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

finished. A lot of suspense!

Thank you! That's always a good sign- when you feel something, like the suspense or the sadness. I want to add a quick story but I don't want to ruin a future chapter... hopefully I'll just remember.

Okay, behind the scenes time!

First I had to figure out what kind of maple tree's leaf is on the Canadian flag. It's the sugar maple. Who knew there were so many different types of maple tree? The research required with some of these minor details will really lead you in unexpected places, like charts on the hardness of different types of lumber. Like the comment in the second paragraph, "There are denser lumbers, but maple is the celebrated Canadian wood." To say that, first I wanted to check to make sure maple wasn't on the harder end of the spectrum. Anyway, I was glad it was the sugar maple because I really needed it to be later on in the story. But that had to do with sap and syrup, and it's much later on in the story.

So that was just another small detail with a surprising amount of research behind it. I learned a lot of unexpected stuff writing a book, and it certainly cleaned up my grammar and spelling (which is why I recommend writing a book to anybody contemplating doing so... just go for it, if you have the time... at the very least you'll sharpen some skills that will be useful in other aspects of life. Oh, and you get really good at dealing with rejection). But as for the type of maple question... all I could think at 1am while writing this chapter was, "I am SO glad for the internet. Ten or fifteen years ago I would have had to go to a library... not many of those open at 1am." (I did most of the writing for this book on Friday and Saturday nights from 10pm to 3am. Took about two and half years).

The main purpose in this chapter was to look at justice issues with respect to the cycle of poverty. I've heard recently (word of mouth) that 99% of us will land in a class equal or lower than our parents. It's not often that someone grows up poor and even lands in the middle class as an adult.

The poverty cycle was set up in the orphan's chapter, two chapters ago. Sam is at a different stage of the cycle as Lyell, but both are orphans. Sam, like Lyell, is without parents and vulnerable to exploitation. Guy and Al try to exploit Sam in his chapter, wanting to use him as bait for the Manbare. Lyell winds up in a similar situation with the giant amphibious whale creature.

The exploitation is set up in Sam's chapter, and the theme brought out when Lavender says, "When light shines on agenda, it casts a permanent shadow." Probably the best example I can think of is a boy being nice to a girl he likes. He doesn't tell her he likes her right away, because then she'll think he's just being nice so she'll date him. Then she finds out he likes her, and it casts a permanent shadow on every nice thing he did and will do in the future. "Sure, he's being nice, but only because he wants to go out with me." I think even forty years later that shadow may still be there; she'll be suspicious if he's still unusually nice to her.

When Lavender uses this saying she's talking about Guy and Al's plans to eat the herisson. Because of her gift, she can see the white glow (the 'light' shining on agenda). But I used this saying in this way because I also wanted the boys, who would soon get ink on their faces (permanent shadow), to think she was giving them an evil prophesy. This was so that I could develop another theme, one of Lavender's self-doubt and fear that she's actually evil. And that was discussed in the interim chapter, after the orphan's and before this one, the Commandant's.

But the theme still stands in Sam and Lyell's world of poverty and exploitation. And the exploitation is the Wooden Sword, which we've read. The Wooden Sword is a program with an agenda, and that is to exploit children like Sam and young men like Lyell. The Commandant is a participant in this exploitation. Ellard is not from the same background as Sam or Lyell, so he's not in this poverty cycle, nor is he taking part in it like the Commandant. His role in the story is as an outsider shining the light on the Wooden Sword's agenda (even though the whole time the Commandant is suspicious of Ellard's agenda, it's Ellard who criticizes the Commandant for the agenda of the Wooden Sword). The Commandant isn't the most self-aware character, but he repeats the agenda/light/shadow theme when he says, "If the public eye sees so much as a flicker of someone's agenda, it permanently affects their view of them." It's the same thing Lavender said, just reworded and more direct. Lyell is actually the one who says, "Beware the wooden sword!" He says it playfully to the Commandant, but it's foreshadowing to what's going to happen to him.

One issue I had in this chapter was the lack of horses. I didn't want to use any domestic creatures from our world. I thought a different society in a different time period might have some of the same wild creatures, but domestic creatures change so rapidly because of the way we breed them. So we have mullice, tollimore, ovidons from earlier chapters. Polaris says to the Commandant, "you will not ride." I didn't use the word horse anywhere in the story, and this was my weak cover-up. It was also tricky to get around the horse thing in the Summoner's chapter. What was pulling the cart when he took the girls to their farm, then exile? I avoided answering that question.

Random stuff:

The Commandant speaks of his colleagues as wolves circling a huntsman's fire. They smell the meat but know they'll have to domesticate themselves if they want to have any. (This is how it's believed the wolf was domesticated.)

