F.T. McKinstry's Blog - Posts Tagged "f-t-mckinstry"
I wrote this last year when my husband was deployed in Afghanistan.
In honor of Veterans Day, those who serve and the ones who love them.
***
Ten months ago, when winter held Vermont's Green Mountains in a white-knuckled grip, the man I love deployed to Afghanistan.
I can be strong when the need arises. But during the weeks that led up to his departure, I wasn't of a mind. I backed away slowly, and then turned and scrambled for the shelter of work and purpose. There, I stood over the woodstove like a vengeful witch and brewed up survival plans: stories to write, paintings to paint, garden harvests to grow and can, books to read. In no time, I had built a sturdy fortress, and when he marched from the hue and cry of a fluorescent send-off ceremony, I ran into my fortress and slammed the door behind me.
This is my second time to lose him to a deployment. Again wearing my pointy hat, I fashioned a figure of a seasoned warrior. I comforted myself with this mojo in much the same way as I have the death of a cat: I've endured it before; it will be easier this time. But it doesn't work that way. The same primordial force descends just as fresh and terrible as it did the time before. It simply takes a bite from a different place.
The Family Readiness people from the Vermont National Guard call me now and then. They ask how I'm doing and if I need anything. I often ignore phone calls, but I don't ignore those. The people are kind, and they understand the sadness; it hovers around them like a fragrance. I assure them, no leaky faucet, chimney fires or downed trees this month. Wood is stacked and the roof is sound! I'm a seasoned warrior!
Romance can be useful, sometimes.
I am good at solitude. I like the silence; it allows the deeper, subtler shades of the mind to come through. But solitude is not the same as being alone. Thanks to the brilliant metroplex of the Internet, I am not wanting for contact with my man; I talk to him every day. But he is a virtual lover. He might as well be on Mars, complete with oxygen tanks, bottled water and slimy monsters. The months have turned him into a character in a science fiction tale, a holographic transmission fading in and out to the beat of an active sunspot. When the connection ends, my fortress is silent and all my plans blink at me stupidly.
My little cabin is a big place now, a shrine to the power of my imagination. I talk to my cats, the dead or half-dead creatures they bring in and those I manage to rescue from them. I talk to my fishes, and whenever I find one stuck to the filter intake, a part of me dies too. I talk to my plants, to the gardens outside, the birds and dragonflies. I talk to the spider that lives outside the bedroom window and works on its web each night. I talk to my truck, eyeing the creeping rust as I would the countdown timer on a roadside bomb. With so much companionship, I shouldn't feel lonely. But I do.
It took me these ten months to realize my sturdy fortress is built on a swamp. All my plans have grown mold and sagged into the murky waters. I don't feel like painting, or reading, and my garden barely yielded enough to snack on, let alone can. Writing feels like reaching into the stars to touch an invisible planet that won't support life. I wear a clever mask, in public. "Oh, I'm working on this and that," I say. "Very busy, ayuh!" Whatever.
This cabin is full of ghosts: cats and fish I've laid to rest, rejected manuscripts, abandoned ideas, the knitting project I lost interest in, the vitality of an ivy that doesn't care for the west window. The wraiths of another passing summer fill the place like a nervous crowd. When my man is here, the ghosts are faint, as if he wields the power of the earth to scare them away. They don't flee from me like that. A watery creature, I attract them.
My lover is a Green Mountain boy. Strong as the hills, and as reliable. He emails me pictures of the mountains in Afghanistan, which are vast, tall, dangerous and inaccessible except to goats and vultures. The irony of this is not lost on me. "Wow," I say, wearing the same specious smile I wear while waving my seasoned-warrior mojo over the widening cracks. "Nice mountains. When are you coming home?"
Time can be cruel, but it is wise. The silence of solitude has finally managed to cut through the meows, chirrups, trickles and rustles of my interior dialog. Without the roots of the mountains, I drift out into the sea of my imagination like a mermaid whose heart got broken by a sailor. Two weeks left before he comes home. If I start swimming now, I should be within earshot of the shore by then.
In honor of Veterans Day, those who serve and the ones who love them.
***
Ten months ago, when winter held Vermont's Green Mountains in a white-knuckled grip, the man I love deployed to Afghanistan.
I can be strong when the need arises. But during the weeks that led up to his departure, I wasn't of a mind. I backed away slowly, and then turned and scrambled for the shelter of work and purpose. There, I stood over the woodstove like a vengeful witch and brewed up survival plans: stories to write, paintings to paint, garden harvests to grow and can, books to read. In no time, I had built a sturdy fortress, and when he marched from the hue and cry of a fluorescent send-off ceremony, I ran into my fortress and slammed the door behind me.
This is my second time to lose him to a deployment. Again wearing my pointy hat, I fashioned a figure of a seasoned warrior. I comforted myself with this mojo in much the same way as I have the death of a cat: I've endured it before; it will be easier this time. But it doesn't work that way. The same primordial force descends just as fresh and terrible as it did the time before. It simply takes a bite from a different place.
The Family Readiness people from the Vermont National Guard call me now and then. They ask how I'm doing and if I need anything. I often ignore phone calls, but I don't ignore those. The people are kind, and they understand the sadness; it hovers around them like a fragrance. I assure them, no leaky faucet, chimney fires or downed trees this month. Wood is stacked and the roof is sound! I'm a seasoned warrior!
Romance can be useful, sometimes.
I am good at solitude. I like the silence; it allows the deeper, subtler shades of the mind to come through. But solitude is not the same as being alone. Thanks to the brilliant metroplex of the Internet, I am not wanting for contact with my man; I talk to him every day. But he is a virtual lover. He might as well be on Mars, complete with oxygen tanks, bottled water and slimy monsters. The months have turned him into a character in a science fiction tale, a holographic transmission fading in and out to the beat of an active sunspot. When the connection ends, my fortress is silent and all my plans blink at me stupidly.
My little cabin is a big place now, a shrine to the power of my imagination. I talk to my cats, the dead or half-dead creatures they bring in and those I manage to rescue from them. I talk to my fishes, and whenever I find one stuck to the filter intake, a part of me dies too. I talk to my plants, to the gardens outside, the birds and dragonflies. I talk to the spider that lives outside the bedroom window and works on its web each night. I talk to my truck, eyeing the creeping rust as I would the countdown timer on a roadside bomb. With so much companionship, I shouldn't feel lonely. But I do.
It took me these ten months to realize my sturdy fortress is built on a swamp. All my plans have grown mold and sagged into the murky waters. I don't feel like painting, or reading, and my garden barely yielded enough to snack on, let alone can. Writing feels like reaching into the stars to touch an invisible planet that won't support life. I wear a clever mask, in public. "Oh, I'm working on this and that," I say. "Very busy, ayuh!" Whatever.
