Thomas Wharton's Blog, page 17

What I Learned from a Batman Costume

There it was, impossible but true. In my hands. The one thing I wanted more than anything in this world.
Growing up in Grande Prairie, Alberta, the one thing I wanted more than anything in this world was a Batman costume. In the 1970's, Grande Prairie was a small oil & gas boomtown far from anyplace you could get a Batman costume, or most other tokens of civilization for that matter. There was no Internet, no eBay in those days where you could order any costume -- any thing you wanted with a couple of clicks. Well, there was the Eaton's catalogue, but they never had anything cool like superhero costumes (I don't think superhero underwear had even been invented yet). Grande Prairie was just so, so far from the Batcave.
Let me clarify one thing: I didn't want this costume for Halloween. I wanted it so that I could BE Batman, which was who I really was. That much was obvious to me at the age of ten. The only thing needed to confirm it was the suit, and then I could start my crime-fighting career. 



I dreamed and hoped and probably even prayed for a Batman costume. I bugged my parents obsessively. I left little messages on their pillows so that they wouldn't forget to remember to look for a Batman costume the next time they went to the Woolworth's department store on main street. I drew pictures of Batman costumes and formed plans in my head that maybe if I found a navy-blue raincoat at the store I could somehow add a cowl and ears, maybe with blue construction paper and clear tape….
One morning I was walking to school with a friend. We were dragging our heels as usual, talking about whatever we talked about back then. Girls? Probably not quite yet. More likely the latest cool thing the Fonz had done on Happy Days the night before. We were almost at the doors of the school when ahead of me on the sidewalk I saw a brown paper bag. I stopped and picked it up and looked inside.
Inside the paper bag was a Batman costume.
Yes, it sounds highly unlikely. So unlikely that years later, after the costume itself was long gone, I remembered this incident and wondered whether it had really happened. Maybe it was just a figment of my overheated comic book fantasies.
So I asked my Mom, the repository of family memory: could she corroborate this event? She could. It had really happened. She remembered how I came home from school that day in a delirium of joy with the Batman costume I'd found lying on the sidewalk in a paper bag on a frosty morning in Grande Prairie, Alberta.
(I should add that, being a good Catholic boy, I took the costume to school and dutifully handed it in the principal, who made an announcement over the intercom that a lost costume had been found. When school got out in the afternoon no one had claimed the mysteriously-abandoned package – the day's second miracle – and so the principal returned it to me and said I could keep it).
(And we're talking about the 1960's Adam West version of Batman's costume. Or maybe a slightly updated version of it. It wasn't a full costume, only the cape and cowl. No shirt with muscles drawn on. No gloves. No boots. It might have included a belt, I don't remember.)
Okay, not only is this story unlikely, it's also not a very good story, is it? If my family was dirt poor and the bag had been full of one hundred dollar bills…. Or if the Batman costume had belonged to a kid who was teased and bullied at school and I'd had to make the agonizing choice of keeping the costume or giving it back to him….
But no, I was a typical middle-class North American kid with trivial TV-aroused desires. I did nothing to earn it, I didn't "deserve" it. Maybe I'd dreamed and wished so hard that I actually imagined it into existence. Maybe the universe just gave it to me.
My life has been graced with unlikely gifts a number of times since the miraculous cape and cowl, in ways far more profound and life-changing. Sometimes a gift arrives that you hadn't even known you wanted or needed.
The Batman costume was great for as long as the cheap fabric lasted, which wasn't long. Soon enough I was dreaming, wishing, obsessing over something else I wanted more than anything in this world. Like the prettiest girl in school to fall in love with me (no such luck that time). I think now that the real gift I received that day was to be startled into an awareness of the everyday strangeness of life.
I've been watching the universe carefully ever since. You never know what you might find in a paper bag on the sidewalk. Or anywhere else. You never know what surprises might be hiding under the bland, boring skin of the familiar.
Maybe that's how a writer gets made.

What is the Perilous Realm?

Q. Since the Realm is a huge world, would places such as the Screaming Wastelands, Bourne, Snowlands, Twilight Land, Dark Aunc, Tirreth Dree and Arzareth be like seperate provinces/states/countries within it?
A. The Realm is the world (or worlds) of Story, so really it is infinite in size, as vast and neverending as all the stories that have been told or might be told. So all of the places named above are "storylands" within the Realm, but yes, they can be thought of in a way like provinces or countries. The only difference being that you can't always get to one storyland from another by way of a direct road or path, and maps are never very reliable. This is because Story is always changing, in the same way that each teller changes a story as he or she tells it. Take the tale of the voyages of Odysseus, first told by Homer in the epic poem The Odyssey. Each time the story is retold or translated or turned into a graphic novel or a movie, it's a slightly different story. You could almost say that the story stays with us, it survives by constantly changing.
So, in the Perilous Realm, it is natural for storylands to grow, and sometimes to fade away, back into the Weaving from which all stories come. That is why you can never completely rely on a road or a map to get you to a particular storyland.


