philosophy, psychology and other long words beginning with p. discussion

finished.

"My name is per. I am the youngest of four." As someone who delights in sound, I rather liked this.

Thanks! I'm not sure when the behind the scenes is coming, but hopefully soon.

Also, I'll be changing the icon for Ancient Canada soon, but it's just because we repackaged it with a different book cover at the editor's request. I still have to update my Goodreads icon to reflect the new cover. Look for something purple. All the links shouldn't change.

Thanks for the heads up.

Chapter 15 Behind the Scenes


My dad said this was his favorite chapter. I was surprised it was anybody’s favorite, because it’s so much of a supporting chapter (to the Bog Man’s). His reasoning was it had a lot of action. One thing I liked in hearing that is that a lot of readers have different favorite (and least favorite) chapters. I thought that was probably a good thing.

In this chapter, we finish the second of four paired chapters. Princess/Oslo were paired, and Bog Man/this chapter were paired. They were paired in similar ways. The second one (Oslo and this chapter) assumed you already knew certain information, from reading it in the first one (Princess and Bog Man).

Originally I had hoped to make the book have all completely stand-alone chapters. As in, you could really read any chapter like it was a short story. That idea didn’t really work because every chapter I would be explaining who Lavender was, her gift, and the world they’re in. Then I thought, ‘Okay, stand alone chapters except when Marigold fills the gaps.’ Still very limiting for the overall arc of the book. So by this point in the story I was more comfortable with giving up on that structure, and could actually play around with the chapters so that Oslo and this chapter (second of each pair) wouldn’t stand alone, but would rather give you a new perspective into things that were going on in the previous chapter… things we didn’t realize, but would make sense once we realized it.

The hard part with that was the first in the pair really did have to stand alone without help from the second. You had to read the first of the pair and really think you were told everything you needed to know. The solution to that was to keep secrets from the characters. The princess didn’t know much about what was going on with the suspected food taster (Quinby) and she certainly didn’t know that King Ulffr considered her and just about everybody a suspect. Likewise, Tollund (the Bog Man) didn’t know where the girls came from, just that they rescued him, and were present again when he was arrested. He doesn’t know all that went into setting up his arrest.

The fun part to all of this was being able to play with time. There are overlaps in these chapters. In other chapters there are ‘underlaps.’ For example, the Summoner who delivers the girls into exile ends his narration there. Lichen picks it up, but by then the girls are poking around in the forest looking for food. Not much time has passed between, but no narration occurred, so there’s a gap.

In this chapter, besides a lot of overlap between it and Bog Man’s before it, it was fun to go back to the moment when the girls left Svalbard. They start this chapter on Prince Oslo’s yacht, with Quinby onboard, right after Oslo offered to have him secretly exiled in place of what the king would have done to him (execution).

Let the flirting begin. Quinby is pretty clueless, but Marigold, having some issues in the men department, doesn’t have high standards. While Marigold lays it on as thick as she can, Quinby barely picks up on it, and Lavender just about can’t stand watching the nauseating display.

A couple things started to hit me, not the characters, at this point. The main one was the flaw in their field guide, which they’re still working on. Things aren’t simply ‘poisonous’ or ‘edible.’ Certain wild food would be edible in small amounts, but poisonous in large amounts, or for example some people would be allergic to certain things and others wouldn’t. So the idea that the world is full of wild food that either sustains life like the Garden of Eden or kills you dead like a cyanide pill isn’t right. But since that hit me at this point, I felt compelled to clarify (see second paragraph of the chapter). In hindsight this was probably me just obsessing over details, trying to plug any and all plotholes. I think I was a little too close to the work at this time, and the explanation I put into the story might have just been extraneous. But hey, whatever.

I also realized I had kindof painted myself into a small corner with what language the girls were going to speak on Jan Mayen. Bog Man’s chapter had him understanding them, so they’d have to speak Svalbardian. But why wouldn’t they speak Canadian when they were alone? Specifically the scene when they’re counting to pull him out of the bog. Again, obsessing over small details. So in this chapter I explained that they were trying to become fluent by only speaking Svalbardian even when alone together.