Going back to The Kitchen Sink, the comic strip my brother and I did a long time ago, I borrowed the names Guy, Al, and Sam from it for the orphan's chapter. But I also borrowed jokes. I had a lot of jokes all saved on my computer, and occasionally reviewed them to see if any would fit Ancient Canada. One fit really well for the Commandant's speech. It's his opening joke. In the Kitchen Sink, it wasn't too different. Guy and Al (both about 12 years old) are in history class when the teacher says, Frame 1: "Today we're about to start a new topic on world religions." Frame 2: "We'll be looking at them purely from a historical perspective. It's not our job to decide who's right and who's wrong..." Frame 3: "...We do that in the advanced class." (Children cheer). Other jokes I borrowed from the Kitchen Sink were the jokes Ellard and Lyell tell to the Commandant when they first meet him.

The Commandant's speech is like My Brother's Dinner or The Mystic Garden's pamphlet. I tried to throw random 'artifacts' in from the world of Ancient Canada. I thought that if I were the reader, I'd enjoy little breaks in the narrative like those. I tried to work them in whenever I could. Maybe a letter from one character to another, that sort of thing.

Polaris picks the Commandant because he knows him and knows how loyal he'll be. After dealing with the Summoner, Polaris just wants someone who will quietly go and kill Lavender and Marigold, no questions asked. This is also why he chooses Lyell and Ellard, thinking they'd be loyal. He doesn't send an army, because he doesn't have a great grasp of her gift. He's trying to send sort of a 'special ops' team.

If you look at the map, right about in the middle is a drawing of the creature at the end of this chapter. It's whale-like, but is amphibious with six legs and a single eyeball at the end of a long appendage. It may be hard to picture, but check the map out (first several pages of the book has the map).

I talked about anosmia in this chapter, the inability to smell. It's like blindness is to sight, anosmia is to smell. The first person to read Ancient Canada was anosmic, the same friend who I named the Summoner after.

I went back and forth with what I felt of this chapter. "I love it; the action is great." "I hate it; the Commandant's annoying and the philosophy drags on." This and Oslo's chapter were two chapters I finished and was thrilled with at first. Then I kept going back and forth, almost embarrassed about them. In the end the feedback I got on this chapter was pretty good. The jury is still out on Oslo's, but Oslo's chapter probably has the most good quotes of any chapter in the book. (That's why I originally loved it.) But I think the relevance to modern themes saves the Commandant's chapter's first 80%, and the action saves the last 20%. I hope. Like I said, the feedback on this chapter was pretty good. I was in touch with a graphic novel start-up publisher, and they liked a scene from this chapter (the action scene), which now appears on their website:

http://ch37.tv/AlphaChannel/2012/02/2...

The other scene they posted was from the Bog Man, probably my favorite chapter. I haven't been in touch with them in a while, though I should probably say hi.

As always, thanks for reading!

I know Orson Scott Card says that he outlines a story long before he even finishes the book. You pay so much attention to detail with flags, imaginary creatures, and everything is so plotted out with characters being introduced and re-introduced that I think it would take a very careful outline to keep track of it all.

Funny enough, I had no idea where the girls were going next when I was writing this book. But if there will be a sequel, I'll probably have the whole thing mapped out before I even start. And that's only because so much time has passed that I've had enough ideas, and have written them down. But for the first book, I knew the beginning and the end when I started, but almost nothing in between. It was fun thinking, "Okay, who's my next narrator going to be?"

But as for the details, I'd think of those at random times and write them down on a 'Master' file. That's organized into about nine different sections. Each has a title so I can hit 'control f', type in the title, and jump right to the section on the file. One section is quotes and philosophy. Another is cultural details. Another is random jokes that I think will eventually fit a scene. But the big sections are just tons of loose notes for sequels.

Yesterday when I was eating dinner with the kids, I thought, 'I bet if I put honey on everything I could get them to eat their vegetables, potatoes, meat...' There's a scene I'm thinking of in a sequel where the Svalbardian narrator is eating leftovers the day after a huge banquet. So I just jotted down that he's going to drip honey all over his leftovers to moisten and flavor them back up. He'd probably get teased for it, and maybe the next part of the joke is that Siberians probably do the same thing, only with blood, not honey. It's fun thinking of these details to hopefully make for an immersive world, but I'll never remember them unless I write them down on the master.

Yes, I've heard authors who feel the stories or characters at times have a life of their own. It is cool when you have a moment in life to incorporate in a book too.

I think it starts when you're building something, like a character or a world. You start from scratch, or an idea. But once you've built and built, it starts building itself. And that's nice when that happens, because it's much easier at that point.

I've never felt that I would have the imagination to write fiction. I am still not sure. Maybe that's why I am so fascinated by those who do.