idea of a place surrounded by immense sea walls on three sides and incredibly high mountains on the fourth that rose up splitting a larger landscape and basically creating a large bowl shaped land t to the south hat rises to outward towards it's edges and slopes downward from north to south. Accessibility or departure is only via the bay whose natural defenses are tricky and dangerous in their own right and nearly imperceptible from the Great Sea beyond.

The climate is sub arctic but warmer several months of the year to allow for a massively productive growing season (the short-season). An ancient Pine forest spreads along the base of the mountains and there are two rivers that originate in the mountains. There is a round peninsula at the furthest point south that holds a large bog where all the runoff collects and saturates the loamy soil. It's a fantasy novel so I was able to stetch the bounds of reality a bit. It was only necessary that these things were all possible in the climate and then I could bend them to my writer's will a bit.

So in thinking of the form and function of the landscape, I simply looked to our own world for examples that gave me the "ok" I was seeking. I could have done all this research on the internet but I went to the main branch of our county library to try and capture some of that old-time investigative fun of looking through a stack of books!

This image really started the whole notion of the sheer cliffs and a very inaccessible landscape from the sea. 

This pic of the Andes mountains was perfect to inspire the mountain range which I wanted to be volcanic, sharp-featured staggered ridges and massively tall/impassible in my low-tech world. Also, it inspired a legend of the mountains being the remains of the last living giant's teeth. . . and that led led to an expression of surprise used among the folk: "Bezik's teeth!"

These bogs and the walkways that run through them are the inspiration for a similar area, known as Berwick, in my world. 

And this strange landscape in the Faroe Islands gave me the idea for the "bowl" shape with rising cliffs out at the edges. 

 So that's where the world began. Well, my fantasy world.   Having a starting point gave me the canvas for making the map, which is an ongoing work as well, and I hope to share it with you next month on fourth Friday!

Thanks for reading!!

Nicolas

PS: I recently listened to a short Sci-Fi-Fi story called "Repairing the World" by John Chu as read by Levar Burton on his Levar Burton Reads podcast. What I loved most about the futuristic world the story is set in was that there were only a few indicators that it WAS in the future. Rifts in the fabric of time that can be repaired and the use of mechanical dragonflies as messengers.  The story is completely about the main characters and the prejudice that survives in that future world,  the way society views people on it's fringes.  Leaving a very real and scary notion that things may not get better in every way as we move forward in time. . .  Well worth a listen though!

An Exciting Year Ahead - 5th Friday Post - December 29th

Hi Everyone!

So here we are on the cusp of yet another New Year.  I've written before about no longer making resolutions but there ARE a few things I DO like to do before or at the New Year.

First, I love to choose three words that I want to be my focus for the coming year. I print them out and keep them above my editing station and I check in with them from time to time.  I haven't settled on any of the three yet for 2018 but I feel I DID manage to stay true to the ones I chose for this past year, especially "diligence".

Second is an old family tradition that I loved when I was a kid. Every New Years Eve I put several coins out on the windowsill and leave them out overnight until New Years day. The coins should be silver (symbolically, not literally) and when you bring them in on New Years Day, you put them somewhere safe so that you do not spend them the rest of the year. If you do this, it is said to ensure that you'll always have enough through the year and I will say that it's always worked for me. . . but not when I was a teenager. . . I was always broke then. : )

Third, I will make my annual reading pledge at Goodreads. Last year I chose 30 books as my goal and ended up reading 33 or 34 I think. . . I may increase it to 40 this year ( I can always sneak a few comic collections or graphic novels in if needed).

I'm looking forward, as always, to the year ahead. I've got a full range of new ideas for my shops, I'll be furthering work on "The Ledgerkeepers" novel, working on off Etsy web sites for that world and for my Shadow of the Sphinx shop. Oh and I will be starting up on Instagram in January!

