WistThistle is Finished

I started the novel in August and completed it a few days before Christmas. My first fantasy novel, and the first of a trilogy. As a player of Dungeons & Dragons from the time I was ten years old, a year after the game was invented, I have always loved building worlds filled with magic, sorcery and dragons; and I have so enjoyed building the world of WistThistle that I’m even looking forward to editing the book, to adding the small details that occurred to me while writing the last paragraphs. I’ve already edited the first chapter, which means I could technically submit the novel to agents this evening.

The novel and main character are a little different than I first imagined them, but the spirit remains the same.

“Hwat! The tale of warriors, heroes, noble houses or great Sagelords is not what I come to tell.” So begins the tale of the Wayfarer Ta’Ehto, also called Ohéto—which is the name of the gray catkins that grow on the Wistthistle, meaning greycoat or mouse. In the dragon tongue she is called Findahl, which also means greycoat. While the War of the Isles is told in noble gatherings, portrayed in hall-length tapestries and elaborately sung by court poets, the tale told here is the tale of a woman beloved by the common folk. For her no tapestries are woven and for her no court poets sing. She had no gift for magic, lacked the warrior’s strength, and was not descended from the nobility, but girls dress in her likeness and her tale is preserved in the workaday poetry of Hæthrymic storytelling. I have tried to capture the lovely rhythms of the Hæthrymic language with a more fairytale-like English. And the dragon’s tongue—what can be said of it? One cannot truly translate the dragon’s tongue. The tongue has no nouns or adjectives, but is only verbs, for the dragon perceives the world, not as it is, but as a world of endless becoming.

My heroine, Ehto, is loosely an Inuit heroine with a gift for listening, languages, and kindness. She wants nothing to do with the war raging through the Isles, and doesn’t understand the forces arrayed. She only wants to wander the isles like the Japanese poet Basho—going from one utamakura to the next. She’s small in stature, hides and runs away when she can, yet doesn’t know her own power when she protects those she loves. She directly and indirectly causes the destruction and dissolution of the most powerful force in the Isles—the great wizards called the Sages of Halder. She learns the language of the dragons, hundreds of years after the last Sage spoke their tongue, and it is the dragons who give her the name by which she’s known—Findahl (greycoat or mouse in the dragon tongue). She is Findahl, the first druid in hundreds of years; and doesn’t herself know what it means to be a druid. Those who fear her the most look in all the wrong places. No one thinks that a woman, let alone a young woman, from the snowbound tribes of the North Crescent could be the most feared adversary of land and sea.

There were those in the village who had hidden when they heard the dragon speak. They had understood nothing else, but understood the name Findahl. Findahl was a man. Findahl was a young woman. Findahl was a sorcerer who might take the shape of a girl so small that she could walk unsuspected through town and city. Findahl spoke the tongue of every isle. Findahl could speak with dragons. Yet no person could speak the language of every isle and so it was thought that Findahl was both man and woman—being many people. Ehto, seated among the villagers, would ask if any had seen Findahl, and the traders would answer that none had seen the witch, sage, or sorcerer, and yet they boasted that if they ever saw Findahl, they would know him.

This from the closing paragraphs of the book.

I hope to have the first book of The Isles of Erþe fully edited by the first of January. I wrote the final page of my second novel on the first of January last year. Once I’m finished editing, adding the little details that add to Ehto’s world, I’ll devote January to writing some of the poetry I’ve wished to write. Then in February I’ll be begin to the second book of the trilogy. The current length of the book is 85,000 words, short for a fantasy novel, but just the length I was aiming for. I hope to finish the next two books in the coming year.

up in Vermont | December 19^th 2023

I ask myself…

I’m within a day or two of completing my fourth novel, the first book of my fantasy trilogy. I continue to get rejections from agents for my other two novels. I don’t even read the rejections anymore. We can just assume they weren’t a good fit. Not A Good Fit. That, by the way, is high on my list of tombstone epitaphs. ‘So sorry. Just not a good fit at this time. Try elsewhere.’ In the meantime, I continue to write full time with no income, and l ask myself:

But on the upside, I’m really looking forward to editing this novel. Usually, once I’ve finished, I’m done and ready to move on. I’m also excited to spend at least another year—or more—with these characters. Writing a novel is like moving to a new town. One gets to know the people there. It’s a sad day when the last page is written.

The downside is that friends know better than to ask me how I’m doing.

Just yesterday we returned from the great port of South Genset to the isle of Endfell, sailing northward on the Sea of Eyling—the sea that separates the Isles from the Great Crescent. The sailing was at night, with swells breaking under wintrish squalls, but we had the Sage Alben aboard, who drew the wind into the sheets.