When Lavender digs through their bag to give Quinby some money, Marigold mentions the “small object we received from the Lichen’s stash.” This is going to play a role in the next chapter, the Feathermen’s. Originally this was mentioned in the Lichen’s chapter as “the man finder,” as Mariogold called it. Really the whole ‘give Quinby some money’ idea was just a device so I could mention this object, and remind the reader of it, so it’s not a totally forgotten thing in the next chapter when it becomes important.

In trying to describe the area around the bog, I wanted it immersed in forests at the foothills of the mountain, and I wanted those forests to separate the mountain from the populated end. It’s weird how words avoid you until you’ve already written something. I wanted to give those forests a different geographic feel than all the other forests we’ve been to so far, because this is Jan Mayen Island, not Canada anymore. After finishing this chapter, the word ‘thicket’ came to me. So I re-read both this and the Bog Man’s chapter and replaced the word ‘brush’ or ‘tall grasses’ as appropriate with ‘thicket.’ All that work for one word, but it probably does help, especially describing bogs and swampland.

For this and Oslo’s chapter, the second in their pair, it was pretty tedious writing overlapping scenes. For example, Bog Man talks about getting pulled out of the bog by the girls, then in this chapter, the girls narrate it from their perspective. I tried to speed it up a bit because it was the reader’s second time seeing the same thing, but I wanted to make sure they actually got that different perspective, and I wanted it to remind the reader of what they already read in the previous chapter, because that would ‘anchor’ the story through a common scene, and if they were at all disoriented wondering where/when we are in the story, this would help pin it down. Getting the text exact wasn’t necessary; if Tollund narrates the dialogue a little differently than Marigold, that’s fine. But the timeline was a pain. What time of day was it when Oslo proposed to Sanna? How many nights was it between Tollund being pulled from the bog and getting arrested? Was this enough time for Tollund to make a reputation for himself on the island? Because that has to be the same amount of time it takes the girls to help set up his arrest.

Lavender is exhausted most of this chapter. They were up all night when they pulled the Bog Man out of the bog, then realized they can’t just go to sleep. She gets really cranky. A few times I realized my characters haven’t slept in a while, and they’re not going to sleep for a while. Some of that is plot-driven, but some of it may have been subconscious to the fact that I did most of my writing on Friday and Saturday nights between about 9 or 10pm and about 3am. But because she’s cranky, Lavender can barely tolerate the backwards locals on the island, and is not about to explain her gift to anybody. This is leading her to a mindset she’s going to be in for the next chapter.

Per, Bergen, Hakon, Carrson, Tate, Rae, and everybody on this island has a Scandinavian name. I picked names for characters based on baby-naming websites where you could pick the nationality. I either picked ‘Scandinavian’ or ‘Norwegian’ names for anybody that lived in a Svalbardian-speaking place. That’s because modern-day Svalbard is ruled by Norway. For Jan Mayen Island, I tried to pick names within these categories that I didn’t realize were Norwegian, but were. I thought that separated them a little bit (so it felt like a different place) but not too much (so it still felt like the same empire) from the names of characters on the main Svalbard island.

At the dinner before Tollund’s arrest, Marigold socially picks up the slack for a very drained Lavender. She’s convinced at this point that she’s just born evil (also part of the mindset Lavender will take into the next chapter), and Marigold chats about their recent trip to the castle. I had to think of something that the locals would want to hear about, which was funny, because it took me a while. What will Marigold talk to them about at the dinner table, so the introverted Lavender can just take a break and chill out for a bit? Finally I realized, well, they have met the royal family and been to the castle recently. Duh. That’s perfect.

At that dinner, it did start to feel like the Last Supper. Here’s everybody breaking bread on the night before a big arrest (Tollund’s arrest, although not present for the dinner). There were many times where I had to actively steer my story away from this or other extremely well-known parallels, simply because if I seem like I’m making a parallel to a famous narrative, most readers will probably think it was intentional. And I found it surprisingly hard at times to steer the story away from such parallels. For example, the big sea creature with Simon in it could easily have been read as a Jonah and the Whale story. Which wasn’t what I was going for, but when you watch Pinocchio, can you blame someone for thinking the whale part of the story might have been based on Jonah? I didn’t realize it would be so much work to avoid that stuff.

