Nancy Lanni's Blog

Over the last year, I’ve been working on two novels. I’m in the last stages of editing Ysabet V, continuing the Serian story of Elena, Ysabet’s daughter. Ysabet VI should follow thereafter. Ysabet VI is the last of the series, bringing together many of the characters familiar from the previous novels.

I also have completed a shapeshifter novel set in the Colorado mountains. I had great fun writing this one. Although the main character’s abilities don’t strictly follow formats set by other authors writing in this genre, it taps into the belief that the Pack is the strength of their extended families. I think you’ll enjoy reading about their struggles.

I’m looking forward to presenting them to you.

Animals hold a major role in fantasy literature. Many of our earliest picture books personify animals, allowing them to talk, walk on their hind legs, wear clothes, and behave in human ways. Their anthropomorphic traits have become one of the conventions that define the genre.

Toto from The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum was a recognizable dog, a loyal companion to Dorothy, but the Lion had the ability to converse, plan, and dream about finding his courage. Children’s creative minds make the transition comfortably. Their imaginations accept characters which could never exist in our world and find common ground with them. As a result, we have a wealth of fantasy literature for children and young adults.

Transformations from human to animals is a popular motif in fantasy literature, bringing more complex novels into the realm of adult fiction with adult themes. Vampires change into bats and fly. Werewolves shift from human to wolves, merging characteristics from both species to their advantage. Young Brandon Stark from George R. R. Martin’s The Game of Thrones is a warg, meaning he is able to merge his consciousness with animals. In essence, he becomes that animal with his human mind controlling the animal’s actions. This ability carries Bran beyond his own limitations as a human being as every hero must transcend mortal abilities to reach his full potential in order to defeat an enemy or to complete a heroic task.

Sometimes technology causes the change in form. The Marvel Comic’s character Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider and becomes Spider-Man, a superhero able to use his spider silk for mobility and defense. Often a magical intervention causes the change. In T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, Merlin changes Arthur into various animals in order to teach him life lessons. Sometimes the character has an innate ability that awaits a trigger to cause the shift. Ilona Andrew’s Kate Daniel’s novels are urban fantasies of a race of shapeshifters who survive in an altered post-apocalyptic world using their enhanced powers. Their traits are passed on to their young.

Readers meet new animals in fantasy literature, animals that don’t exist, that never existed in our human world. Unicorns, dragons, mermaids, griffins and firebirds emerge from mythological tales to become recognizable symbols in our culture. When an author enters the world of fantasy, he needs to have an understanding of the supernatural characters which other authors have given substance before him and the natural world so as to paint a portrait of his unique animal that is believable to his readers. J. R. R. Tolkien populated his Middle-earth with elves, dwarfs, and hobbits as heroic figures, orcs, sentient spiders, and trolls as their enemies. Tolkien didn’t digress too far from humankind when he created hobbits. Their diminutive size, over-sized feet covered with fur, and their love of comfort are endearing characteristics. Frodo and Bilbo’s willingness to risk themselves to protect their people, shucking complacency for a wider view of the world, gives them heroic proportions and makes them some of the most enduring characters in literature.

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Books I – IV are available on Amazon. Click on the links to the left to order your copies. Enjoy!

A new Cosmos is showing tonight at 8 central time.

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com...

English allows a science fiction writer to create words to express his needs, words which don’t now technically exist in the language but still make perfect sense to the reader. If one is writing about a technology which springs from the author’s imagination, the vocabulary may not exist.

When I wrote a blog on world building, I looked up a number of spellings to find which was most common. Some wrote it as one word. Some hyphenated it. I chose to split the words at my editor’s suggestion, but I can see the concept might standardize as one word. Apparently it is a more popular topic than I thought, and authors think of it as one term.

For the science fiction writer, compounding is a great way to invent new words. Spaceship has long become a standard because it is so self-explanatory. We even forget that it has lovely metaphorical overtones. The same with spacesuit. My spell checker does not like me to talk about ‘dropping downplanet,’ but like the familiar word ‘downtown’, I think it’s perfectly clear what I mean.

Think of our movie favorites Star Trek or Star Wars. These characters travel at lightspeed or warpspeed and fight with lightsabers.

Inventing words can be great fun, particularly in naming characters or places. When I needed to name the world where my Ysabet character would go, I wanted a short word, beginning with an s or sh sound because I preconceived the language as sibilant. That would allow me an easy transition to an adjective form—Ser, Serian. Perhaps I was a little blatant when I named a bad character Seamus Esterat. Even though the first letter is different, capturing the sound of a baby’s first word in Serian led me to choose sama instead of mama for mother. Home becomes dolm, father, kai’fa, and son kai-su. There are elements of the English equivalents in there while performing as a separate language.

Here is an interesting link to J. R. R. Tolkien reading elvish:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOZPWp...