This cabin is full of ghosts: cats and fish I've laid to rest, rejected manuscripts, abandoned ideas, the knitting project I lost interest in, the vitality of an ivy that doesn't care for the west window. The wraiths of another passing summer fill the place like a nervous crowd. When my man is here, the ghosts are faint, as if he wields the power of the earth to scare them away. They don't flee from me like that. A watery creature, I attract them.
My lover is a Green Mountain boy. Strong as the hills, and as reliable. He emails me pictures of the mountains in Afghanistan, which are vast, tall, dangerous and inaccessible except to goats and vultures. The irony of this is not lost on me. "Wow," I say, wearing the same specious smile I wear while waving my seasoned-warrior mojo over the widening cracks. "Nice mountains. When are you coming home?"
Time can be cruel, but it is wise. The silence of solitude has finally managed to cut through the meows, chirrups, trickles and rustles of my interior dialog. Without the roots of the mountains, I drift out into the sea of my imagination like a mermaid whose heart got broken by a sailor. Two weeks left before he comes home. If I start swimming now, I should be within earshot of the shore by then.
To me, the most mysterious and beautiful thing about writing is the process itself. This is an exploration into the otherworld; like a hapless warrior in a medieval tale, I venture in with my sword and cloak not knowing what will appear from the shadows. I like to be startled.
The otherworld loves a good laugh. It's full of tricksters, beautiful beings and demons, a virtual parade of mirrors in which I see myself in the form of fantastic places, characters and events. While this is easy to romanticize, it's not for the faint of heart. I've often regretted getting what I asked for, or been bewildered by the obvious to the extent that it spins my life around—suddenly, it's not about the story anymore. I've written things that took me years to understand and synthesize. But that's where the mystery comes in.
I love supernatural archetypes...but then again, I'm friends with most of them. Here are some of my favorites in action.
Odin
In Norse mythology, Odin is the one-eyed, all-seeing god of war, magic and wisdom. He is a complex figure, associated with poetry and inspiration, madness and battle fury. He is also a shapeshifter and considered fickle, not to be trusted. He brings to mind the old Celtic stories of poets and magicians who, in their search for truth and pattern, end up going mad and wandering bewildered through the wilds. A patron of writers, if ever there was one.
"The Eye of Odin" is a science fiction story woven into the myth of Odin. It's about the daughter of a warrior clan who made her fortune as a fighter for a military contractor who harnessed the powers of the higher mind. When she is targeted for discovering a secret beneath their dominion, she must learn the nature of a much greater power: love.
Master of magic, god of war, Odin wanders alone.
-From "The Eye of Odin," Aoife's Kiss, Issue 35.
Shapeshifter
The otherworld itself has the nature of a shapeshifter. You think you are looking at one thing, but it's something else; the psyche wears garments that mimic the forces of nature in symbolic ways. The shapeshifter reveals things through deception. What better thing to leap out while writing a story of a wizard-assassin about to fall to his own machinations? She appears from the otherworld with a message he won't understand until he knows what she is.
He drew one more arrow from the shadows of wind and snow and leveled the black, shiny tip through the trees, drifting along in a track as the lord rode down. Then the small man called out—in a woman's voice. She stopped and turned, slowly pushed back her hood to reveal the face of a wolf, gray with a white muzzle, her eyes flashing moon pale as they leapt over the surroundings.
- From The Hunter's Rede, Book One in The Chronicles of Ealiron.
Loerfalos
The unconscious mind has often been compared to the sea. An awesome force, vast, mysterious and mostly unseen, the sea is a metaphor par excellence for the forces of the Feminine, the primeval void from which all things come. The loerfalos, which in the wizards' tongue means "serpent of green darkness," is an enormous immortal sea serpent. A creature of the otherworld, she moves between dimensions, making her elusive and difficult to believe in. Her appearance heralds transformation on a large scale...usually unpleasant. When I began writing The Gray Isles, she was waiting for me. And she had quite a lot to say.
Voices rippled the surface above like the wings of a mayfly, an irritating vibration caught in the rays of the rising sun filtering into the surrounding darkness. One voice she knew; the other, she knew as the blood of an offering cast into the infinite flow of her creatures. Untold shades, hunter and hunted, the souls of drowned sailors, thousands of pearly eggs for every one that breathed, they whispered of chaos in balance.
- From The Gray Isles, Book Two in The Chronicles of Ealiron.
Sioros
This beastie showed up in my consciousness with a roundhouse kick. He is the driving force in my novel Crowharrow, which is the folk name for him. In the wizard's tongue, sioros means "destroyer in the air." A rare creature with the body of a man and the wings of a raven, he is immortal, as are all properly integrated archetypes. Predatory and tricky, he is a powerful seducer of women. Like the loerfalos, the sioros is of the otherworld, and moves between. While not inherently evil, he can seem so. A supernatural force, he burns with the fire of gods and confronting him—or worse, falling in love—is exceedingly foolish.
She leaned down and plucked a crimson columbine and some meadowsweet. She paused, and then straightened her back as the forest eaves stirred on the edge of the field. Something pale moved there, with a darker shadow surrounding it. A chill rippled over her heart as it came into focus, a magnificent man with the wings of a raven twice his height. Clad in the forest, he moved with the grace of dreams, his feathers settling in whispers as he turned and gazed at her from eyes the color of stars.
- From Crowharrow, Book Three in The Chronicles of Ealiron. Coming in 2012 from Double Dragon Publishing.
Wizards, Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration is a collection of stories with a fairytale flavor featuring gods, shamans, shapeshifters and otherworld beings interacting with mortals in characteristic ways. To find out more, see the following posts:
Wizards, Woods and Gods
The Spooky Forest, Part One
The Spooky Forest, Part Two
The Spooky Forest, Part Three
The Spooky Forest, Part Four
On Goodreads: Wizards Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration
The otherworld loves a good laugh. It's full of tricksters, beautiful beings and demons, a virtual parade of mirrors in which I see myself in the form of fantastic places, characters and events. While this is easy to romanticize, it's not for the faint of heart. I've often regretted getting what I asked for, or been bewildered by the obvious to the extent that it spins my life around—suddenly, it's not about the story anymore. I've written things that took me years to understand and synthesize. But that's where the mystery comes in.
I love supernatural archetypes...but then again, I'm friends with most of them. Here are some of my favorites in action.
Odin
In Norse mythology, Odin is the one-eyed, all-seeing god of war, magic and wisdom. He is a complex figure, associated with poetry and inspiration, madness and battle fury. He is also a shapeshifter and considered fickle, not to be trusted. He brings to mind the old Celtic stories of poets and magicians who, in their search for truth and pattern, end up going mad and wandering bewildered through the wilds. A patron of writers, if ever there was one."The Eye of Odin" is a science fiction story woven into the myth of Odin. It's about the daughter of a warrior clan who made her fortune as a fighter for a military contractor who harnessed the powers of the higher mind. When she is targeted for discovering a secret beneath their dominion, she must learn the nature of a much greater power: love.
Master of magic, god of war, Odin wanders alone.