Ok, can I just make two small complaints about instagram already? I signed up and chose an account name a few weeks ago.  It's not my name OR any of my Etsy shop names by the way. . . that's just me preferring a little anonymity. . . . and I was immediately bombarded with a list of people I might know/want to follow. Now, I have not been active on any social media platform for quite some time and so almost all of these people they've recommended are from the distant past. . . I just find it creepy that they instantly know and are linking me to people who I've known in the past! AND, I checked in yesterday just to get myself ready and I already have two dozen followers. . . only one of them is someone I know, the rest are random accounts, some seem fake, and a few local area business accounts. Come on now.  I have ZERO posts! Why would anyone who does not know me be following me already???  What if I start posting really bizarre or disturbing art? Still wanna be my friend there "Tiny Vacation Home Rental in PDX"?
Hmmm?

OK, rant over. :)

That said, I AM looking forward to getting the visual feed going and I am secretly hoping it allows me to find artists who inspire me from all over the world, like the old days on Myspace when it was still cool and ad free.

Well, I think that's it for this edition. . .

I am sending wishes to you all for a wonderful start to your own New Years and may it be filled with light, love and inspiration each and every day!

XO

Nicolas

The Bewildering Pine - Worldbuilding - Fourth Friday - November 24th

I wrote about it before, quite awhile ago, but I want to get into the specifics of the world building I've done for my novel-in-waiting, "The Ledgerkeepers".

First I want to say that I admit that I am a prime candidate for what is known as "worldbuilder's disease". This is when you allow the task of creating a fictional world to consume you and you never get to the writing of your book, stories, music and what have you because you can't move past the creation. Well, I spent the better part of a year creating the world that is the setting of this book.

I get it.

It's addictive. There were times I couldn't stop and,even with all the details and ideas I've fleshed out, there remains more to be done.

And while fantasy/sci-fi wiring is most prone to this, it needs to be done for any sort of storytelling really. In fact, one of the first novels I read way back when I was maybe 10 or 11 was a true crime story that was so detailed about the era (1940's -50's), the neighborhood (Boston's little Italy) and the characters (mostly 2nd generation immigrants) that I was swept away into it and have never forgotten the "escape" effect it had on me.

But building a world from scratch? Deciding on a subarctic climate leads to the types of housing, plant life, foods, animals, terrain, clothing that are needed. The types of people/elves living there leads to origin stories, folktales, shadowy pasts, familial/community structure and expectation and superstitions.

The magic, if there is any, leads to needing to set the rules, what it's limits are, who can use it and the many ways it might manifest or change the dynamics in a world you worked so hard to build.

Languages, social structure, government, ability to travel, money, trade, politics etc etc etc

And do not even get me started on mapmaking. It's my favorite part and I am in process of making the third full map of this land.

On and on and on. . . and I could be quite happy with just doing that if it weren't that I feel compelled to tell this bigger story.

But the best part of getting past those beginnings and into the writing is that your world gets to be built from within the telling as much as it did when you were building it deliberately before hand. Some of my favorite bits and details of the world thus far came from just writing and not from advanced planning.

Take this passage from one of the first chapters I've completed:

      . . . And while that was all reason enough for his soured opinion of them, what disturbed Yanne most about the Barchan traders was that, save for a few of the youngest aboard each vessel, they had all been fitted with their trademark iron teeth. Those oversized denticles, which they grated together inside their mouths and scraped along the tines of their heavy iron flatware in a most egregious and disconcerting way, were just too much to bear.  Just the thought of the sound they made sent shivers spiraling up Yanne’s spine and made the hair on his neck and arms prickle upright. Their original teeth, those that they still possess when they’re ceremoniously yanked for the fitting of the iron, are fashioned into a choker that each Barchan wears around his neck with great pride. 

          "And that’s no treat to look upon across a communal dining table."

The Barchans unsettled Yanne — and very few things did.

So, before writing that passage I knew only that the Barchans were traders from the outer world who dealt/interacted with the folk in my world very rarely since  the trader docks are located out on a floating village in the vastness of the bay, away from the bulk of the land which is inaccessible by large ships.

