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

A summoner works secretly to bring criminals to justice. In this chapter, the journey really begins.

When you read this chapter, look for the Summoner to argue that Lavender should be allowed to serve Polaris in the cathedral. Polaris says this is impossible; she's a female.

After this chapter we more or less lay off the gender inequality themes, but what the Summoner says relevant to our world is 'any inequality in religion based solely on gender indicates an obvious absence of the divine.' Meaning that when an ancient religious text or policy is sexist, it's an obvious indicator that the passage you're reading isn't from God. It lacks divine inspiration and is a man-made modification. Most societies would see that as obvious if it were a racist policy. If we can discard our ancient racist baggage, why not the ancient sexist baggage as well?

He elaborates in ways that have a lot to do with contemporary issues on the subject, which are starting to culminate right now (A few months after Ancient Canada was published, actually. Guess I got lucky there).

It's the longest chapter so far, so take your time. Just let me know when, and I'll do the behind the scenes.

I am on 36. Very interesting discussions on the sacred texts, which the Summoner does not view as infallible. Also, it is starting an up close view of Polaris. Will be outside much of today, but may read more tomorrow.

Yeah, the infallibility of Polaris' ancient texts is a big part of what I was saying between the lines... just the absurdity of a fallible creature declaring infallibility on anything. It creates too much baggage. One generation's sin is the next generation's good deed, sometimes. But more on that when I do the behind the scenes.

I just told a friend in a fb message about this book and she is also a friend at GR. I was just coming to GR to comment on a blog and see that she already marked to read Ancient Canada. Sorry I haven't made any more ground since last stated. I was offline for a couple of days. I hope to make some progress today.

No problem! If she wants to jump in on the group read, I'd be happy to give her a free e-copy of the book. Here's the link: http://ancientcanada.com/Ancient_Cana... (and for a different file type, other than PDF, she can email askmarigold@ancientcanada.com). If she wants to join the read, she could probably catch up to us, or I could bring her up to speed if she'd prefer to "fastforward" right to where we are. Either way, thanks for spreading the word!

I know she is editing a book and working on her Master's Degree right now so she may not be able to right now. But I will mention. Thank you!

Yeah, that'll keep you busy. May not be the best time for her. As for the editing, that can drag on and on. I've joked before that the best part of writing is the six or seven times you finish the same book. You get to enjoy that sense of accomplishment over and over and over again.

Oh my, six or seven times! Well, I just finished the Chapter. Polaris is so threatened and paranoid. I wonder what is in those "files" he won't reveal and claims that it has such proof of Lavender's guilt or if it is all a bluff. If he was who he claimed to be, he would have no need for paranoia. But he is a fraud. But still, to be so afraid. While earlier it was clear that text were open to interpretation, it is clear that some have even broken from the faith. Others love the faith enough to try to reform from within if I understood it correctly.

It seems like this is a Theocracy, which would make it hard for those who separate from the Church. It is somewhat like Anglican Church. Yet, it is more than Divine Right theory to be King as he seems to be more than a Prophet as far as I can tell as he was a star in the heavens. Or is that just a metaphor? I don't think he is considered a God like leaders of Japan have been or Ancient Egypt. Or is he?

Oh yeah, the editing goes on and on. Don't tell your family you're done with your book until it's published.

Okay, behind the scenes coming, realistically, in a few days. But for now, I can definitely answer those questions, and will probably wind up doing some of the behind the scenes while I'm at it.

One thing about Polaris, he will not reveal his agenda. It eventually comes out in the very end, but he feels he has a country to protect, and these are the actions he needs to do. He's an institution, and as such has fallen into the trap many institutions do, which is an overwhelming anxiety of self-preservation. One thing I will say, when we learn more towards the end, it actually makes his actions seem driven more for the good of the many (at the expense of the few) than simply unjust and evil. It sympathizes him a bit as a villain when we learn more, not unlike Darth Vader when we learn more about him. Only Polaris isn't Lavender's father.

When you mentioned the church, I'm not too familiar with the Anglicans, but as a religious leader, Polaris is Pharasaic. He's the founder of Canada, claiming to be from the heavens, which would give him divine authority that no one would question. He never says he's all knowing or all powerful, so in that sense he's more of a prophet than a god. But he does claim a sort of divine inspiration (or maybe the Divine Right theory you mentioned), cut from divine cloth if you will. And since there's no other divine ones around, he's the one source to follow. The brightest star in the sky is the North Star, aka Polaris. He says he's from there, from the heavens. Either that's the truth or a false claim to establish the kind of authority he'd need to structure a new society. But it could be something in between, like the metaphor you mentioned. We see the answer much later in Agrippin's chapter (leave it to the Siberians to seek to cripple Polaris' authority). If you want to know the spoilers early, I'll post the reveals I'm hinting at. Just let me know. It would ruin a lot of the surprises in Agrippin's chapter, but it wouldn't hurt the reading of the book other than that, I don't think.