-From "The Eye of Odin," Aoife's Kiss, Issue 35.
Shapeshifter
The otherworld itself has the nature of a shapeshifter. You think you are looking at one thing, but it's something else; the psyche wears garments that mimic the forces of nature in symbolic ways. The shapeshifter reveals things through deception. What better thing to leap out while writing a story of a wizard-assassin about to fall to his own machinations? She appears from the otherworld with a message he won't understand until he knows what she is.He drew one more arrow from the shadows of wind and snow and leveled the black, shiny tip through the trees, drifting along in a track as the lord rode down. Then the small man called out—in a woman's voice. She stopped and turned, slowly pushed back her hood to reveal the face of a wolf, gray with a white muzzle, her eyes flashing moon pale as they leapt over the surroundings.
- From The Hunter's Rede, Book One in The Chronicles of Ealiron.
Loerfalos
The unconscious mind has often been compared to the sea. An awesome force, vast, mysterious and mostly unseen, the sea is a metaphor par excellence for the forces of the Feminine, the primeval void from which all things come. The loerfalos, which in the wizards' tongue means "serpent of green darkness," is an enormous immortal sea serpent. A creature of the otherworld, she moves between dimensions, making her elusive and difficult to believe in. Her appearance heralds transformation on a large scale...usually unpleasant. When I began writing The Gray Isles, she was waiting for me. And she had quite a lot to say.Voices rippled the surface above like the wings of a mayfly, an irritating vibration caught in the rays of the rising sun filtering into the surrounding darkness. One voice she knew; the other, she knew as the blood of an offering cast into the infinite flow of her creatures. Untold shades, hunter and hunted, the souls of drowned sailors, thousands of pearly eggs for every one that breathed, they whispered of chaos in balance.
- From The Gray Isles, Book Two in The Chronicles of Ealiron.
Sioros
This beastie showed up in my consciousness with a roundhouse kick. He is the driving force in my novel Crowharrow, which is the folk name for him. In the wizard's tongue, sioros means "destroyer in the air." A rare creature with the body of a man and the wings of a raven, he is immortal, as are all properly integrated archetypes. Predatory and tricky, he is a powerful seducer of women. Like the loerfalos, the sioros is of the otherworld, and moves between. While not inherently evil, he can seem so. A supernatural force, he burns with the fire of gods and confronting him—or worse, falling in love—is exceedingly foolish.She leaned down and plucked a crimson columbine and some meadowsweet. She paused, and then straightened her back as the forest eaves stirred on the edge of the field. Something pale moved there, with a darker shadow surrounding it. A chill rippled over her heart as it came into focus, a magnificent man with the wings of a raven twice his height. Clad in the forest, he moved with the grace of dreams, his feathers settling in whispers as he turned and gazed at her from eyes the color of stars.
- From Crowharrow, Book Three in The Chronicles of Ealiron. Coming in 2012 from Double Dragon Publishing.
Wizards, Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration is a collection of stories with a fairytale flavor featuring gods, shamans, shapeshifters and otherworld beings interacting with mortals in characteristic ways. To find out more, see the following posts:
Wizards, Woods and Gods
The Spooky Forest, Part One
The Spooky Forest, Part Two
The Spooky Forest, Part Three
The Spooky Forest, Part Four
On Goodreads: Wizards Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration
There's a venerable piece of advice to writers that says, "Write what you know." If you know what you're talking about, it's easier to bring the reader there. But how does it go when it's not familiar to anyone because you made it up out of thin air and broke the rules of known earthly experience in the process?
Enter the fairy tale. A good one drops in enough familiar things to lure the reader in. We all know what a forest is. A constellation. A frog, or a cat. But then things get weird, the familiar becomes suspect and you can go anywhere. When I started writing these stories years ago, I had all kinds of dark and fanciful ideas. I wrote them down and wasn't thinking about writing what I know. But I was.
Fairy tales create landscapes from metaphors, patterns and emotional impressions. This process isn't conscious or linear. It rises from the inner realms of the mind—not when the writer wants it to, or thinks it should, but when it's time—and what looks like a story about, say, some nefarious creature lurking in an enchanted forest is, beneath the surface, a story about something else entirely. Something we all know and are familiar with.
Wizards, Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration is a collection of eight tales that journey through the darker side of the psyche in the guise of imaginary beings, tree and animal lore, romance, dreams, visions and verse.
The Trouble with Tansy - An orphaned girl on the threshold of womanhood inherits a splendid, mysterious garden from three generations of wisewomen. When a roguish wizard attempts to impress her by disrupting the seasons, she must turn to the old powers for help.
The War God Sleeps - When a lush, fertile land is seized by drought, a lonely hermit's son ventures deep into the hills in search of water and there awakes a beautiful, yet terrible god whom the world has learned to live without.
The Bridge - A visionary who spent her life preparing for a planetary alignment that will materialize a beautiful nature spirit only she can perceive, descends into her blackest fears when she is abandoned to a war for which she is indirectly responsible.
The Fifth Verse - An ancient immortal entity defies the rules of her kind by falling in love with a mortal warrior, an indiscretion that leaves her grieving, pregnant and dependent on the help of a wizard whose army was responsible for the death of her beloved.
Deathseer - Under the influence of a mysterious observatory, the commander of a fearsome army is trapped in a conflict that eventually costs him his honor and the life of his brother, and drives him to accept an inborn magical ability that changes his destiny.
Eating Crow - A masterful, wayward shapeshiftress angers a wizard who curses her by summoning a diabolical immortal hunter that puts her near death and forces her to seek the wizard's cat, a gentle, mystical creature that alone can heal her wounds.
Marked - The mother of a fey child learns the pitfalls of mingling with immortals when her boy is taken by a ferocious winged monster at the request of the god who fathered him.
The Origin - A woodsman discovers that he is a god who created everything around him to know the love of a woman whose mortality drives him to the brink of annihilation.
Wizards, Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration is available as an ebook from Wild Child Publishing (PDF, HTML, ePub, Mobi, Lit and PRC), Amazon (Kindle) and Barnes and Noble (Nook).
See Story Illustrations
Read an Excerpt
Watch the Trailer
Customer review of Wizards, Woods and Gods:
"If you enjoy a book for sake of an interesting story, this book is for you. If you enjoy a story for sake of how well it's written, this book is even more so for you. F.T. McKinstry writes in a way that involves all the senses. It's not something I read line by line, but sensation by sensation. Highly recommended."
Enter the fairy tale. A good one drops in enough familiar things to lure the reader in. We all know what a forest is. A constellation. A frog, or a cat. But then things get weird, the familiar becomes suspect and you can go anywhere. When I started writing these stories years ago, I had all kinds of dark and fanciful ideas. I wrote them down and wasn't thinking about writing what I know. But I was.
Fairy tales create landscapes from metaphors, patterns and emotional impressions. This process isn't conscious or linear. It rises from the inner realms of the mind—not when the writer wants it to, or thinks it should, but when it's time—and what looks like a story about, say, some nefarious creature lurking in an enchanted forest is, beneath the surface, a story about something else entirely. Something we all know and are familiar with.