So. How have you been?

up in Vermont | Dec 12 2023

WistThistle | Book 1 of The Isles of Erþe

Or as I might spell it: Wistþistle, is the first book of my fantasy trilogy—The Isles of Erþe. It takes place in a world of sea and islands that will remind readers of Earthsea. The symbol Þ comes from old English and is how the sound ‘th’, as in ‘moth’, was written. There was also the symbol ð, for the pronunciation of the ‘th’ in ‘mother’, but I’m not going to go so far as to use that. As an aside: This is the source of the ‘Ye’ in Ye Old Bookstore. For years—decades!—I thought that the ‘Ye’ was old English for ‘Your’. No. Ye is actually how printers, on the cheap, spelled ‘The’. The ‘Y’ in ‘Ye’ is actually the middle and early modern English version of ‘Þ’. My spelling of Earth, as Erþe, comes from Gawain and the Green Knight.

My aim is twofold.

First, I want to be sure that agents can continue rejecting my writing with a clear conscience. Second, because it’s fun and you only live once, I love Anglo-Saxon poetry and I want to lend my fantasy novel a little of that flavor. One of the features of Anglo-Saxon is the concatenation of words, like in modern German. Some modern translations will try to preserve some of that flavor so that in Edward L. Risden’s translatoin of Beowulf you’ll read a line like this:

                    Among a monstrous folk
he was betrayed      into the power of enemies,
speedily sent to death.      Concerning him, sorrow-surgings
troubled too long.

One of my all time favorite poems is Ezra Pound’s translation, from the Anglo-Saxon, of The Seafarer. He brings a beautiful, rough and muscular rigor to the Anglo Saxon, reproducing its alliteration and sturdy rhythms in a way that has never, to my knowledge, been equaled elsewhere.

My mood ’mid the mere-flood,
Over the whale’s acre, would wander wide.
On earth’s shelter cometh oft to me,
Eager and ready, the crying lone-flyer,
Whets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly,
O'er tracks of ocean; seeing that anyhow
My lord deems to me this dead life
On loan and on land, I believe not
That any earth-weal eternal standeth
Save there be somewhat calamitous
That, ere a man’s tide go, turn it to twain.

Anyway, I wanted to bring some of that feel into the narrative of my novel. I noticed that Le Guin did the same. Every so often she will throw words together, like ‘sunreturn’, in ways that remind me of Pound and other Anglo-Saxon translations. I’ve thrown them into my own prose and have adopted the more oratorical style of writing one finds in the high fantasy of both Tolkien and Le Guin. I’ve never liked fantasy novels written in a modern vernacular (which typifies most modern fantasy novels). Any world building, for me, goes down in flames (and I do mean flames) the instant some medieval character and his crossbow start using 21st century, idiomatic expressions. That includes the narrator/author.

Anyway, I’m closing in on the novel being forty percent written. Unlike my first three, I actually wrote a complete and detailed outline this time and—Hark! I bring thee tidings! Took me two days and it’s doubled my daily word count to well over sixteen hundred words a day. Amazing what planning can accomplish. Who knew? But I just wanted to share a little of what I’ve written. Currently, the following is the brief introduction:

“Hwat! The tale of warriors, heroes, noble houses and wizards is not what I come to tell.” So begins the tale of Ta’Ehto, also called Ohéto, the latter meaning Wistthistle in Hæthrymic. While the War of the Isles is told in noble gatherings, portrayed in hall-length tapestries and elaborately sung by court poets, the tale told here is the tale of a girl beloved by the common folk. For her no tapestries are woven and for her no court poets sing. She had no gift for magic, had no strength, and was not descended from the nobility, but girls dress in her likeness and her tale is preserved in the workaday poetry of Hæthrymic storytelling. I have translated their speech into an almost fairytale-like lilt and have tried to preserve their curious way with words if only, in some small way, to translate the lovely rhythms of the Hæthrymic language.

The main character, Ehto, pronounced É-hé-tow, comes from the northernmost reaches of the Isles of Erþe, from a culture that compares to the Inuits. She possesses a profound genius for language that allows her, in her small way, to make huge changes in the course of that world’s history—a gift that turns out to be more powerful than sword, magic, or any other fantasy trope typifying the hero’s journey. She’s small. She hides, terrified, where there’s violence. She’s not strong. She’s not brave. She just wants to be in love with the world—a world in the throes of war. Sound familiar?

Anyway, and so far, here are a couple of poems from the novel. I’ve tried to reproduce, in small ways, the rugged feel of Pound’s The Seafarer.