What is empathy? It is a social imperative that allows a community to share grief or fear or to celebrate joy. It works through a memory of a similar experience or communicated through speech or body language. We know how someone should feel if they experience success, so we clap to express our recognition of that feeling.

 Body language is a major part of the way we read people. When a baby slaps its mother, she might enclose its hand in her own to prevent another similar action, and she might make a sad face and say no. Just as a baby might recognize a smile and returns it, it learns that a frown is a bad thing and to avoid an action that would bring it about.

 I write about a character in the Ysabet series who experiences other people’s emotions or physical reactions such as pain as though it were her own. This is empathy carried to a psychic level, and I can’t believe it truly exists in the world. It certainly would be an extremely distressful gift that would have horrible consequences for the receiving empath. Unless she could avoid other people or learn to block their sensory output, the cumulative consequences would lead her to physical or mental stress of the greatest degree. Ysabet’s struggle to overcome her gift is one of the major conflicts in the story.

 By my definition, a true empath is one who can not only read the emotional levels of other individuals, but also translate their complex patterns and then enhance or disperse a certain emotion as she chooses.  The highest level of empathy is a healer, though the healing is done with a combination of psycho-kinetic telepathy and empathy.  The healer is generally a compulsive individual.  If someone has a physical pain or emotional pain, the empath feels compelled to help him, and in doing so shares that pain with him.

 Over the course of the novels, Ysabet learns more and more of her psychic powers. She has both empathy and telepathy, but she always defines herself as an empath. That’s the way that she relates to people. I’m afraid that as an author I am a little cruel to her, pushing and pulling her into situations where she must use her psychic powers, often at great risk. I admire the way she accepts those challenges.

Imagine stepping through a clothes closet into a world of witches and warlocks, where animals talk and magic thrives. Imagine racing through time far into the future. What would it be like? Would some people live in an idyllic setting while other live underground? Imagine peering down a rabbit hole and then falling, falling, falling to a place ruled by playing cards. Been there before? Sure we have.

Remember the image of the Fellowship of the Ring traipsing up the slopes of a New Zealand glacial field. We can believe this fantastic landscape is Middle Earth and orcs wait just around the corner because we can relate to what Tolkien described. Many fantasies take place in a medieval world. Hogwarts is really a castle complete with ghosts. We are comfortable with that. Remember the images created by the illustrators who honed Avatar into a work of art full of exotic plants and dragons waiting to be tamed. How much richer was the audience’s experience because of their visual craft?

Every novelist must describe the settings where his story’s action takes place, but when a science fiction or a fantasy writer takes pen in hand, he builds a world which predetermines much of the action of his story. That’s not to say that his imagination isn’t constrained by simple physics. The reader must be able to relate to the description.

One of the first steps to building a world is to map it out. The Game of Thrones and the Hobbit are movies where the introduction displays an intricate map. Take the time to create it in some detail. I have one fantasy novel that I literally imagined unrolling a map on a tabletop, placing a sword along one side to hold it down and a mug of ale and a knife to keep the other side unfolded. The southwest corner of this elfworld contained an aged and magical forest. Through the center of the map, I visualized roads that led to villages and cities where humans dwelt. A mountain range which sheltered the homes of the mountain elves and dwarfs ran the northern length. This world was large but finite, like some pre-Columbian concept of our world. If the characters traveled far enough, they could, in a sense, fall off the edge of the table. Entrances to its wonders came through doorways, gateways from other dimensions, one to our world through which my main character stepped. Not so nice characters could enter at other points, but the elves had granted powerful magic to warders who protected these doorways. Forces were in play to weaken the warders’ magic and allow entrance to destructive elements. Thus the conflict was born, and the story put in motion.

If the main character travels space to a new world, is a sentient species already in place? How does the planet affect their physical form? In what ways are they like us, different from us? The reader has to be able to relate as well as to be surprised with something new and exotic. Is their culture more primitive or more advanced than ours? How do they modify their world to provide shelter and food? Describe their homes and their meals. What part does weather play in their lives? Even Shangri-La had limitations. The story would be dull if their world was too perfect.

Build into this world different customs and language. What kind of government do they have? How do they greet one another? I loved making a new language for my Ysabet series. Simple phrases can be repeated throughout the novels so that the reader becomes familiar with them.

What part does religion play in the story? Many sword and sorcery novels have complex polytheistic religions. Some have multiple religions in competition with one another. I based the religion of my Ysabet series on a sky god/mother earth concept where the main demigods evolve from their natural world. It worked for the Greeks.

It’s great fun to invent new animals and plants, especially in pristine worlds which evolve independently from sentient beings. Such a world finds its own balance, and when the author adds an outside influence, either the world must change or the alien adapt.

Friends of ours, who lived in Southeast Alaska, returned to Massachusetts every summer to visit his parents. Usually we spent some time together during these visits. This year, they had an additional objective to buy a small airplane. They had driven down in their pickup with two German shorthaired pointers, one very pregnant.

