Day Three {First Times}

There they lie in Ilwëa forgotten,
There they lie asleep.
And no one shall awake them,
Nor stir their shifting dreams.
There they lie with all their
Secrets scatter'd round:
Their books, their jewels,
Their histories engraven on their shadow-beds.
In Ilwëa they lay down,
From Ilwëa they shall never rise
Though all weep for them.
One day Ilwëa shall go down into the Sea,
One day it shall be lost in the Deep
From which Enmella and Midwëo were made.
Let the Sea be silent of the Noliam,
Of Uoi and Yusala, of the mighty sons
Born of the Armelfar.
All time for them has ended.
Let the names of the Noliam
Wash clean from all the forsaken tombs.
There they lie in Ilwäea forgotton.
There they lie asleep.

day three: your first attempt at writing

It's Day Three of Lerowen's fifteen-day writer's challenge. This is probably the most embarrassing of the fifteen questions, considering a writer's skills (we hope) improve over time. Going back and digging up original works from the dark early days is like taking a good long look at the stuff we wore in the early nineties...

Well, I don't actually have my very first piece of writing any more, and it has been so many years that I don't remember it very well. To its credit, I seem to recall that it had some kind of plot, but that's about as much credit as I can give it. So, for the sake of clarity, I'm going to fix on the piece that really launched me into a comfortable world of writing. This piece is a fantasy weighing in around 317,734 words (not including the massive amount of history, backstory, and poetry that went along with it) and styling itself under the title of The Starling. Of all my pieces of writing up to that point, this was the first that really pulled together the things I had learned scrawling my more imaginary works, the works that were really just the writer playing with her characters. The Starling was its own work, my first real piece of stand-alone fiction, the first piece I had written that I could really (in a creator's way) be proud of.

To poke some fun at myself, I have to say that I'm a real American story. I taught myself how to write, I pulled myself up by my own No. 2 pencils. The Starling was my first independent work, but in its own way it was still just another exercise as I honed my skills to make a publishable work. I'm still a little proud of The Starling, though the poor thing bears the tell-tale markings of amateur fantasy.

the characters

The plot is very character-driven, so it would make most sense to touch on the characters for explanation. With elves and humans, and brownies and stars, I had quite a cast to manage. My country-at-the-world's-end was populated by lots of different folk, and a sort of country that is fading out of its primal magical state. But a bit of magic still remained in veins and pockets, and my main character, you might say, was one of those. He was a Starling, a half-breed, part human and part star. Auran Starling was a lot of fun to write. He was a man in his late twenties, early thirties with a young wife and a nephew, he was very close to the land and had a good hand with horses, and in general he was a very strong, quiet individual. His orphaned nephew Cirdil was almost the spitting image of his uncle, having grown up with almost no other standard to go by. The two were peas in a pod. Into this pea-pod I tossed another fellow, a follow-the-leader sort of young man who attached himself willingly to Auran's shadow; I tossed an elf, I tossed a brownie, I tossed another starling. Through all the shifting peoples of my countries, these folk stayed the course together and, though primitive as far as my current skills are concerned, it was enjoyable to see them come together into a single whole with a single purpose.

the single purpose

So, what's the point of all this, hmm? The point goes back, as any epic will, to a happenstance in the past. If Hel had decided to take over Asgard, it would have been similar to Haierel, a fallen star, getting it into her mind that she wanted to take not only her revenge for (from her point of view) past wrongs, but wanting to take everything. She was my cruelest, most calculating, most wicked and womanish character I had written before. When Auran signed up to take on the job of dissuading her from her goals or putting a knife in the hollow of her throat, he was not fully aware of what he was getting into. She was my first stab at the Infernal Venus, and she did not turn out so very badly, either.

This was my world-building story, my chance to get the hang of writing a new world, new peoples, new cultures, new histories and mythologies and whatnot, so on, and further. It's 317,734 plus words of serious abandon, and those 317,734 plus words, I think, really paid off. I still look on Auran and Cirdil, Aeofern and Kelan, and Brownie, with fondness. They taught me a lot.

Star would fall and Starling rise,
Clearing the dark and clouded skies.
Night will fade and dayspring come,
And Fire give way to light of Sun...