Polaris founded a country, and runs almost every aspect of it. He's CEO of Ancient Canada. Two parts of it he hasn't delegated any authority are the military and the religion.

It's not exactly a theocracy, but it's close. It's not a theocracy because they don't run their government based on interpreting their faith. They don't have to; Polaris hasn't died and he just lays down the law. And no one questions it because he protects the border. And he hasn't died after 500 years, so they figure he must be divine.

It would be hard to separate from the Polarian faith, mostly because there's nowhere else to go, but he doesn't check to see if people are going to cathedral services. It's more about structuring a society than what you worship, so he's happy if you just follow the rules, and doesn't need to be prayed to or anything.

Back to Polaris not revealing his agenda. This gets very frustrating for Lavender, not really knowing why he's doing what he's doing, or why she had to be exiled. The narrator of the next chapter is a large, stone, wise hermit creature who helps her with this frustration. She makes the mistake in thinking Polaris was out to get her, but the narrator explains nobody thinks like that. Whatever Polaris did was to help Polaris. He just hurt Lavender as a side effect. But to think someone is going out of their way just to hurt you is actually self-absorbed, thinking that your situation is what motivates others. Anyway, that's in the next chapter.

The file in question is her rap sheet from when she was a baby (see the end of Heather's chapter for more). It's not a bluff, but it's an injustice. Heather broke the law when she went to visit Simon at Fort Alert. She had her reasons, but the law was pretty cut and dry. No civilians in a war zone. Lavender was guilty of the same crime, even though she was an infant, which is absurd. Polaris tells the Summoner at the end he hid this information (the file) so his investigation wouldn't be biased. But if I remember right, Polaris never says her past crime was as an infant. This is absurd and he knows it, hence he hides the file from the Summoner.

Polaris is paranoid, and very threatened by Lavender. This gift of hers has him very uneasy. We won't really find out why until the final chapter (again, let me know if you want spoilers, although this one would spoil more than the first one). But he's been threatened by her since he first saw her eyes as an infant, which is why he slapped her with a treason conviction at the time. Now she's back on the map, and he brings her old file with him to the briefing with the Summoner. Heather and infant Lavender didn't serve much time, just a few nights. But they were both released and told any law-breaking in the future will end in a public execution.

He wants to do this, but he's high strung about it. This is because he has a guilty conscience about the whole thing. As the Summoner says, pre-existing guilt on a topic will lead to hypersensitive reactions about it.

He's able to drown out his conscience. He's glad he convicted infant Lavender of treason, because now he gets to kill teenage Lavender, who threatens him so much for some reason. And even Polaris needs to cross his t's and dot his i's, because if he declared something 300 years ago, he's stuck with it today. It's divine word as soon as he inks a new law or policy. How can you go back on it? Divine word must be timeless and universal, right? If it's been against divine will for 300 years, it wouldn't suddenly change. Unless you admit you were wrong, but it's easier for him to just keep insisting.

Straight from that thought the Summoner suggests Lavender's services be used to aid Polaris in the Canadian faith. This would strengthen the Cathedral, but make her a female religious leader. Unfortunately, Polaris has already decided a long time ago that this will never be allowed. And we're stuck with that policy forever. The Summoner's appeal was my punctuation on the gender issues, which we step away from starting now.

Hope I answered your questions without rambling too much. Let me know if there's any others that come up between now and the behind-the-scenes. As always, thanks for reading!

I was wondering if Polaris was really supposed to be as old as people were saying, but you clarified that. Thanks so much for the answers to the questions! It sounds like you gave a lot of background too.

Here we go, behind the scenes for the summoner:

The summoner is one of four characters named after people I know. I never based a character on a friend or family member. Unless you count myself, who I used for Lavender and Marigold (Lavender was the left-brained side of me, Marigold the right-brained side). But I did sort of name four characters after friends and family members, if I’m not forgetting anybody. Denton is the last name of the first person ever to read Ancient Canada in its entirety. He’s a good friend and former co-worker, and helped a lot with feedback. I told him I’d name a character after him. Technically Denton is the fake name the Summoner uses, but it’s the only name he gives. He has to maintain secrecy and protect his family, so it wouldn’t be safe for the character to use his real name, for a book he knows will be published within his world. I liked the name for two reasons, which is why I applied it to this character: 1) it fits the sound of Ancient Canada and 2) the summoner’s garb can be thought of as a protective barrier, so no one can get to the real person inside the gray garments. Kinda like a tooth- it has enamel on the outside and denton on the inside. But that metaphor wasn’t intended when applying the name. Don’t forget to floss.