Our friends couldn’t find a plane to meet their criteria, and my husband volunteered to make a few calls around Central New York to locate a suitable candidate for them. They drove to Syracuse to view one of his finds and promptly purchased it. Now their dilemma was to get their plane, their pickup and two dogs back home with them. They made us an offer. If we would drive the truck and take the male dog, they would give us some traveling money and entertain us for the time we’d spend with them in Alaska. Since we couldn’t afford such an adventure on our own at that time of our marriage, we agreed.

Our route would take us across Canada and up the ALCAN Highway, an unpaved road constructed during World War II to connect western Canada with Alaska. On a tight budget, we camped all the way, sleeping on a platform in the truck cap and cooking on a charcoal stove. The main road across Canada offered easy access to a large variety of improved campgrounds where we could view the scenic wonders, have a hot shower, stock up on fresh water, and chat with the friendly Canadians. Still, the long drive took its toll. By the time we reached Dawson Creek in British Columbia, the beginning of the ALCAN Highway, we felt somewhat bedraggled, and we still had a thousand miles of road to drive.

Riding on a dirt road for long distances is body punishing. Gas stations, stores and restaurants along the way appeared in the middle of nowhere, every fifty or sixty miles, but their quality deteriorated as we penetrated the interior. Some stops contained characters as rough as the road. We’d gas up, buy drinks, and clean up at their rudimentary restrooms, and by the time we reached the next outpost, the constant vibration made us desperate to relieve ourselves again.

The scenic campgrounds with amenities that we had utilized across Canada disappeared. We just picked a spot along the road to eat and sleep for the night. I remember my mother’s adage that you had to ‘eat a peck of dirt in your lifetime.’ I think we ate our whole peck in that one trip. Dust was a constant, penetrating our clothing and our bedding, Flying debris from oncoming vehicles fired stones at us that tried to punch out the windshields and headlights. Insects took advantage of the long summer days to add another layer of misery to the experience. The scenery was certainly breathtaking, but our discomfort made it difficult to appreciate it quite so much.

Much of the route followed the Coast Range, some of the highest mountains in North America, pristine, wild, scarred only by the bull dozers which had cut the roadway across the hips of the massive peaks. Hanging off the edge of one mountain, we could see the road returning on the next, knowing that we’d have a long way to travel around and in and back out again to reach the spot we could easily view across the canyon. We met few people, occasionally coming upon equipment clearing rockfalls. We didn’t linger anywhere. When respite offered, I no longer had the inclination nor energy to talk with the people we found there.

One individual, however, made a lasting impact on me. To this day I remember our brief interaction. He  drove a big rig full of merchandise for the population of the sparsely settled communities along the Alaskan trail. As I left our car to walk into the small store which accompanied the gas station, I felt the impact of his presence, and I hesitated. He stood close to seven feet tall, his body in perfect proportion to his height. His hair was burnished red-gold, his fair features shone with health and good nature. He wore a checkered shirt and heavy, yellow work boots. Had he carried an axe over his shoulder and accompanied a blue ox, I wouldn’t have been surprised. This man appeared perfectly suited to this forested, overly-endowed world we had entered.

He greeted us in an effusive, friendly manner. His speech held more than a trace of a Russian accent, and it made me think of the term white Russian, those dissident transplants from Communist Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. Russians had been early settlers of Southeast Alaska, and many of their isolated communities still kept remnants of their ancestral language and customs.  Feeling very out of place, dirty and unattractive in comparison, I stomped on past him with only a brief nod. My husband, filling the car with gasoline, spoke with him while I continued into the little store.

After I made my purchase, I avoided returning immediately to the car because I was ashamed of my disheveled appearance. Through the window, I could see the two men part with a friendly handshake. The man stepped into his truck and continued up the highway.

Because it had begun to rain, we decided to eat at their diner, lingering over the meal until the storm had passed. We spoke of the white Russian’s astonishing looks, and his friendly manner. At some point, my husband mentioned that at the end of his conversation, the man had said, “Thank you for talking with me.”

Those simple words made me feel guilty about my unusual lack of courtesy. A big frame like his would have intimidated others the way it did me. It wasn’t that I feared him, but his presence made me feel small in comparison. For that same reason, others might have shunned him. Those frequent long trips on the Highway and brief acquaintances would have made for a lonely ride. I could have been more friendly.

In a little while, we continued our drive into the mountains, creeping along switchbacks now soaked with rain. Predictably, we came across a place where the runoff had brought down rocks and debris which had collapsed part of the fragile roadway. Already the road crews were clearing the rock. A narrow one lane along the edge of a huge drop-off would allow one vehicle enough width to pass the blockage. A crew member stopped our progress, offering a severe warning to be cautious. A truck had already gone over the edge, he told us.

I saw the mangled truck as we drove past, and it indelibly infused the memory of the white Russian in my mind.