Yanne, a main character in the book, fancies himself a storyteller. The Barchans are rude and obnoxious but so, in his own way, is Yanne. So in deciding what aggravates him about the Barchans,  it is of course some of the mirrored traits he sees in them. Yet I wanted something outside the box for him to focus on about them and I needed something visually specific to identify the Barchans later in the book.

Their oversized iron teeth, the chokers they wear made of their pulled, original teeth and the sounds and sights of iron scraping on iron. All of that came up in the writing/daydreaming and, even though it is just a tiny scrap of the world building, now I can't imagine the chapter/story without it.

World builder's disease can present itself in the writing too though. That passage above was around four times as long after it's creation. The rest was unnecessary backstory and filler. More reveal than was needed which, often, loses your readers. (and this is hard for me because I LOVE reading descriptive text even when I know it's a bit much for the story!!)

As world builders we all tend to think the worlds we create are incredibly cool. And most of them may be. But in the writing I am discovering, even in and among my own creation,  a slow unveiling is far more effective than an info dump of history and genealogy.

A great part of the excitement of the process is that I do not know where it will go exactly or what other little gems I might uncover about the folk who populate it as the story continues!

I am glad you're coming along for the ride and I look forward to sharing so much more as we go. . .

Hoping all my American readers had a wonderful holiday and that everyone else in our beautiful world had a magical day, as always!

Keep building the world you wish to dwell in!

XO
Nicolas

 

The Bewildering Pine - Fourth Friday October 27th

Welcome to my first Fourth Friday Post. Every month, on the fourth Friday I will be writing about, and sharing insights into, the Bewildering Pine; a world I've been creating, in one form or another, for as long as I can recall.

I should start by explaining and separating the two main parts of this series and that world.

One, the "Bewildering Pine" is the fictional world where my first (in process) novel length book, "The Ledgerkeepers", is set.  It's a fantasy world that pulls from the many influences and inspirations I've had over the years for just such a world. The world is populated by "old world elves",  simply referred to as folk, and not the High elves of modern fantasy.

And the second aspect, the Bewilder and Pine, which is the creative outlet for my miniature making. It's my Etsy shoppe and where many of the larger ideas I have been formulating began.

Here, I really want to focus mainly on the book, that world and it's ties to my childhood and adult life but some parts of that world are derived from the experiences and products in the shoppe, and the shoppe in great part inspired the book and everything else that will come beyond it. . .  so I will want to dive into both over the coming months.

Today, for the first installment, I do want to focus on what the undertaking of the writing of this book has meant to, and done FOR, my own heart.

It would be easy, I think, for an outsider to look at my miniature work, my writing here and my views on life in general and assume I am stuck in a loop of nostalgia and whimsy, not that there would be anything wrong with that. . . and to a degree it's true. :) I've come to a place in my life where I tend to keep most anyone who I feel is too caught up in the outside or "real" world at arms length. Not because I want to pretend that world doesn't exist but because I believe how much that world affects us is almost entirely up to us most days.

Simply put, if  I allowed that world to inundate my daily thoughts and emotions, I could not do what I do for a living. It's not an escape, it's the way I go about and make sense of that very same world while at the same time, giving life to, and protecting, another world I've held within for so many years.

Somewhere along the way I decided that we each have our roles to play, I won't say it's our destiny or our calling. . .  or even our path. . . just that we may choose what we do with each moment we are given and for me, that choice slowly over the years became one of deciding that I wanted to put as much beauty and joy into the world as I can every day.

I discovered early on in the Etsy/maker-of-things world that the more I attached stories to my little creations, the more people responded to them. The more stories I created, the more the world that is now the Bewildering Pine of the book, started to creep in and influence my making and the stories I wrote to go with.  Tart Carts, crooked towers, shop and village names, houses with different architectural styles, little enigmatic elves who live in the woods or in hermit like solitude. Monks with face like mimes. Old tongues and sacred traditions lost. With each addition another little piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Now, this is going back some eight years to the beginning. In the last few years, the separation had begun to widen in my heart and in my creative desires. I started spending more time on the "side project" which, at the time, I could not have told you what exactly it would become. The world of the book is now vastly different from the world of the Etsy shoppe.

