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Why I Love David Whyte Now

Once upon a time, I ran a blog that encouraged me to seek out and memorize meaningful poetry. For whatever reason, I gravitated toward poets who have anchored themselves in the annals of tradition and time. Poets like Henley and Longfellow and Dickinson.

Somehow, the poems of the modern age often strike me as too irreverent to fulfill the purpose I’ve carved for poetry out of my own life. I prefer words that gently provoke, softly invite–poems whose words are timeless as the meaning their authors hope to portray.

So, you can imagine, whenever I find a contemporary poet with work that resonates with this objective, I get twitterpated, inspired, and look at life anew.

Such a discovery happened this week when I found David Whyte. First, I read his poem “The Truelove,” which might be one of my very favorite descriptions of the moment you find someone so very special.

Almost, immediately after, I read another piece of his entitled, “Sometimes,” which I share with you today.

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.

Somtimes by David Whyte

Please, don’t feel like you must keep reading. If reading this poem stirs you to contemplation, then don’t let me interrupt. What follows are my own thoughts and reflections, neither right nor wrong, applicable or irrelevant.

Poems, like music, exist in abundance, and a perfect match between reader and work comes down to a matter of preparation, life experience, and timing. For me, this poem hit me like a load of bricks.

Perhaps it’s because I have wandered, recently, into such a forest and seem to find myself bombarded by these places filled with questions that have waited for me.

It’s so easy to let life slip by–easy enough as developing a routine and sticking to the schedule. And there is always pressure to stand, with load squarely on shoulders, and do nothing but hold up the world the way you ought to. To simply stand so that others can walk across the bridge you carry.

There is nobility in that sentiment, one I’m all too familiar with. I’ve found immense satisfaction in helping others cross difficult ravines.

At the same time, I can’t help but feel as though there are journeys to be had, journeys earmarked still for me both beyond the chasm and, deeper still inside the forest David Whyte talks about.

How can one balance responsibility and the yearning calls from questions that can make or unmake a life?

I suppose we are all remade the way our bodies are remade. A Swedish biologist discovered that. Dr. Jonas Frisen. The cells in our bodies have complete renewal, that is all are replaced, every seven to ten years. In some areas, like our skin and our hair, it happens much more quickly.

How often do our spirits and hearts turn over? Does it take seven years? Can it take a moment?

And if so, what memory gets left behind and how? What holds the nostalgic yearnings of things so far behind us?

Perhaps, somewhere deep within, there is a well where all water that falls on us finishes and remains. And it’s this well that defines us, truly. And despite what renewals take place beyond its curbs, or how we choose to ignore, heed, or interpret its callings, we go back to the well to start again.

Book Blend! My Next Project, War and Peace, and Temeraire

Do you ever have too much up in the air at the same time?

I’m up to my neck in research for my next historical fantasy series. It takes place during WWI, and it’s been really eye-opening to dive into that history. Did you know that over the course of WWI, fifteen to twenty million people died? That’s roughly 400,000 deaths each month.

To the modern mind, it’s simply unimaginable.

In the meantime, I’ve also finally decided to tackle War and Peace. So many times, when people talk about novels, they say things like, “Oh yeah, it’s a great book. I mean, it’s not War and Peace, but it’s good.” Well, I was tired of hearing about how great War and Peace was. I’m listening to it on audiobook.

The audiobook is sixty hours long… I’m halfway through. It’s going well. There’s a line in Gilmore Girls where Rory Gilmore meets up with her boyfriend, Dean, at the bus stop. She asks if he read it. He says, yeah I read it.

That right there is the most unbelievable scene in the entire series. There’s no way Dean read War and Peace. But I guess that’s a conversation for another time.

I took a break from War and Peace when I hit the halfway mark to read Black Powder War, book three in the Temeraire. It’s a great historical fantasy book series by Naomi Novik about the British Dragon Aviators in the Napoleonic War.

There’s only one problem. War and Peace is also about the Napoleonic War, and I’ll admit there have been a few instances in which I’m getting things mixed up. I mean, as a rational adult, I understand there were not actually dragons in the militaries fighting between Napoleon and the other European powers. But does that mean I can’t imagine Andrei Bolkonsky riding a dragon from time to time?

But then, when combining this mash-up to all of the details about dates and battles and tech innovations from my research on WWI, my mind is in a constant state of near psychedelic hallucinations about some fantastical past.

I suppose there are worse things to be thinking about all day.

Do you ever experience plot/story mashup? Read more than one book at once?

My Spotify Playlist for The Onyx Door

When I was in law school, I spent a lot of my time poring over dense technical readings for many hours on end. It was difficult to keep all of the competing abstract theories and reasonings straight in my head. Understanding the advanced theories on civil jurisdiction or the rule and perpetuities is enough to get anybody down.

There was a little chair in my law school, though, positioned against a wall of tall glass windows. On the other side of the windows was a sloping hill covered in greenery. In effect, it made a wall of foliage that became my happy reading place.