Something else that's strange about the Realm is that each story within it has its own time, its own seasons and changes of day and night. It might be a warm summer's day on the road to a storyland, but as soon as you step across its borders, it's the middle of the night and raining. Then you go home, and years later if you return to that story, you might find yourself setting foot again in that same rainy night. For the people within that storyland, time passes normally and the seasons change, but for you, coming back to visit it, time hasn't passed. It's paradoxical, and most folk who live in the Realm don't bother themselves too much with these mysteries. They leave that for the Enigmatists.

Here's another question that sometimes puzzles people in our world when they think about the Perilous Realm: do the people who live in the world of stories know that they're in a story? The most likely answer, I suppose, is that some do and some don't. Or sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. Aren't there times in our own lives when we feel like we're living in a story? (It may be a good story, a happy one, or a bad story we'd like to get out of). And don't we sometimes tell ourselves stories about our lives, to try to make sense of them? I imagine that for people in the Realm, life is very much like that: they simply accept that there is Story all around them, that their lives are made of stories, but they don't often stop to think about it.

Shade

Shade began life somewhere far to the northwest of the Bourne, as an ordinary wild wolf, before the Great Unweaving changed the Realm. He was the leader of a pack of wolves that hunted in the forests and tundra of the north, and at that time he had no name, nor did he have the ability to speak. He was an utterly wild wolf who had never met a human being nor suspected the existence of such a creature. For the wolves the greatest joy in life was the hunt. Shade and his pack hunted many animals, including the great, caribou-like deer called the tarand.

Then creatures of a kind the wolves had never met before began to appear in their territory. They were Nightbane in the service of Malabron, and they had come to trap wolves. For the first time,  Shade's pack found themselves running and hiding from something that was hunting them. But the Nightbane weren't out to kill wolves for sport or trophies (as some supposedly intelligent humans still do today). They were trapping the wolves in order to twist and mold them into nightmare creatures who would do their bidding, who would hunt and kill other Storyfolk on command (much as the conquistadors used vicious dogs in their battles with the indigenous peoples of the Americas).


Shade's mate was trapped by the Nightbane. She fought so fiercely against captivity that the Nightbane were forced to kill her. Shade caught up to them and killed many of them, but they wounded him very badly and he escaped into the forest to die. How he lived, and became a companion of the Stewards and was given speech and a name, and in time became the friend and protector of Will Lightfoot, is told in The Shadow of Malabron.

The Fair Folk

The Perilous Realm is the world of Story, and so it is no surprise that the Fair Folk are known in many stories throughout the realm by many different names.
The Fae. The Xian. The Sidhe. The Nunnehi. The Tylwyth Teg. The Aziza...

One could say that each storyworld sees and knows the forms and faces of the Shee in its own way. Each is one facet of the truth about these wise and mysterious beings, a truth which is wider and deeper than any one story can contain. The Fair Folk can appear tall and lordly. They are also "the wee folk." They can be menacing and terrifying to behold. They can look so much like you and me that we would never suspect we had just met one of them. They can become thin and insubstantial enough to hide between the covers of a book. They can be nothing more than a voice telling an old tale by the fire.

In the novels of The Perilous Realm trilogy, the Fair Folk are sometimes referred to as the Tain Shee.
No one knows how long the Tain Shee lived in Eleel and the lands around it before the Great Unweaving. After the capture of their city and the destruction of their homeland, the Tain Shee fled and went into hiding from the Night King, and in time they became known as the Shee n'ashoon, or the Hidden Folk. (The name shee n'ashoon literally means "the shoeless people" and refers to their ability to pass unseen and unheard and leave no tracks).

What is also unclear is whether the Fair Folk are immortal. It seems that they once were, in the timeless time at the beginning of the Realm, but that mortality entered their world along with Story itself. They may live far longer than human beings, but even the Fair Folk must die and return to the Weaving, along with everything else.
The Hidden Folk travel in what is known to some as the Green Court, a moving city of tents and pavilions that is glimpsed at rare times by wanderers in wild, unpeopled lands and on the shores of lonely seas.
In the coming struggle to prevent the Night King from devouring all of Story, the Hidden Folk may be forced to reveal themselves at last to their ancient enemy, and march into his Shadow Realm. But the Stewards are no more and so this time the Shee will have to march alone against the Night King.