Cast your golden net care-worn sailor.
Be not heavyhearted though the windheave
Tells tales of loneliness; cast your net
Into the shift and surge of the bluegreen sea.
Let not the days despair
Nor long nights dismay you, for love
Awaits who with glad and cheerful heart
Trawls the world’s wide waters.

Or how about a Troll’s Song?

Trolls call me Tørgo, toll-taker
Dweller in mountain and dale. 
I, toppler of trees,
Fearless take my forest-strolls; am he
That tumbles rocks from mountaintops,
That rubs his back 
Against the sky till the raked clouds crack 
With thunder and the rooflightning leaps from heaven
To Erþe. Swallower of the sun
Am I; and what is a troll other than that?

If you visit the Wikipedia page on Trolls, you’ll see what inspired the poem’s beginning and ending. But that’s all for now. I may post a little more in the next couple weeks. The Wistþistle, by the way, is a small thorn tree that flowers on the coast of Ehto’s village home, and is her namesake.

up in Vermont | September 15 2023

The Hook & the Fisherman

My next novel was going to be Writer Writer. I would describe it but I’m shy about sharing too many ideas with the entire online population of planet Earth. When I was in Berlin with my daughter this past June, also a gifted writer, I tried to talk her into writing a fantasy trilogy. At some point, like a damned fool, I said: If I, as in me and myself, were going to write an epic fantasy, then this is what I would write. And godammit if I didn’t talk myself into writing a fantasy epic. I wasn’t on board until last week. I woke up at 3:30 AM, working out the story and couldn’t get back to sleep. That’s a sign. I’m already closing in on ten percent of Book One, called Wistþistle: Under and Over the Bridge. I’ve always loved Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy and have wanted to write high fantasy in that spirit—and so I’ve adopted the high mimetic style one finds in Tolkien and Le Guin’s high fantasy. (The trilogy is all about the power of language.) I’ve never found fantasies convincing when they’re written in the flat vernacular of contemporary English. Since there are only so many ways to map a world, mine is full of islands like Le Guin’s. Call it derivative, but the choice is to look like Le Guin or Tolkien. Anyhow, I just wanted to share a first fable that appears in the early pages of the novel.

And so the youth told her a little story about a fish that swallowed a fisherman’s boat and made the fisherman ride on her back until she had carried him to her own land and transformed into a beautiful young woman. So long as I stand on this isle, she said, I appear to you as what I am, yet the curse may be lifted if you love me as I do you.  The fisherman, who hadn’t suffered the same sudden love as she for him, and having no way to leave the island without his boat, refused and begged her to let him go. She promised she would but first he would have to spend three nights with her and in return she would only ask for one thing already in his possession. The fisherman saw no harm in agreeing.

On the first night she took him to a room filled with gold treasures collected from the seabed. But a man may have as many treasures as he wishes if he will only work for it, he said. On the second night she seated him in a great hall and cooked such foods for him and served such wine as will never be tasted. He ate and drank but said he would not stay for a man might as easily learn the art of cooking as the art of fishing. Now the fisherman eagerly awaited the third day, but on the third day the beautiful woman said she had no more goods to offer. He was free to leave. His boat was moored and ready. Now I ask for my one gift, she said; and she took from him a kiss. This made the fisherman very angry for he had been spoiled by the treasure and food and expected more. And yet as he sailed home, and after he had forgotten the food and treasures, he was nettled by the kiss.

What use, he asked himself, was a kiss? And yet her kiss was like a hook in his heart. The more he resisted it, the deeper plunged the barb. And no man may have a woman’s kiss but from a woman. The kiss tugged and tugged at him. But where was the island? One day a stranger appeared at the fisherman’s door and said that there was an old witch who knew where the woman lived, and all the fisherman would have to do was to cook her the best fish of any tasted and to serve it on a flawless plate of gold. The fisherman spent the next years learning to cook and smithy gold. Then he went to the witch, who lived in a hut overlooking the expanse of sea and earth. When he served the witch, and the old woman was satisfied, the fisherman asked where the beautiful woman’s island was. Give me a kiss, she said, and I will show you. The fisherman might have refused, but now the hook in his heart was like a killing pain. He knelt in front of the old witch and kissed her, and when he opened his eyes the beautiful young woman of the isle sat before him, for a kiss is the only gift that receives what it gives in the giving.

And there you have it. I may also post the first chapter for first impressions. Don’t forget that my first book, Tiny House, Big Mountain, a novel about a girl and her mother’s spiritual journey in the Greens of Vermont, is in print and available. Feel free to ask me about it or to let me know what you thought of it, if you’ve read it.

up in Vermont | August 21st 2023