There are still bits and pieces that remain constant but as characters, locations and I suppose, most of all, the plot for the Ledgerkeeper's story started to reveal itself to me, I saw the chance to speak about more than just a fantasy world. It's aim is to be a novel that speaks to cultural identities and traditions, how things change, why things change, and, of course, how everything is not what it seems when story is a foggy subject at best.

As for the writing, this has been a crash course. I've never even attempted to write something like this before. Not seriously. Poetry yes, short stories, yes, letters of all kinds to friends and family, yes.

But to sit down and say, "Right, I want to write a novel!" No, that never crossed my mind once really.

What I've learned more than anything in the last year since I took up the task is WHY so many people start writing a novel, a short story, a memoir and then quit. Because it's reallllllly HARD and it requires something I feel blessed to have been able to find in an already busy life. The space and a routine to do so!!

I believe it's the hardest creative thing I've ever set out to do.  It requires persistence, time commitment, belief in it and in yourself. More than all of those, I think, it requires a desire to say something through your fiction. To tell your story or offer a viewpoint.

Nothing has ever brought me face to face with my own resolve and motivations like writing.

I chose the genre of fantasy for obvious reasons. Mostly because at the start of a fantasy story or novel is the world building part of it. That world that only exists in your head has to be fleshed out. Mapped out too. Not all at once but, at some point, you have to think about it all. The cultures, the limitations, the food, the climate, the magic etc.

Often you'll hear writers offer the advice "Write what you know". For some, like David Sedaris, that can mean your close family. For others like George RR Martin, that means the world you've been toying with in your head for your whole life.

To me, the love required is the same and evident in both I think. So yes, write what you love as well as what you know. The great thing is, you can learn so much that you don't know when you start! I may have a fantasy world in my head but it's littered with real world objects and situations that need to be right for the story. How does a water clock work? How were certain vegetables farmed 500 years ago? What happens when you have two moons, not one. The list is endless.

I love fantasy. Myth, legend, magic, the realm of Faerie, elves, surreal nature.

The funny thing is, I've decided to go a whole lot less in the original direction I assumed I would.

I've left magic off the board in this world for the most part. What magic does exist is born more of our own old world beliefs and traditions and the faith of folk in that.  I've seen first hand in my life how powerful that can be. So, if it's tinged with magic in the Bewildering Pine, it has roots in something you may recognize. There are no great powers, no mages and wizards. No dark forces. . .  at least, not magic ones.

The main characters as well as most of the supporting ones are all based on people I have known as well. From childhood friends to folk I know in the small town I live in currently. All wonderfully unique in their own ways and human to a fault.

I personally fall in love with books for the characters, not just the worlds the author created for them to dwell in.

My favorite books of late all share the core foundation of having very strong characters as well as the world around them being interesting too. But that doesn't mean they have to be a total creation of the imagination.

A Darker Shade of Magic
A Green and Ancient Light
The Queen of the Tearling
The Foretold
The Night Circus

All of these portray vastly different worlds: Four parallel Londons,  a non-descript,"post war" European setting,  a realm from our very own possible future, an Amazonian tribe/landscape and the underbelly of 19th century London.

What they all have in common are main characters that are stronger than the need to suspend your disbelief because they are relatable. Now, I won't ask you to read any of those if fantasy is not your thing. . .but if you want a short story that sums that same idea up, of the character being more important than the system of magic and the world, I'd suggest seeking out "The Night Market" by Holly Black. It's simply one of the best short stories I've ever read. It's got a bit of fantasy, a bit of magic too, but it's all revolving around the main character, her love of her family and the ending is the true magic of the story, of the world. . . of each of us in our world. It's well worth the read.