Wizards, Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration is a collection of eight tales that journey through the darker side of the psyche in the guise of imaginary beings, tree and animal lore, romance, dreams, visions and verse.
The Trouble with Tansy - An orphaned girl on the threshold of womanhood inherits a splendid, mysterious garden from three generations of wisewomen. When a roguish wizard attempts to impress her by disrupting the seasons, she must turn to the old powers for help.
The War God Sleeps - When a lush, fertile land is seized by drought, a lonely hermit's son ventures deep into the hills in search of water and there awakes a beautiful, yet terrible god whom the world has learned to live without.
The Bridge - A visionary who spent her life preparing for a planetary alignment that will materialize a beautiful nature spirit only she can perceive, descends into her blackest fears when she is abandoned to a war for which she is indirectly responsible.
The Fifth Verse - An ancient immortal entity defies the rules of her kind by falling in love with a mortal warrior, an indiscretion that leaves her grieving, pregnant and dependent on the help of a wizard whose army was responsible for the death of her beloved.
Deathseer - Under the influence of a mysterious observatory, the commander of a fearsome army is trapped in a conflict that eventually costs him his honor and the life of his brother, and drives him to accept an inborn magical ability that changes his destiny.
Eating Crow - A masterful, wayward shapeshiftress angers a wizard who curses her by summoning a diabolical immortal hunter that puts her near death and forces her to seek the wizard's cat, a gentle, mystical creature that alone can heal her wounds.
Marked - The mother of a fey child learns the pitfalls of mingling with immortals when her boy is taken by a ferocious winged monster at the request of the god who fathered him.
The Origin - A woodsman discovers that he is a god who created everything around him to know the love of a woman whose mortality drives him to the brink of annihilation.
Wizards, Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration is available as an ebook from Wild Child Publishing (PDF, HTML, ePub, Mobi, Lit and PRC), Amazon (Kindle) and Barnes and Noble (Nook).See Story Illustrations
Read an Excerpt
Watch the Trailer
Customer review of Wizards, Woods and Gods:
"If you enjoy a book for sake of an interesting story, this book is for you. If you enjoy a story for sake of how well it's written, this book is even more so for you. F.T. McKinstry writes in a way that involves all the senses. It's not something I read line by line, but sensation by sensation. Highly recommended."
When I was a child, my grandparents lived on a golf course. It was a beautiful place, mysterious and sprawling with woods, lakes and paths. A good place to go fishing, only mind the snakes and snapping turtles. Not far from my grandparents' house, a path went through a dense patch of woods with a stream running through it. We called it the Spooky Forest. It was generally agreed upon that straying from the path was a bad idea.
In honor of my childhood haunt and the release of Wizards Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration, here is the first in a four-part series in which I'll talk about the stories in the book, two at a time, including excerpts and illustrations.
Part One: The Power of Creation
The forces of creation exist in all things, flora and fauna, seasons, worlds, every act of the heart, every loss and turn of a mind. Light comes from the Void and surprises its creators with something new and heretofore unknown. In "The Trouble with Tansy" and "The Fifth Verse," two women, a mortal and an immortal, discover the power of creation through the inexorable forces of death.
The Trouble with Tansy
Gardens keep secrets...especially old ones. Orphaned and wary of magic, a young woman knows little of her ancestral garden's mysteries until she discovers her own power in the darkness of winter, the words of a witch and the loss of her innocence.
In a huge willow tree, perched the shadowy form of a cat, oddly cloaked and sitting with one leg hanging down. It shifted like rolling water into a mink, a salamander, a frog.
Tansel lowered herself into a clumsy curtsy. "Aunt," she said carefully, "I need your help."
"What will you pay for it?"
Tansel hung her head. "I have nothing." It was true. Nothing but tansy.
"You are still innocent. You must give me that."
Tansel blinked. What did that mean? She recalled what the crone had told her years ago, about knowing the darkness. But it did not matter now. She nodded quickly.
The watery thing in the willow tree swirled down around the trunk like a snake and coiled on the ground, where it became a hovering shadow. In a voice like wind over a grave, it chanted:
"These things three, your garden needs
"To make the dark and light the same.
"Slis, a frog,
"Gea, the spring and
"Retch, the oldest wizard's name."
The Fifth Verse
Born of stars and witness to the rise and fall of civilizations, an immortal entity takes for granted the vastness of her knowledge—until she falls in love with an ordinary mortal warrior. But the price she pays for this indiscretion involves knowledge of something much greater and more powerful than war, wizards or even the gods themselves.
The wizard lived north in the foothills of the Spectral Mountains, in the ancient castle of Altaeros. A god of that name had built it; he lived in the sinews of the castle through a towering opal spire that focused his mind in the world. But the Shade cared nothing for that. As a terrible storm, she raced over the sky wailing in a legion of shadows, a maiden's grief, a mother's wrath. She struck the towering moss-cloaked stones of Altaeros, shattering panes of crystals and glass, uprooting generations of herbs and flowers and shaking the earth beneath the foundation stones. She rained and split the sky with thunder, she howled like wolves and screamed like owls, and blew the trees and brush into tangled, cracking hands until at last, when she had become too heavy and empty to rage anymore, she fell.
The castle shuddered when she hit the floor.
Time slowed, spun around for a moment, and stopped. An overcast sky gazed down dispassionately as the immortal rolled over in her woman's form, pale as a broken shell.
"Are you finished?" said a voice above her.
Wizards, Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration is available as an ebook from Wild Child Publishing (PDF, HTML, ePub, Mobi, Lit and PRC), Amazon (Kindle) and Barnes and Noble (Nook).
In Part Two, we'll be looking at what happens when you wake a god from his peaceful sleep. Until then, stay on the path....
In honor of my childhood haunt and the release of Wizards Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration, here is the first in a four-part series in which I'll talk about the stories in the book, two at a time, including excerpts and illustrations.
Part One: The Power of Creation
The forces of creation exist in all things, flora and fauna, seasons, worlds, every act of the heart, every loss and turn of a mind. Light comes from the Void and surprises its creators with something new and heretofore unknown. In "The Trouble with Tansy" and "The Fifth Verse," two women, a mortal and an immortal, discover the power of creation through the inexorable forces of death.
The Trouble with Tansy
Gardens keep secrets...especially old ones. Orphaned and wary of magic, a young woman knows little of her ancestral garden's mysteries until she discovers her own power in the darkness of winter, the words of a witch and the loss of her innocence.
In a huge willow tree, perched the shadowy form of a cat, oddly cloaked and sitting with one leg hanging down. It shifted like rolling water into a mink, a salamander, a frog.Tansel lowered herself into a clumsy curtsy. "Aunt," she said carefully, "I need your help."
"What will you pay for it?"