 Painting: Riders of the Sidhe by John Duncan.

Imaginary Art

Every year the Art Gallery of Alberta presents a new exhibit "for children and their grown-ups" in the gallery space known as the BMO World of Creativity (what my family used to call "the kids room" at the gallery). This year, a brilliant young Edmonton designer named Gabe Wong was given the challenge of creating a new interactive, hands-on exhibit. His ambitious idea was to invent the art of an imaginary culture.
The results are stunning. As the AGA website puts it, "enter a place where geometric shapes and primary colours form the language, legends, and landscape of a new, imaginary culture. Move throughout the space to create performative compositions with sound and movement, construct mythological creatures in paper, decode cryptographic messages and develop new stories based on the immersive experience of method and madness!"
One of the walls in the exhibit contains a hidden message created out of shapes that are the alphabet of this imaginary culture. Kids (and grown-ups) can decode the message to get a very short story. Gabe and I had worked together on another project and so he asked me to write the story that would go up on the cryptography wall. The challenge was that I was only going to get about 40 words to work with! After much struggle I came up with a handful of ideas and Gabe chose one. I'm not going to tell you what the story is. You'll have to visit the exhibit and puzzle it out yourself. When I visited the exhibit with my son, I realized I'd forgotten most of the story, so we ended up having to decode it anyhow.

The Nightwanderer and the Raven

Moth is an archer of the Shee. He is known to some as the Nightwanderer. His companion is the raven Morrigan. She has the ability to speak in a guttural language of croaks, squawks and tongue-clicks that only Moth can understand.

Moth and Morrigan have not always been shadowy wanderers. Long ago, before the Great Unweaving, they lived with their people, the Tain Shee, in the city of Eleel off the coast of the Western Sea. Their names then were Arthan and Seelah. Their father, Lirr, was a shipbuilder and mariner of the Shee. Their mother was Lysse, a weaver. After his children were born, Lirr gave up his seafaring, but he soon grew restless and tired of home life. Eventually he built a new ship and sailed away in it. Neither he nor his his crew of the Shee's finest mariners were ever seen again.
Arthan and Seelah grew up with their mother. It was from Lysse that Seelah learned the craft of weaving, though she quickly surpassed her mother in skill. As a boy Arthan was wild and reckless. Like his father he was given to long journeys by himself, though he shunned the sea and always turned his steps inland, to explore other places within the Realm itself. He had many adventures during his travels, but his curiosity and impulsiveness got him into trouble often.
It's said that Arthan found paths that brought him into our world, and even more dangerous places. Once he was trapped by a vain and vindictive sorcerer-queen who bound him with a powerful spell and kept him as a servant. He was forced to do her bidding, stealing treasures and trinkets she fancied, and working mischief and mayhem on those she disliked (it is possible that something of this time in Moth's life has reached our world in garbled fashion, in the stories of mischievous sprites and elves, as in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.) Once Arthan finally escaped the queen's clutches, he forever after had a loathing for sorcery of any kind, and an even stronger desire to remain free and unbound by anyone or anything, even the laws and customs of his own people.
Lysse was troubled by her son's long absences, fearing he might leave one day and never return, as her husband had. She persuaded Thur, the Shee's greatest metalsmith, to take Arthan as an apprentice. The boy chafed against the smith's stern, demanding authority and master and apprentice quarreled often. But Arthan did learn the metalworking trade. Perhaps from a desire to outdo his master, Arthan applied himself to the craft with such diligence that in time the Shee were asking for his handiwork, not Thur's.
For her part, Seelah remained at home with their mother, learning and growing in skill as a weaver. She missed her brother when he left on his long solitary wanderings, and wished to go with him, but the craft she was dedicated to demanded almost all of her time. Her woven cloths and tapestries became widely known and praised among the Shee, and once a young prince of the Shee named Lotan came to her house, to request the cloth for a fine traveling cloak. He visited her every day while she worked on the cloak, and by the time it was ready, Seelah and Lotan had fallen in love. Arthan heard of this and made a rare visit to his mother's house to meet Lotan. The meeting did not go well. Arthan learned that Lotan dabbled in spellcraft, and he took a dislike to the prince that was quickly reciprocated. Seelah was saddened that her beloved and her brother, both so proud and headstrong, could not overcome their mutual dislike for her sake, and their own.
At that time, rumor came to the lands of the Shee that distant lands were falling under a terrible shadow. Entire worlds of the Realm were fading and disappearing. And then the Steward Oreyn came to Eleel.
The Stewards (or the Innathi, as the Shee called them) visited Eleel from time to time and their visits were always times of great joy and celebration, but on this occasion Oreyn brought grave news. The troubling rumors were true. A dark power known as the Night King had risen and was devouring  storylands, turning all he conquered into a bleak and nightmarish shadow version of the Realm. The Stewards were gathering all of their friends and allies to meet and stop this threat.
The Shee joined the alliance, and Lotan rode to battle, promising Seelah he would return in victory and they would be married. Arthan wished to go, too, but his skills as a smith were needed for the forging of armor and weapons, which the Shee had had little use for until this time.
The war was long, and from time to time messengers would return to Eleel with news of the battles and how the alliance fared. There were many tales of heroic deeds and sacrifice from the war, and Seelah began to weave these stories into a great tapestry.
And what happened then, and how Arthan and Seelah became Moth the Nightwanderer and the raven Morrigan, is told in The Shadow of Malabron.