The other three characters named after friends and family are Marigold, Little Andy, and Al. We haven’t met Little Andy or Al yet. Marigold is in my sister’s email address, which she said was her favorite flower. I thought it had the perfect slightly mature but slightly tacky connotations, so I asked her if I could use it for a character. She said yes of course. Little Andy narrates a later chapter. His name is short for Anders, and he is a small bird-like creature mixed in with Svalbardian society. I needed a diminutive nickname for him to fit his character, who unfortunately is often seen as a novelty by other characters. My mom’s cousin is also called Little Andy, but it’s not short for Anders. Andrew, I believe. Finally, Al. My brother and I put together a comic strip that never got picked up. We named a character off a friend, Al. The other characters in the strip were Guy and Sam. I used all three names for the orphan boys in chapter 7. So, through an extra degree of separation, Al in Ancient Canada is named after a friend.

The summoner describes his trade. He’s essentially part detective part cop part secret agent. Seeing a summoner in the marketplace, dressed in the gray gear, is kinda like seeing a cop in the rear view mirror with the lights on. “Uh-oh, is this for me?” Then the car passes you, hopefully, and your heartrate goes back down to normal. He works for the Civil Mandate Enforcement, which is just the police department. His ultimate superior is Polaris, who usually doesn’t get involved. Polaris gets involved in this one because he doesn’t want anybody knowing about it who doesn’t have to. Polaris is very secretive in this case because he’s quite threatened by Lavender, definitely paranoid and neurotic. We don’t really get an explanation why he’s so worried, because Polaris doesn’t reveal his agenda. We’ll find out more later in the book.

There’s certain things I think that no matter how many times we learn, we just can’t remember. One of mine seems to be how to spell ‘gray.’ It’s g-r-a-y for the color, G-r-e-y for the proper last name. Although I believe you could spell the color either way. I used the word a lot in this chapter, and had to constantly remind myself, “Jennifer Grey, from Dirty Dancing,” so I didn’t spell the color gray with an e. But you may have noticed the word ‘fiften.’ I wanted to play with language for the book, giving it an archaic feel, approximately the medieval time period. But I couldn’t do much playing with language, or the book would be unreadable. I thought in our world the word “fifteen” was probably originally “five and ten.” I can see dropping the “and,” but when did we give “ten” an extra e? I went back to fiften, which spellcheck hates, but all numbers from thirten to nineten are like that. Although they still say “teen girl.” If I remember right, we don’t see this until about now. I worked around having to use those words in the first few chapters, for the sake of picking up a publisher. They usually want the first three chapters as a sample, and if they see something like “seventen” and figure it’s a typo, they may put Ancient Canada straight into the circular file (trash bin) depending on how picky they are.

We see our first “Polarian quatrain” in this chapter. They’ll play a larger role late in the book, and will be quoted occasionally throughout the story. It’s the equivalent of them quoting their scripture. The four-line format was decided on when I heard about how Nostradamus wrote, in Apocalyptic-sounding quatrains. All the Polarian quatrains should all be in iambic meter. All lines in a given quatrain will have the same number of syllables, but not all quatrains have the same length lines. The rhyme scheme is always ABAB. The quatrains were written by Polaris early on in his country’s history. They tell an early Canadian how to live, how salvation can be achieved, and what the end of time will be like. Mostly they just structure the society with rules and policies. They’re still used five-hundred years (seasons) later, in the time period we’re reading, although most of them would be considered obsolete by your average Canadian. The summoner’s argument is, if a sexist quatrain is considered obsolete, let’s get the white-out and ditch the thing. But Polaris isn’t comfortable with that, because if it was once the divine word, it is still the divine word. They’ll have their argument over that of course. Chapter 18 is a collection of quatrains which I originally had as chapter 2, right after the prologue. It was supposed to be a mood-setter, but it was a little too much too soon. I pushed it back to chapter 18, between the final two chapters. It fits better there because it explains all the secrets we learn in the chapter before it. It sheds a lot of light on the quatrains, their original purpose, and the intended double meanings in many of them. Since it was originally chapter 2, there’s no harm in reading chapter 18 (it’s short) but it’ll probably be a little confusing without reading 17, and 17 has the spoilers.

The summoner villainizes Polaris badly, so badly that he admits no one as bad as he is portraying could have founded a decent country (and he considers his Canada a decent country, so there's an admitted contradiction there). But he’s writing with knowledge of later events that we don’t have. He, like all narrators, is writing his chapter knowing what has happened in their world. Essentially they’ve read the whole book and we haven’t. This usually doesn’t matter much, but in this chapter it partially explains why the summoner is so hard on Polaris with his portrayal.

Also in the long, degrading introduction of Polaris, we see some more fire metaphors. Being “from the brightest star in the sky,” and “red eyes that glow lie dying coals.” (Reminder: in our world, Polaris is also known as the North Star. It sits right above the axis of the earth, so it sits right above the North Pole. Natural that some mythology would form out of this.)