Tansel hung her head. "I have nothing." It was true. Nothing but tansy.
"You are still innocent. You must give me that."
Tansel blinked. What did that mean? She recalled what the crone had told her years ago, about knowing the darkness. But it did not matter now. She nodded quickly.
The watery thing in the willow tree swirled down around the trunk like a snake and coiled on the ground, where it became a hovering shadow. In a voice like wind over a grave, it chanted:
"These things three, your garden needs
"To make the dark and light the same.
"Slis, a frog,
"Gea, the spring and
"Retch, the oldest wizard's name."
The Fifth Verse
Born of stars and witness to the rise and fall of civilizations, an immortal entity takes for granted the vastness of her knowledge—until she falls in love with an ordinary mortal warrior. But the price she pays for this indiscretion involves knowledge of something much greater and more powerful than war, wizards or even the gods themselves.
The wizard lived north in the foothills of the Spectral Mountains, in the ancient castle of Altaeros. A god of that name had built it; he lived in the sinews of the castle through a towering opal spire that focused his mind in the world. But the Shade cared nothing for that. As a terrible storm, she raced over the sky wailing in a legion of shadows, a maiden's grief, a mother's wrath. She struck the towering moss-cloaked stones of Altaeros, shattering panes of crystals and glass, uprooting generations of herbs and flowers and shaking the earth beneath the foundation stones. She rained and split the sky with thunder, she howled like wolves and screamed like owls, and blew the trees and brush into tangled, cracking hands until at last, when she had become too heavy and empty to rage anymore, she fell.The castle shuddered when she hit the floor.
Time slowed, spun around for a moment, and stopped. An overcast sky gazed down dispassionately as the immortal rolled over in her woman's form, pale as a broken shell.
"Are you finished?" said a voice above her.
Wizards, Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration is available as an ebook from Wild Child Publishing (PDF, HTML, ePub, Mobi, Lit and PRC), Amazon (Kindle) and Barnes and Noble (Nook).In Part Two, we'll be looking at what happens when you wake a god from his peaceful sleep. Until then, stay on the path....
Welcome to Part Two of The Spooky Forest, a series dedicated to the stories in Wizards Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration.
Part Two: Awakening Gods
Some say that everything we know is the dream of a god. I am fascinated by the idea of a sleeping god, a being who comes from and must occasionally return to the quiescence of the womb, as all things do, for healing, renewal and rebirth. In "The War God Sleeps" and "The Origin," one god is awakened by a mortal; the other, by his own creation.
The War God Sleeps
Loneliness and a quest for knowledge will drive a person to many things. Combine this with the vision of a shaman, and an age of ignorance ends on the edge of a sword.
Loneliness remained one mystery that defied Sethren's mind, despite his understanding of structure and formlessness. The space between the lines had become a wellspring of loneliness, an opaque impression only water seemed to penetrate. He often wondered if his father, a hermit whom the folk in the villages thought mad, living as he did on the wild edges of their simple existences, felt lonely. But then, his father lived half of his conscious life elsewhere. Perhaps the ones he spoke to there, the ones who told him things, kept him company.
According to him, loneliness had driven the War God to abandon the world. An entity who caused death by reaching through the lines into the darkness that created them knew the solitude of the Mother; and after so many turns of a world from life to death to life, so many spirals in so many eons, he could no longer bear it. So the War God grew sad and went to sleep.
The hermit spoke of a temple in the north, at the base of Math's Eye, the mountain range that protected the realm. He said the War God slept there, beneath five points, five lines and a raven's eye. So said the old tales. So said the mad. No one else spoke of such things.
The Origin
Things aren't always what they seem. Perception creates reality. But there are rules, such as the linear progression of seasons or the natural and unquestioned confidence one has in the solidity of things. One woodsman falls in love...and the rules change.
He had built this path to the top of the hill where he had first seen her. She had appeared over the grass like a sunrise, walking slowly, her eyes as dark as the night with a tawny star in the depths, her skin the color of the earth and her hair a tangle of moss and roots, reddish and wild, like her. Together they had planted a grove, when the meadow rippled in the wind and birds fluttered and chirruped among the brush and flowers. They had dug the holes for the trees with their bare hands and gently placed the seedlings in. They had smoothed the path by walking to the stream with a fat clay jug, returning to the grove and watering each tree with a jugful, one at a time.
She sang to the trees, the dark-skinned girl. He remembered her voice, rich and full of subtleties, as she stood in the sun with her brown breasts bared and her arms and fingers splayed like the branches of an ash, her voice spiraling into the sky. Underneath the warm green moss, silence loves the water, she would sing. High above the cool blue wind, sunlight loves the air.
Wizards, Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration is available as an ebook from Wild Child Publishing (PDF, HTML, ePub, Mobi, Lit and PRC), Amazon (Kindle) and Barnes and Noble (Nook).
Part Three, "War and Transformation," will venture into two tales of love, honor and destiny.
Part Two: Awakening Gods
Some say that everything we know is the dream of a god. I am fascinated by the idea of a sleeping god, a being who comes from and must occasionally return to the quiescence of the womb, as all things do, for healing, renewal and rebirth. In "The War God Sleeps" and "The Origin," one god is awakened by a mortal; the other, by his own creation.
The War God Sleeps
Loneliness and a quest for knowledge will drive a person to many things. Combine this with the vision of a shaman, and an age of ignorance ends on the edge of a sword.
Loneliness remained one mystery that defied Sethren's mind, despite his understanding of structure and formlessness. The space between the lines had become a wellspring of loneliness, an opaque impression only water seemed to penetrate. He often wondered if his father, a hermit whom the folk in the villages thought mad, living as he did on the wild edges of their simple existences, felt lonely. But then, his father lived half of his conscious life elsewhere. Perhaps the ones he spoke to there, the ones who told him things, kept him company.According to him, loneliness had driven the War God to abandon the world. An entity who caused death by reaching through the lines into the darkness that created them knew the solitude of the Mother; and after so many turns of a world from life to death to life, so many spirals in so many eons, he could no longer bear it. So the War God grew sad and went to sleep.
The hermit spoke of a temple in the north, at the base of Math's Eye, the mountain range that protected the realm. He said the War God slept there, beneath five points, five lines and a raven's eye. So said the old tales. So said the mad. No one else spoke of such things.
The Origin
Things aren't always what they seem. Perception creates reality. But there are rules, such as the linear progression of seasons or the natural and unquestioned confidence one has in the solidity of things. One woodsman falls in love...and the rules change.
He had built this path to the top of the hill where he had first seen her. She had appeared over the grass like a sunrise, walking slowly, her eyes as dark as the night with a tawny star in the depths, her skin the color of the earth and her hair a tangle of moss and roots, reddish and wild, like her. Together they had planted a grove, when the meadow rippled in the wind and birds fluttered and chirruped among the brush and flowers. They had dug the holes for the trees with their bare hands and gently placed the seedlings in. They had smoothed the path by walking to the stream with a fat clay jug, returning to the grove and watering each tree with a jugful, one at a time.She sang to the trees, the dark-skinned girl. He remembered her voice, rich and full of subtleties, as she stood in the sun with her brown breasts bared and her arms and fingers splayed like the branches of an ash, her voice spiraling into the sky. Underneath the warm green moss, silence loves the water, she would sing. High above the cool blue wind, sunlight loves the air.