Illustration by T Wharton

Will Lightfoot

Will Lightfoot is a boy from our world. He has dark wavy hair, brown eyes, and stands about five foot four. His birthday is August 6th and his full name is William Joseph Lightfoot. He is the son of Jack and Rose Lightfoot. Jack is a welder and mechanic. Rose was a gardener and a fine storyteller. Will has a younger sister named Jess (short for Jessica).


Will's interests (at least before meeting Rowen of Blue Hill) included soccer, video games, and drawing.

When Will was 11 his mother became ill and spent a number of weeks in hospital before passing away. Rose was of Native American ancestry and when Will was younger his mother told him stories based on the tales and legends of her people. Most of these stories involved a boy hero named Light-of-Foot, or Lightfoot, who roamed the prairies and mountains with his pony Great Heart, having all kinds of adventures. After his mother's death Will lost interest in books and stories.
Three years after Rose's death, Jack Lightfoot got a job offer in another city in the west. He decided to take the job and move his family because Will and Jess were not coping well with the loss of their mother. Jess has stopped speaking in anything more than a whisper, and Will had become sullen, withdrawn and was almost always angry. Jack hoped new surroundings might help his children.
The family spent several days crossing the country in their rickety camper van. Along the way they stopped at a campsite where Will stole his father's beloved old motorcycle. He ended up crashing it and found himself in a strange world called the Perilous Realm…
Illustration by T Wharton

Rowen of Blue Hill

Readers have asked for more information about Rowen.
When we first meet her in The Shadow of Malabron, Rowen is nearly fourteen years old. She has pale red hair, dark green eyes, and stands about five feet tall. Her birthday is February 4th.

Rowen lives in the city of Fable with her grandfather, Nicholas Pendrake the toymaker (and loremaster). The toymaker's housekeeper, Edweth Little, has also looked after Rowen since she was a small child.
Nicholas Pendrake was married to a weaver and storyteller named Maya Siddarha, from a storyland far to the east of the Bourne called Jataka. They had one child, Gildred.
Gildred Pendrake grew up to become a knight of the Errantry, and was well-known in Fable for her courage, kind heart, and skill as a horsewoman. She married a man named Thomas James Rymer. He was a writer and artist from our world who stumbled into the Perilous Realm and sought Nicholas Pendrake's help in getting back home (much as Will Lightfoot did many years later). In Fable, Thomas met Gildred and they fell in love, and had a child of their own, Rowen.
Thomas Rymer never returned to his own world. He and his wife and child went to live a quiet life at a farm north of the Bourne called Blue Hill (it was at this spot that Thomas had first entered the Realm). Since Gildred and Thomas were of two different worlds, they decided their child's family name should be neither her father's or her mother's, and so they called her Rowen of Blue Hill, for the place where the two worlds had first met.
Nicholas and Maya Pendrake visited Blue Hill often to see their beloved grandchild. Maya often stayed at the farm for longer periods, after Pendrake's duties as loremaster called him back to Fable. Maya looked after Rowen during those times when her parents were busy working the fields and tending to the animals on the farm.
When Rowen was two years old, a band of mordog and other Nightbane invaded the Bourne from the north. They burned and ransacked many farms and villages before the Errantry finally drove them from the land.
One of the farms the Nightbane attacked was Blue Hill. A smaller party of mordog came to the farm at dusk. The family dog gave one warning bark before a Nightbane arrow silenced it forever. Gildred was the warrior and so she went to meet the enemy while Thomas ran with Rowen into the woods behind the cottage. Thomas might have escaped with his daughter but he set her down in the concealment of a hollow under a fallen log and ran back to help his wife. They were both killed. Hours later Nicholas Pendrake reached the farm with a contingent of Errantry knights. The Nightbane were long gone. Pendrake found his granddaughter in the forest, crying and shivering from the cold. He took her home with him to the toyshop in Fable.
Both Nicholas and Maya suspected that the attack had not been truly random. They feared that their granddaughter, a child of two worlds, had disturbed the threads of the Realm in such a way that dark powers had become aware of her and wished her harm. And so Maya decided to journey into the Weaving, the mysterious world-within-the- world from which all the threads of Story come. Her goal was to recover the lost, ancient wisdom of the Stewards, knowledge that might protect and help her beloved granddaughter.
Maya never returned from the Weaving, and so Rowen grew up under the care of her grandfather and Edweth the housekeeper. She turned out to be much like her mother in character: feisty, bold, and clever. Rowen loved her grandfather's stories about her mother, and her greatest wish was to become a famous knight of the Errantry, just like Gildred.
Rowen loved to explore the fields and woods around Fable, and did so often without her grandfather's permission. He still worried about the dark powers who wished Rowen harm, and so he tried to prevent her from going off alone, but Rowen was very inventive when it came to evading the rules of the house. It was on one of these unauthorized excursions that Rowen encountered a boy in danger, a boy from the strange world her father Thomas had also come from. 
The boy's name was Will Lightfoot, and he was as startled to meet Rowen as she was to meet him….