The summoner heads north to see if anybody knows Lavender. He meets a ‘grouse’ farmer, and a grouse (which is real in our world) can just be thought of as a chicken, or at least poultry. Basically there’s a chicken farmer who plays a role in this chapter. The character says Lavender prevented her from unnecessarily killing a lot of his livestock. He would have done this to prevent the spread of disease (distemper, a common veterinary term/disease), but she helped him (with her gift) be a little more frugal, pointing out which ones were sick and which weren’t. He says he’d like to be able to repay her someday, but later when she stands a makeshift trial in front of the marketplace, he denies her after she asks him for help.

As the summoner seeks out the girls’ business, which is essentially Lavender playing the fortune-teller, he spots Marigold quickly. She has the ability to attract attention, but Lavender is (and wants to be) more of a grain of sand on the seashore. We’ll see this metaphor a few more times throughout the book.

We also hear the phrase “It doesn’t work like that,” in response to someone’s misunderstanding of how Lavender’s gift works. We’ll hear that again throughout the book as well, used the same way.

On page 47 (of the pdf at least) we see a single-page brochure of The Mystic Garden. It’s Marigold’s design; she does the marketing. Sometimes I wish she would do the marketing for my book. That’s definitely the hardest part of writing. Anyway, as one character says, she’s drawn “silly flowers” all over them. I tried, not very hard, to actually have flowers all over the brochure we see on page 47. But that would have been an electronic nightmare, taking it out of text format and into the realm of a jpeg file needing to be inserted. The map we see at the very beginning was about the last thing added before finalizing the electronic file.

The summoner argues extensively with Polaris, and Polaris clings to his beliefs. Confirmation bias (also known as polarization effect or Tolstoy syndrome) is the tendency to seek information that confirms pre-existing beliefs and ignore or discredit information that disagrees with it. The summoner says, “The polarisation to confirm pre-existing beliefs is tremendously strong in politics and religion: beliefs people cling to.” It’s a minute detail, but the misspelling of “polarization,” spelled with an s instead of a z, was intentional to have the word Polaris in it. It may not look unusual to some readers, because I believe outside the U.S., it isn’t misspelled.

Polaris’ attempt at publicly executing Lavender is botched because of an unkept man, a peddler, with bright green eyes. He doesn’t look familiar to the summoner, but he’s familiar to the reader. He’s the same man who was there to guide Heather to Simon in the second chapter, when Lavender was born. He’s in the right place at the right time again. Naturally we’ll see him again, but it’ll be a while.

Lavender’s doped up during the ‘trial,’ drugged by the summoner to kill the pain he thinks she’ll feel in inevitable execution. Marigold’s sober but a bit stunned at first by the whole situation. Still, she quickly steps in and joins her sister in exile.

Although Marigold isn’t drugged, the summoner is confused why she could be so flippant about the exile. That’s Marigold. She knows she’s not in danger until her sister says, “You’re glowing.” So she has a tendency to laugh and joke in really inopportune moments. She also hates camping, but they’re going straight into the bush.

If there’s anything left unanswered, feel free to ask!

Next is the Lichen’s chapter. He’s one of my favorite characters, because he’s based on a great source of inspiration for me, St. Francis of Assisi. The chapter is the beginning of the epic, and the girls start the chapter a little lost, but leave with strong direction and resolve.

Thanks as always for reading. Now for something really behind the scenes. Ancient Canada has gotten a few reviews lately. Yesterday was a great one and today was maybe the worst one yet. It's my first book, and I'm seeing what I did right and what I did wrong. But sometimes they're the same thing. Some people love the writing style, some hate it because it's wordy. Some people like the philosophy, some feel like I'm lecturing them. I didn't mean for that. But things like that are coming up. It makes me a little extra grateful for folks that have patience to read through the book in spite of my mistakes, and hopefully the good outweighs the bad, making it time well spent.

You didn't skimp on the background. Thank you! Well, I would take a bad review with a grain of salt because not everybody is going to look any book. The fact that you did have an audience who appreciates the world you create is what matters.

Thank you! I appreciate that. The good news is the next day I got another five-star review. So in about three days I get a five star, a one star, then a five star. So go figure. Grain of salt, like you said.

2 five stars!

Yeah, and another one today on Amazon! And they're not relatives either. I can't even get most of them to read the dang thing. But the ratings system, and the grain of salt, it all reminds me of a funny scene from the Drew Carey show.

Kate: How do I look?
Oswald: Great! You look like a seven.
Kate: What? A seven?
Louis: Don't worry, Kate. That's a perfect score. His scale only goes up to seven.
Oswald: It starts at three.

lol