To accompany it all, while I read, I had a playlist of Norwegian music artists singing quietly in a language I didn’t understand. For whatever reason, this odd combination of environmental settings got me into the right mindset to understand difficult things.

While writing The Onyx Door, the last book in the Luella Winthrop Trilogy, I also relied on music to help me go deeper and understand more clearly what needed to happen. As I struggled over narrative decisions, I relied on and added to this list until now, just hearing some of these melodies takes my mind’s eye to specific spots in the Netherdowns, Dawnhurst-on-Severn, or Fernmount.

I’d like to share this playlist with you, and if you haven’t picked up a copy of The Onyx Door yet, when you get to it, feel free to let the music play while you read. I hope it helps whisk you away as much as it helped me!

My Summer as an Actor in Evermore Park

This past summer, I spent my weekend evenings working as an actor in Utah’s Evermore Park. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s an immersive adventure fantasy park. The park is designed as an old Victorian English town, which if you know me, sounds like heaven.

In Evermore, portals open up to different realms, and creatures and characters come through the portals from their respective magical lands. Guests to the park come through a portal of their own at the front gates.

Evermore is packed with things to do. You can see animal shows, fire dancers, aerialists, fortune tellers, musicians, gamblers, or magicians. You can throw axes, shoot arrows, beat up on your friends with boffer swords in a battle arena, or play archery tag. You can earn gold from the Evermore residents, help them with quests, or try to unravel a large park-wide plot a mystery at a time. You can play trinket trading games or you can see if you have what it takes to join one of the many guilds in town, such as the Pirates, the Knights, or the Blackheart Hunters.

The whole point is that you can carve your own path, choose your own adventure.

I played a couple of characters this summer: a magician (where I got to dust off my old prestidigitation skills and try my mettle on guests) and a monster hunter blessed, or cursed, with the ability to shoot fire from my hands. Let me say, seeing the look on guests’ faces when, after speaking to me back and forth all night, I found the occasion to let loose a fireball was incredibly rewarding.

As far as the season-wide plot goes, Evermore went through all sorts of problems when a portal opened up in their mausoleum, and beings from a hostile land started trying to come through. Each week this problem intensified. But though I played my part moving that big plot forward, I actually spent much of my time developing an amazing rom-com plot with the tavern keeper, Annie, filled with all sorts of classic story moments one might only find in a 90s sitcom.

Throughout my whole experience, I was absolutely overwhelmed with the enthusiasm and passion for the project I saw in everyone I worked with. The production team was kind, professional, and strategic. My fellow actors were supportive, positive, and dedicated. And the park guests brought the magic with them every time the gate opened.

I accepted the acting position believing I knew, to some extent, what I was getting into. After all, I’d attended the park in the past, and I’d seen my brother perform there for nearly a year in various roles.

But I was mistaken. I had no idea what waited for me.

It had been a long time since I’d worked with a creative team of passionate individuals that truly seem to care about one another, who work together united to make a cohesive and beautiful creative product. I’ve had some traumatic experiences in the past with other creative teams, experiences I thought I’d healed from. But I realize now that in an attempt at self-defense, I’d closed off a portion of myself.

Bit by bit, as we staged an alternate reality for park guests, I started to open up again.

It happened in small moments. Whether it was playing a piece of the drama with other performers, seeing kids play with dragons and meet mermaids, watching park guests make new, lasting friendships, or developing heartfelt connections with strangers through a layer of consented-to, heart-felt make-believe, it happened.

I believe in the power of stories. I believe in the power of fantasy, but it’s difficult to express to others why fantasy is important for society.

Perhaps it’s an act of empathy, and by exploring that which cannot exist, we actually learn so much about ourselves. And more importantly still, by suspending our own thoughts and judgments and stubborn ideologies, even for just an evening, we can learn so much more about others.

This is my fire-magic empowered Blackheart Hunter, Cinder, as drawn by one of our amazing park guests, Eddie.

Research File: The Black Assize of Oxford

The third book of the Luella Winthrop Trilogy is called The Onyx Door. In that book, I included several elements that made me, as an author, nervous. One of them was a 19th-century criminal trial proceeding.

As an attorney, I found my research on 19th-century English criminal procedure, but I was terrified I had included too much nitty-gritty for a lay reader to enjoy. Fortunately, it appears I balanced it well enough, but it’s because I resisted the temptation to include too much of the research. Things like the Black Assize of Oxford.

I read about the Black Assize as I was parsing through the different processes regarding arraignments, grand jury trials, assize trials, and assize schedule rotations. If you don’t know, an assize court was a date set aside for judges from London to administer justice for greater crimes throughout different regions in England.

If you were accused of murder, for example, you would likely find yourself facing trial at an assize court on that jurisdiction’s scheduled time.

As a result, judges went through batch sentencing. A judge might hear a boatload of cases and sentence all of them in a day or two. If a judge managed to get through an entire assize without administering the death sentence, they called it a white-glove session, and, rumor has it (excuse me, rumour has it), they were presented with a pair of white gloves.

A white-glove session was the opposite of the Black Assize in Oxford at 1577.

A plaque on the wall inside County Hall in Oxford.