Wizards, Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration is available as an ebook from Wild Child Publishing (PDF, HTML, ePub, Mobi, Lit and PRC), Amazon (Kindle) and Barnes and Noble (Nook).Part Three, "War and Transformation," will venture into two tales of love, honor and destiny.
Welcome to Part Three of The Spooky Forest, a series dedicated to the stories in Wizards Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration.
Part Three: War and Transformation
War destroys the fortresses of ignorance with the awesome indifference of a natural force such as an earthquake or a hurricane. Whatever its causes or intentions, it changes things. Permanently. But while it can drive us to the depths of human depravity, sometimes, as with any traumatic event, it can also awaken us to our potential. In "The Bridge" and "DeathSeer," a priestess and a warrior find themselves caught in wars that strip the veils from their eyes to reveal their true natures.
The Bridge
Gods appear to wizards as one thing; to warriors, another. A priestess in search of love in the otherworld is led by her god to the truth of her birthright...but only war can show it to her.
The autumn sun cast long beams across the mauve, green and gold tapestry of the brushy field. A woman emerged from the shadows, breathing deeply as a cool breeze drew her cloak around her bare thighs and stirred the rose-violet oil on her skin. She spoke an ancient word from the pit of her womb and passed through the towering gate of Sol Keep, poised like a forbidding hand on the edge of the plain.
The High Master would know she had gone. But he would not know where. Or why.
A chill swept over her flesh as the naidrin's voice caressed her mind in a whisper of branches, leaves and flowing water. Efae, he said in his gentle way. Where do you fly?
"You should know that," Efae said aloud, addressing the tree line in the distance. "You told me in a dream last night. Now is the time. Tonight I will cross the Bridge, and we shall be together."
The naidrin said nothing.
Deathseer
Keeping a personal secret in the darkness of war is perilous, as secrets know the path to the light. A high commander with the ability to see the hand of Death keeps this secret under the cloak of dreams and visions until he realizes, at great cost, that Death doesn't take sides.
Liros awoke in the clutches of a recurring nightmare. As a white wolf, he saw through the eyes of a child. Drop the candle and run, run on bare feet, so quietly. The dream hovered in his body, his visceral identity and sense of self, an experience as vivid as waking life. Not quietly enough.
Surrounded. Warm tears fall into the open arms of the eternal Void.
As his consciousness returned, the feeling in his heart stood in anguished contrast to the well-built outpost where he lay, in the pre-dawn, surrounded by the watchful eyes of warriors. They called it Fentalon, named after a war god of the North with the head of a wolf. To Liros it felt like a prison.
A candle flickers out against the cold, damp earth.
He closed his eyes and exhaled as the miasma of his circumstance gathered around him. His fading dream darkened it like a bright light casting the long shadow of a crag.
The roar of the river hides the cries, the truth, even as it weeps.
He made a decision.
Wizards, Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration is available as an ebook from Wild Child Publishing (PDF, HTML, ePub, Mobi, Lit and PRC), Amazon (Kindle) and Barnes and Noble (Nook).
In Part Four, "The Immortal Hunter," we'll come face to face with a beautiful yet terrible otherworld creature some believe is just a legend. It isn't.
Part Three: War and Transformation
War destroys the fortresses of ignorance with the awesome indifference of a natural force such as an earthquake or a hurricane. Whatever its causes or intentions, it changes things. Permanently. But while it can drive us to the depths of human depravity, sometimes, as with any traumatic event, it can also awaken us to our potential. In "The Bridge" and "DeathSeer," a priestess and a warrior find themselves caught in wars that strip the veils from their eyes to reveal their true natures.
The Bridge
Gods appear to wizards as one thing; to warriors, another. A priestess in search of love in the otherworld is led by her god to the truth of her birthright...but only war can show it to her.
The autumn sun cast long beams across the mauve, green and gold tapestry of the brushy field. A woman emerged from the shadows, breathing deeply as a cool breeze drew her cloak around her bare thighs and stirred the rose-violet oil on her skin. She spoke an ancient word from the pit of her womb and passed through the towering gate of Sol Keep, poised like a forbidding hand on the edge of the plain.The High Master would know she had gone. But he would not know where. Or why.
A chill swept over her flesh as the naidrin's voice caressed her mind in a whisper of branches, leaves and flowing water. Efae, he said in his gentle way. Where do you fly?
"You should know that," Efae said aloud, addressing the tree line in the distance. "You told me in a dream last night. Now is the time. Tonight I will cross the Bridge, and we shall be together."
The naidrin said nothing.
Deathseer
Keeping a personal secret in the darkness of war is perilous, as secrets know the path to the light. A high commander with the ability to see the hand of Death keeps this secret under the cloak of dreams and visions until he realizes, at great cost, that Death doesn't take sides.
Liros awoke in the clutches of a recurring nightmare. As a white wolf, he saw through the eyes of a child. Drop the candle and run, run on bare feet, so quietly. The dream hovered in his body, his visceral identity and sense of self, an experience as vivid as waking life. Not quietly enough.Surrounded. Warm tears fall into the open arms of the eternal Void.
As his consciousness returned, the feeling in his heart stood in anguished contrast to the well-built outpost where he lay, in the pre-dawn, surrounded by the watchful eyes of warriors. They called it Fentalon, named after a war god of the North with the head of a wolf. To Liros it felt like a prison.
A candle flickers out against the cold, damp earth.
He closed his eyes and exhaled as the miasma of his circumstance gathered around him. His fading dream darkened it like a bright light casting the long shadow of a crag.
The roar of the river hides the cries, the truth, even as it weeps.
He made a decision.
Wizards, Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration is available as an ebook from Wild Child Publishing (PDF, HTML, ePub, Mobi, Lit and PRC), Amazon (Kindle) and Barnes and Noble (Nook).In Part Four, "The Immortal Hunter," we'll come face to face with a beautiful yet terrible otherworld creature some believe is just a legend. It isn't.
Welcome to Part Four, the final post of The Spooky Forest, a series dedicated to the stories in Wizards Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration.
Part Four: The Immortal Hunter
Wizards call him sioros, an immortal predator with the body of a male god, towering black wings and the claws and fangs of a mountain cat. To lay eyes on him means either heartbreak or death depending on how the winds blow that day. In "Eating Crow" and "Marked," one woman attempts to elude the hunter and pays with her heart; the other tries to bargain with him and pays with her life.
Eating Crow
It is never a good idea to anger a wizard. One witch causes enough strife to provoke a powerful mage to summon a sioros after her. But when she plumbs the utter reaches of her skills as a shapeshiftress to elude the hunter, she discovers the value of her own humanity.