Map of the Bourne

For my birthday I thought I'd give my readers a gift: a map of the northern half of the Bourne, which shows where Fable, Blue Hill, and other places important to The Perilous Realm are located.


This is not an "official" map. It's just the latest in a line of dozens and dozens of hand-drawn and computer-aided maps I've drawn over the last few years while writing the trilogy. I drew this one today, with so much snow falling outside we had to cancel a trip, so I decided I'd spend the time on a map. If you can draw a better map (and I'm sure most of you can) then please feel free to use this simply as a rough guide. There are no doubt some errors in it (for example I think the farm at Blue Hill is actually a little further east than this map shows).


The problem for me with maps & stories is that I love drawing maps and charts so much that I have to remind myself once in a while to stop with the maps and actually do the writing!

New maps of Story

The Book of Errantry has some good advice for travellers in the Perilous Realm:
"If you ever get lost, remember: either your map is wrong, or the world is."
Travel in the world of Story is more difficult than in most other places, and not just because scary things tend to happen more often in stories than in what we call the real world. The Great Unweaving, the Broken Years, and simple time and change themselves have altered the Realm, and it keeps on changing each day, much to the frustration and bafflement of people simply trying to get from one place to another.
Just ask the professional quester Mimling Hammersong:
"The Realm has always been tricky, changeable, but it's getting worse. There's almost nothing you can place trust in anymore. The rivers, hills, trees, even the stones…. One thing I knew was stone. Stone is reliable. It stays in one place and doesn't wander off. Or it didn't used to. But now the old landmarks, even entire mountains, they're either somewhere they're not supposed to be, or they're just gone." (from The Fathomless Fire, Chapter 7)
Producing accurate, up-to-date maps of such places, needless to say, has to be a nightmare for cartographers.
It's true that some parts of Story have been very well mapped: there are fine maps that pinpoint the exact spot in London where Sherlock Holmes lives, or trace the voyage of the Pequod across the oceans in search of Moby Dick, or identify the shores and villages that Raven the Trickster visits as he travels the world of the Haida.
But there are some landscapes of Story that just don't translate well to a fixed system of geographical coordinates, and maybe that's just the way it should be. When we enter a story we create our own mental map of it, which we may find differs from that of some other traveler, or the "official" map. Sometimes we change the story as we go through it, and so the only reliable map is the one we construct in our own heads along the way.
In video game terminology, the word map is sometimes used in a special way, to refer to a level in the game, or the whole world of the game. That is, the map isn't a chart you follow to help you play, it's the world of the game itself. That might be a useful idea to think about maps of Story, too. A map is the "virtual" world that you build in your head as you travel through a story.
There's said to be an atlas lost somewhere in the deepest, darkest corridors of the library of Fable, an atlas of blank pages. The maps that you draw in this atlas become real places. The map actually creates the world. 
More about maps in the next post ...
Image: World Wildlife Fund Zoomorphic Map, 
from http://www.nikolasschiller.com/blog/i...