Countdown to “A Stone for Sascha” Day 3 of 10: Tales from...

Countdown to “A Stone for Sascha”

Day 3 of 10: Tales from Andalucia

Back home in the United States, sitting in my art studio, I
remembered the church and the ornate placard on its wall that told of its
history as a roman structure, and after that a mosque of Al Andalus, and after
that a church of the Catholic conquistadors. I thought about the stones in the
structure: shaped and reshaped by people, used and reused by people, who like
me, were just momentary visitors; blinks in geologic time. Clearly, these rocks
must hold some sort of wisdom beyond our own.

And then the idea came: What story would a stone tell of its
lifetime, of its travels through time and place? What might it see and know?

Figuring out where to start is always the hardest part. Or,
in this case, when to start. At first I stuck with the familiar: Stonehenge, a
farmer’s wall, an English castle. This path felt predictable, so I challenged
myself to look deeper into history. What if the stone in my story began
somewhere more ancient? After all, humans have been using stone a lot longer than
the megalithic structures discovered across England. Sure enough, there is
evidence of stone circles in Africa and the fertile crescent that predate those
in England by more than 20,000 years. Suddenly, I had to find a route that
would take the stone along ancient trading routes from Africa through the Red
Sea onto Asia and beyond. As my mind wondered, I started to feel a sense of
possibility. Now the real work began…

–

Come back tomorrow for part 4: Research. In the meantime,
it’s not too late to pre-order your signed copy of “A Stone for Sascha” from my
local indie, The Odyssey Bookshop (https://www.odysseybks.com/aaron-becker-books).
Give them a call and let them know to whom you’d like it inscribed. They can
ship it anywhere in the USA. “A Stone for Sascha” publishes Tuesday, May 8th.