So here I am. over a YEAR into this project and just moving forward every day. I spend two hours each morning from 5:30am to 7:30am sitting in the silence of the early hours at the laptop writing, researching, plot sketching, exploring.

Each day starts with feeding and loving on our cat, Bhu, then venturing out to walk to the old-school bakery which is just a block away from our place and opens at 5:30am ( I know, lucky right?) and the day starts with something like this

French Press and a fresh apricot danish. Sorry about the lighting. . . but it WAS taken before 6 in the morning!

Finding that space, that time and making it a routine was key to getting along with the writing. It has also been the best adventure ever! Bringing this world to life and creating the characters and all the little details is like nothing else I've done. I 'm hooked. It's no longer hard. No longer a chore. It's just one more thing in my daily routine and I try not to let anything keep me from it.

In the future I want to talk about the beauty of routine and how it is such an important part of my days. I learned it at retreats visiting a Zen monastery years ago. Their set hours for meditation, meals, down time, work etc were a novel idea to me who, as a creative soul, could not stand the notion of incorporating that into my own daily creative world. Yet. . .

Immediately I saw why it worked but I still fell off the "routine wagon" very quickly afterwards. In the last 8 years or so, learning to keep to a schedule has become essential with all that I want to accomplish and make.

The routine I have now is set in stone and it has to be a pretty extraordinary thing for me to break it..

I'll also want to discuss finding your "voice" thru writing.  For me, that has been the hardest part of taking up a novel. Different writers create in different ways. It was yet one more reinvention and I seem to have found my own methods to get me there along the way.

At this point in the Ledgerkeepers, I have a prologue and four very strong character chapters. One for each of the main characters. Each also explores a little of the world around them and each, before I found my voice, were wayyyyyy too long expositions of pure world building and description ( a common flaw in fantasy writing) and less of the characters.  One of these chapters, for example, was near to 70 pages of discovery writing which I condensed and stripped away to what is now an 11 page first chapter. I found the characters and found THEIR voices, their motivations and their desires.

I'm excited to start sharing some of that world with you all here. And while I am not quite there yet, I want to put out there that I am going to be asking for Alpha and Beta readers in the coming months. (beginning in January most likely) If you have any interest in being among the first to read what I am creating, you can let me know and I will put you on the list of people to open the early chapters of the story up to as it falls into place.

As an alpha reader, I'll ask you to only focus on,  and give feedback for four distinct things:

1. What bores you
2. What confuses you
3. What don’t you believe
4. What’s cool? (So I don’t accidentally “fix” it.)

That's it! No long explanations are necessary. Just simple observations as you go. No other input is required at that first stage. I'll likely post the chapters here with password protection on them and send you the password when I am ready. I tend to like rather short chapters, 8-12 pages on average so it's not a lot of time commitment with each. 

Here and there I'll be posting little excerpts on the open blog too. In addition to "The Ledgerkeepers", I am also creating a book born from the world building itself. An "atlas",  I suppose, with many of the descriptive details of the villages, architecture, maps, belief systems, flora and fauna, folktales and the ancient origin stories for all of the type of folk who dwell in the world of the Bewildering Pine. As if someone were archiving the world from within the world itself. 

Alright, I think that's going to be good for this month's opening installment. I know it was a bit scattered but we'll find a direction with it in the next month or two. 

Welcome along for the ride! I look so forward to sharing more of the world with you in the coming months on fourth Fridays. I hope you will enjoy it too. 

Thank you for coming by and reading! XX
Nicolas

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Beginning in October of 2017 I started to follow the following format for my blog, posting every Friday and under the following headings:

1st Friday of Each Month - New work ( New to the shops and a look at the making of one item each month)

2nd Fridays - Inspirations and Oddities (Links and thoughts about what inspires me) 

3rd Fridays - The Making of a Maker (advice and shared experiences of how I got "here" to where being a "maker-of-things" is my full time job.)

4th Fridays - The World of Bewilder and Pine ( peeks into the world of the Bewildering Pine, the stories and books to follow and all around fantasy world making)