Shapeshifting was Oona's life, a fluid existence she preferred to humanity. As a human, she would have avoided anything to do with the Master of Straif. A wizard of the deep flowing waters, the hollows of the earth and the implacable forces of blood and transformation, he had one black boot in the shadows.
And he loved his crow.
Oona, on the other hand, found the raucous creature too tempting. Tawny, lithe and driven by the lust of spring, she slipped around the eastern wall of the castle and climbed the spiky old hawthorn tree that grew there.
Most humans knew better than to cross a wizard. A cat did not care.
She landed with a soft thump in a bed of periwinkle. The crow called to the dawn. Nice of him to give her something to head for, though she would have smelled him easily enough without the noise. She crept on her belly through the shadows of lupine spires, tulips and daffodils until she spotted the bird on his perch above the crabapple tree. Fluid as sound, she changed.
She landed with a graceful flutter in the tree, a beautiful female crow with glistening black wings and a song for the male on his perch. He knew enough to be wary of her instant appearance in his domain, but curiosity distracted him. In that instant of miscalculation, Oona drew close and returned to her wildcat shape to finish her wicked deed. It ended quickly.
Marked
Falling in love with a god puts one woman outside her own kind. Losing her child to a sioros brings her to the stars with a plea that only a mother could make.
The constellation of Sioros, the Winged Hunter, sparkled on the twilit sky to the north. The towering cluster gazed down from a large star called the Hunter's Eye, which shone with steady, soothing light that Lorelei felt before she opened her eyes with a violent shudder. A fisherman's wife from Othurin, she had a simple mind. But in the light of the Hunter's Eye, her mind became a tapestry, silvery and glinting in divine patterns of arcs, lines and colors from which her thoughts fell most strangely.
She knew the name of the star, for one thing. Alberon. Yes, that was his name.
This elusive memory brought up another, crushingly accessible one. A mother's grief drew her up from the dead-cold ground. "My baby," she gasped, rustling in the breeze between day and night as a raging river flooding over a millwheel, splintering it. She staggered across the bloody path before the cottage, its hearth cold and windows dark.
Away in the distance, a woman screamed.
Wizards, Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration is available as an ebook from Wild Child Publishing (PDF, HTML, ePub, Mobi, Lit and PRC), Amazon (Kindle) and Barnes and Noble (Nook).
Customer review:
"If you enjoy a book for sake of an interesting story, this book is for you. If you enjoy a story for sake of how well it's written, this book is even more so for you. F.T. McKinstry writes in a way that involves all the senses. It's not something I read line by line, but sensation by sensation. Highly recommended."
Part Four: The Immortal Hunter
Wizards call him sioros, an immortal predator with the body of a male god, towering black wings and the claws and fangs of a mountain cat. To lay eyes on him means either heartbreak or death depending on how the winds blow that day. In "Eating Crow" and "Marked," one woman attempts to elude the hunter and pays with her heart; the other tries to bargain with him and pays with her life.
Eating Crow
It is never a good idea to anger a wizard. One witch causes enough strife to provoke a powerful mage to summon a sioros after her. But when she plumbs the utter reaches of her skills as a shapeshiftress to elude the hunter, she discovers the value of her own humanity.
Shapeshifting was Oona's life, a fluid existence she preferred to humanity. As a human, she would have avoided anything to do with the Master of Straif. A wizard of the deep flowing waters, the hollows of the earth and the implacable forces of blood and transformation, he had one black boot in the shadows.And he loved his crow.
Oona, on the other hand, found the raucous creature too tempting. Tawny, lithe and driven by the lust of spring, she slipped around the eastern wall of the castle and climbed the spiky old hawthorn tree that grew there.
Most humans knew better than to cross a wizard. A cat did not care.
She landed with a soft thump in a bed of periwinkle. The crow called to the dawn. Nice of him to give her something to head for, though she would have smelled him easily enough without the noise. She crept on her belly through the shadows of lupine spires, tulips and daffodils until she spotted the bird on his perch above the crabapple tree. Fluid as sound, she changed.
She landed with a graceful flutter in the tree, a beautiful female crow with glistening black wings and a song for the male on his perch. He knew enough to be wary of her instant appearance in his domain, but curiosity distracted him. In that instant of miscalculation, Oona drew close and returned to her wildcat shape to finish her wicked deed. It ended quickly.
Marked
Falling in love with a god puts one woman outside her own kind. Losing her child to a sioros brings her to the stars with a plea that only a mother could make.
The constellation of Sioros, the Winged Hunter, sparkled on the twilit sky to the north. The towering cluster gazed down from a large star called the Hunter's Eye, which shone with steady, soothing light that Lorelei felt before she opened her eyes with a violent shudder. A fisherman's wife from Othurin, she had a simple mind. But in the light of the Hunter's Eye, her mind became a tapestry, silvery and glinting in divine patterns of arcs, lines and colors from which her thoughts fell most strangely.She knew the name of the star, for one thing. Alberon. Yes, that was his name.
This elusive memory brought up another, crushingly accessible one. A mother's grief drew her up from the dead-cold ground. "My baby," she gasped, rustling in the breeze between day and night as a raging river flooding over a millwheel, splintering it. She staggered across the bloody path before the cottage, its hearth cold and windows dark.
Away in the distance, a woman screamed.
Wizards, Woods and Gods: Tales of Integration is available as an ebook from Wild Child Publishing (PDF, HTML, ePub, Mobi, Lit and PRC), Amazon (Kindle) and Barnes and Noble (Nook).Customer review:
"If you enjoy a book for sake of an interesting story, this book is for you. If you enjoy a story for sake of how well it's written, this book is even more so for you. F.T. McKinstry writes in a way that involves all the senses. It's not something I read line by line, but sensation by sensation. Highly recommended."
The Gray Isles, Book Two in the Chronicles of EalironHemlock is a fisherman's son with mysterious origins. Orphaned by the sea, he is sent to a conservatory in the far reaches of the Gray Isles to serve wizards, a fate that both fascinates and grieves him. Romantic, full of stories and adept with all things of the earth, Hemlock reaches adulthood bearing a deep-rooted conflict between earth and sea. When he begins to see visions of an enormous mythological sea serpent, he gets on the bad side of an inexplicably aggressive wizard named Eadred, a recluse with a black reputation. In reckless defiance, Hemlock sets sail unseen, determined to validate his tale and escape the wizard's shadow haunting his every step.
Lorth of Ostarin is a formidable wizard with a turbulent past. An elite assassin and servant of the old powers, he is given a mission by his masters to question Eadred, a high-ranking wizard banished for breaking the codes of his order. Lorth arrives in a fog of eerie impressions to find Eadred missing and presumed to have sailed after a servant named Hemlock, who angered him. When Lorth delves deeper, he finds secrets, legends and the hearsay of island politics. He follows the two men under a pall of unease, hoping to bring a potentially disastrous situation under control. But on the water under a dark moon, he makes a monstrous discovery.