If you read the plaque above, you’ll see a reference to something known as gaol fever. You know, that good ole’ gaol fever that randomly kills a few hundred people in a little over a month but not after…

Here’s what was rumoured to happen:

A certain Rowland Jenkes, referred to as a saucy, foul-mouthed bookseller (something I’ve been accused of myself), was arrested for mouthing off scandalous words against Queen Elizabeth. This, at the time, was considered treasonous. He was also a Roman Catholic, which didn’t help his cause at all.

In fact, around the time of Rowland Jenkes’ trial and the following decade, England would pass several laws abridging the rights of Roman Catholics, culminating in the Popish Recusant Act, which forbade Roman Catholics from moving more than five miles from their house without forfeiting all of their property.

In any event, prior to his assize at Oxford Castle, Rowland went to an apothecary with a request to have a curious and foul poison made up to “kill the rats” that had been nibbling on his books. He was a bookseller, remember. The apothecarist struggled to find some of the unusual ingredients requested.

Those who attribute nefarious causes to this dark event in history believe Rowland made a wick lined with his secret substance, included it into a candle, and had snuck the candle into his assize trial.

The speculated result was that 300 people died from this candle’s effects, including the judge, jury, witnesses involved in the trial that would confirm his conviction for treason.

Was it witchcraft, gaol fever, or a sinister magician’s trick?

A 21st-century look back would suggest a small epidemic of gaol fever. But those in attendance said there were no palpable symptoms usually associated with that type of infection, such as noticeable smells or odours. More curious still, John Webster, the man who reaffirmed the belief of the poisoned candle theory, did so in a book whose sole purpose was to disprove the existence of witchcraft…

Reading The Crimson Inkwell Chapter 1

Today instead of writing, I’m reading the first chapter of my historical fantasy novel, The Crimson Inkwell.

See what type of trouble Luella gets into by picking up your copy of the full novel: http://kennethabaldwin.com/recommends…

5 Great Ways to Make Halloween Special

October is just around the corner! I’m a big believer that the holidays are a special time of the year. After the year we’ve had, I think making the most of the holidays will be especially important and a little bit more challenging.

Classic traditions like Trick or Treat or Halloween parties/dances/haunted houses might be a little different or non-existent this year. But as they say, challenges are only opportunities. So, here are a few Halloween traditions that you can start this year that can enrich the whole month of October.

The October Spooky Read
Each year, I choose a special spooky read for the month of October. It’s a great opportunity to dig into some of the old horror classics that can’t seem to find their way to the top of a TBR list during the rest of the year. To enhance the experience, find a few friends or a reading buddy and have a mini-Halloween book club. I have very fond memories of October strolls with my wife as a poor college, splitting a pair of headphones to listen to Frankenstein. If you need some suggestions, try Frankenstein, Dracula, almost anything by Edgar Allan Poe, or some short stories by HP Lovecraft… or in the spirit of shameless self-promotion you could read my book, The Crimson Inkwell.
Halloween Decoration Project
Another great way to make Halloween special is by tackling a Halloween decoration project. I don’t mean just carving a Jack-o-lantern. Your goal should be to create a memorable project experience. With any luck, it will be a decoration you can bring out for years to come. It could be a Halloween painting, a lit stack of reusable Jack-o-lanterns, a life-sized replica of the Grim Reaper… Engaging your creativity in a meaningful way brings great satisfaction.
Memorialize Fall Sweets
Everyone has some special Halloween or fall treats that fill them with the feeling of autumn. Rather than treating these treats (see what I did there?) haphazardly, plan and give each treat its own special moment. For example, I love Butterbeer around Halloween. We found a great recipe, but we only have it while watching Harry Potter. That turns a food preference into a great tradition.
Halloween Movie Series
There are a set of films that I love, but I force myself to only watch in the month of October. I look forward to watching them all year long. Clue. The Harry Potter films. The Prestige. The Charlie Brown Halloween Special (ok, I don’t have the urge to watch that except during October, but you get the picture). The wait to watch the films makes them all the more exciting when it’s time, which means I’m much less likely to have a phone or be otherwise distracted while watching.
Halloween Podcast
Finally, I encourage you to find a great spooky, creepy, or unnerving podcast. Podcasts are great because you can listen to an episode daily or a few times a week. I tried this last year with the Magnus Archives, a fabulous horror fiction podcast that really got me in the spooky mood.

Good luck! I hope that you can create some meaningful traditions that make your Halloween extra special!

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Writing Good Parody

Parody is hard!

As a writer, there are several plates you have to keep spinning to make sure that your parody not only delivers laughs but stays memorable. In this video, we’re covering:

1. How to write parody

2. What makes for good vs bad parody

3. The difference between parody and satire

4. Parody writing pitfalls to avoid

All That’s In An Author’s Mug

Ernest Hemingway once said that writing is easy, you simply go to your typewriter and bleed.

Most of the time, for me, it doesn’t feel like bleeding, it feels more like trying to get a splinter out.

If you enjoy writing or detest it, I hope you enjoy this brief comical video sketch.