The flicker of moonlight about halfway through the chapter was a ‘Featherman’ flying high above (about 400 perch… a perch is an antiquated but real unit of measurement equal to about 25’, so 400 perch is about 10,000’). A Featherman is about 25-30 feet tall, body similar in shape to a man, but with large wings and a bird’s head. In fact the first one we meet is named Horus, after the Egyptian god. The original Egyptian Horus design is similar, but not exactly the image we’re going for. The ‘body of a man’ is still covered with scales and feathers, and has talons, not feet. Large talons, which can hold a few humans if necessary.

I dug through different units of measurement online before settling on the ‘perch.’ Although it’s real, I had certainly never heard of it. I avoided the known calendar and things like kilometers, miles, inches, pounds, etc., because calendars and units of measurement are always culturally rooted. I thought it was kind of a blemish on that aspect of this alternate world to have a “November 30th.” However, it did make things difficult, so rather than saying “25 feet,” I said “perch,” but then had to explain. I think the ratio was: a Featherman is about the height of the Lichen, and therefore about 4 times the size of a human.

The idea that a giant bird creature was going to at some point come down and rescue the girls was something I had planned for a long, long time, but wasn’t sure when I was going to use it. It was also, in my opinion, kindof a cop-out plot device. Or at least it would seem like that if I wasn’t careful. So I set it up in the Lichen’s chapter, with the story about the Featherman who fell from the sky in a storm (that’s where the sisters got the special object which we’ll read about more soon). Anyway, I was saving that for when I really got the sisters stuck and couldn’t get them out. When you think about it, attacked by an angry mob on an island with no help late in the story is pretty much it. Time to use my get-out-of-jail free card… bring down the Featherman. So far it seems like readers like the Feathermen, but I never thought it was too original of an idea. The idea was only to have a race of creatures I could use to represent pilots. Being a pilot, I definitely had some ideas for what the Feathermen personalities were going to be like.

The next chapter will be narrated in two parts. One is Horus, the Featherman who saved the sisters from the mob on Jan Mayen. The second will be Baker. There are very different tones to their two sections, and they are almost like two separate chapters. But seeing “The Feathermen” in the table of contents for late in the book, I thought, was something more exciting to look forward to than “Horus” and “Baker,” who could have been humans for all we knew, based only on their names.

As always, thanks for reading! I started two new threads, one for each part of the next chapter.

I thought there was a lot of action compared to the other supporting Marigold interim chapters. I liked it but I have had other chapters that I liked more so far. Don't make me name a fave, because I am never good at that. It is cool to me how there is overlap in chapters. Thanks for the wealth of background!

Yeah, past chapters written by Marigold have been more of an opportunity to get to know the girls. Because the other narrators don't always know the girls well, the "Interims" have usually been the chance to get a little closer to the sisters. But by this one, we know them pretty well and that's not necessary.

This is also the point in the story where I thought it was time to focus on the girls' journey, or we'll never wrap things up. Previous middle chapters have often barely featured the girls. I remember thinking at this point it was time for them to be prominent in the remaining chapters, start to finish, and for their journey and the overall story to be more of the focus than a story about the narrator.

It made me a little nervous, because now I had things I 'had' to do. Between chapters 7 and 14, I could pretty much write what I wanted. But now I had to a 'to do list' of plot points to hit, and wasn't 100% sure if I could hit them naturally or not.

In the next chapter, Horus' part at least, we have what was intended as a comedy. The reason this chapter (part one) is the comedy, is because the air gets a little thin up high. That and we're due a break from the seriousness, right before it gets very serious.

It is a lot to work out so I can see how you would be nervous. I appreciate all your details in this fantasy. Also, I am glad you were able to share your book with your dad. My dad read my brother's Sci Fi book Time of Knight and enjoyed it.

Yeah, it was nice my dad read it. I was actually surprised how few family members decided to read it. But I'm not going to get on anybody's case about it. It's a big time commitment and so many people just have such a hard time with certain genres.

You mentioned Time of Knight before. Anywhere I can look for that being sold?

Did I put in a plug for my bro's book before lol? I'll try to see if there is a link to his self-published book. :) I believe it is no longer in print but it is still available online.

I've said how I don't generally read fantasy. I think it's been years since I've read a fantasy book. I've enjoyed the journey so far.

Well, it looks like it is still in print at LuLu the ebook is very cheap though.

http://www.lulu.com/shop/john-bohan/t...