Some secrets are best kept hidden, and madness often hides wisdom. After a harrowing encounter at sea, Hemlock washes up on the shore a different man than he left it. Doubting his sanity, his very existence, he seeks his childhood home for answers; but what he finds leaves him sprawled before his destiny, an inexorable force that cares nothing for his personal anguish.
Lorth, a consummate hunter, is hard on Hemlock's heels—until he gets wind of Eadred's whereabouts. In his quest to lift a curse responsible for his fall and subsequent exile, Eadred has gathered great knowledge of Hemlock's origins. Through him, Lorth reaches the sobering conclusion that Hemlock is not what he seems, but something powerful enough to destroy the realm with a thought.
Unfortunately, Lorth is not the only wizard who has discovered Hemlock's secret. The ancestral ruler of the isles, in an attempt to save his realm from annihilation, captures Hemlock and imprisons him. In his wrath and confusion, Hemlock unwittingly initiates a cataclysm. Racing time, Lorth must bare his sword against an army, violate discretion and risk his own stature in order to free Hemlock from the maelstrom of daimonic transformation before he unleashes the forces of earth and sea on the mortal world.
Excerpt
Video Trailer
Map of Sourcesee and East
Map of The Gray Isles
The Gray Isles is available in print and ebook from the following sites:
Lulu (Paperback)
Amazon Kindle
Barnes and Noble Nook
Reader Store
Double Dragon Publishing
Fictionwise
iTunes (coming soon)
The process of writing a story has a way of revealing one's knowledge or fascination in terms that extend beyond conscious understanding. A powerful lens into the nature of experience, metaphor conveys information that literal explanations can only attempt. Somewhere inside, our hearts make the connections.
Generally speaking, the ancient practice of shamanism involves learning to perceive those connections via a journey into the otherworld, the realm of essence and the source of exteriorized reality. This typically happens during some years-long cataclysmic life event such as illness or loss whereby the shaman endures the dissolution of personal boundaries, limitations, and false perceptions, and thereby emerges from the otherworld not only expanded but also connected to the source. It is essentially a mystical experience.
When I began writing The Gray Isles, I didn't sit down and think, "How about a story about shamanic initiation?" It started as a story about a young fisherman's son named Hemlock who has big dreams that contrast miserably with his lot in life. Through him, I embarked upon a sailing trip over the shining waters of an attractive cliché and was promptly accosted by a sea monster with its own ideas. My story grew into a novel complete with tempests, swords, and teeth.
The shamanic initiation often heralds a crushing landslide of doubts and questions about the nature of reality. It's hard to ignore the forces of the otherworld when one's life falls apart at the hands of one's deepest dreams and desires. At the same time, everything one once imagined possible becomes an illusion in the face of actual experience. It's a paradox. Transformation inherently implies death: one can't change unless something is released. For the shaman, this is everything that blocks connection to the otherworld and understanding of his or her place in the overall scheme of things.
Hemlock's journey begins with a classic refusal of the call. His perception of reality is shaky as it is, even by the estimation of the wizards he serves, ironically. But he has a deep, visceral connection to the sea. When it shows itself, he naturally assumes it's just another fantasy. When he gets the idea of trying to prove otherwise—to defend his sanity, of course—he crashes headlong into the implacable clutches of initiation.
This takes Hemlock down, rends him asunder and spits him out on the other side. Now a lost soul, his roots to the earth begin to disintegrate beyond his control. But, cruel as they are, the forces of the cosmos are on his side in the guise of wizards and assassins—and the sea itself, a literal metaphor in this case. A bridge between earth and water, Hemlock is transformed quite nearly to the destruction of everything around him. So it goes. Who would possibly sign up for such a thing if they knew what it would mean?
The Gray Isles is now available from Double Dragon Publishing. I'll be posting more information soon. Until then, happy sailing—and don't trust every seagull that flies o'erhead.
Website
Excerpt
Video Trailer
Available in print and ebook from the following sites:
Lulu (Paperback)
Amazon Kindle
Barnes and Noble Nook
Reader Store
Double Dragon Publishing
Fictionwise
iTunes (coming soon)
Generally speaking, the ancient practice of shamanism involves learning to perceive those connections via a journey into the otherworld, the realm of essence and the source of exteriorized reality. This typically happens during some years-long cataclysmic life event such as illness or loss whereby the shaman endures the dissolution of personal boundaries, limitations, and false perceptions, and thereby emerges from the otherworld not only expanded but also connected to the source. It is essentially a mystical experience.
When I began writing The Gray Isles, I didn't sit down and think, "How about a story about shamanic initiation?" It started as a story about a young fisherman's son named Hemlock who has big dreams that contrast miserably with his lot in life. Through him, I embarked upon a sailing trip over the shining waters of an attractive cliché and was promptly accosted by a sea monster with its own ideas. My story grew into a novel complete with tempests, swords, and teeth.The shamanic initiation often heralds a crushing landslide of doubts and questions about the nature of reality. It's hard to ignore the forces of the otherworld when one's life falls apart at the hands of one's deepest dreams and desires. At the same time, everything one once imagined possible becomes an illusion in the face of actual experience. It's a paradox. Transformation inherently implies death: one can't change unless something is released. For the shaman, this is everything that blocks connection to the otherworld and understanding of his or her place in the overall scheme of things.
Hemlock's journey begins with a classic refusal of the call. His perception of reality is shaky as it is, even by the estimation of the wizards he serves, ironically. But he has a deep, visceral connection to the sea. When it shows itself, he naturally assumes it's just another fantasy. When he gets the idea of trying to prove otherwise—to defend his sanity, of course—he crashes headlong into the implacable clutches of initiation.This takes Hemlock down, rends him asunder and spits him out on the other side. Now a lost soul, his roots to the earth begin to disintegrate beyond his control. But, cruel as they are, the forces of the cosmos are on his side in the guise of wizards and assassins—and the sea itself, a literal metaphor in this case. A bridge between earth and water, Hemlock is transformed quite nearly to the destruction of everything around him. So it goes. Who would possibly sign up for such a thing if they knew what it would mean?
The Gray Isles is now available from Double Dragon Publishing. I'll be posting more information soon. Until then, happy sailing—and don't trust every seagull that flies o'erhead.
WebsiteExcerpt
Video Trailer
Available in print and ebook from the following sites:
Lulu (Paperback)
Amazon Kindle
Barnes and Noble Nook
Reader Store
Double Dragon Publishing
Fictionwise
iTunes (coming soon)
My woman has a wandering eye;Yarrow, thyme and thorn.
She eyes the ocean and the sky
While stitching sails, forlorn.
I got a kiss, and then a tear
As she bade me go;
But on the waves, my heart's in fear:
My woman's in the know.
- From The Gray Isles, Book Two in The Chronicles of Ealiron.
