Creating Worlds - Tales of Anieth

What I do is create worlds. I wanted to do this ever since I read The Lord of Rings when I was nine. I decided at the ripe ol' age of twelve, that my greatest fear in writing was that some artist would get to interpret the characters and the world visually. Since I wanted to create a WORLD and not a novel, I decided that I had to draw my own pictures. This meant drawing people.

At that time, the art world was in love with abstract art and impressionist art. Realism was out. So I had to flounder around for a long time. I had to teach myself until I got a couple of lessons at the Boulder Academy of Art with Elvie Davis, a student of a student of John Singer Sargent who was still teaching in the classical style. I eagerly absorbed much of what he could teach and he must have thought I was a bit bonkers!

It is only now that I am getting competent enough at art to be able to draw my characters and the scenes from this particular world to the degree of realism that I want. Being a long time fan of the Romantic school of art and writing, and a fan of Ayn Rand and Victor Hugo, I wanted to write fantasy that would mean something. I also wanted to write "fan" fantasy, or fantasy that would have a world attached to it. This required an enormous amount of work, for I was not satisfied with the stereotyped Medieval world for a fantasy background. I backed my world up twice: first to Classical times to get out of the witch/Christian thing, and then to 2000 BCE on an alternative Earth. I took some liberties in that my world's people are from about 1000 BCE, proto-Celts and Persians. My world is as if Darius the Great had conquered Europe and was getting ready to invade Britain for tin and gold. My Zelosians (Persians) had already destroyed Gallicia in Northern Spain for the tin there.

The reason I wanted to write about the Celts was that they were a large, stable confederation that had a high degree of development, similar to the Mongols, the Vikings, or the Lakota, all of whom were too late for my purposes. I learned many eye-opening things as the world learned them: that the world of ancient Europe was not a world of barbarians living in skins, but maybe more highly developed than Classical Greece. The level of technology uncovered rocked the world of anthropology and lent pathos to my world. I came to understand that the world of 2000 BCE was of a greater level of "tech" than the Medieval world and that there had been a long "Dark Ages" as the greedy empires of the Mid-East and then the Mediterranean destroyed much of what had been learned. What a rich background for a world!

But, before I go on (and on) my celebration today is of the creation of the entry book for The Tales of Anieth. I have written (cover to cover) and even published some of the books of this world, none of which worked as "entry" books or first books into the series. There are ten other books written, but none of them worked as first books; all of them were too complex or too late in the history of the series to stand alone without too much back story.

I'm allowing myself the luxury of being proud. This is a new one for me, for I'm NEVER satisfied with my work. But the creation of Raol Aveldonacc as a young man has worked extremely well and I've written the best book I have ever written and I think it works. Pause. I've said this over the years, but this time, I may be right. Why? Because the story works. Usually my stories were good, certainly good enough, but they had some flaw. This story is a small story, a story of passion and tragedy, a story about a single man that takes place over the space of about a month.

But, more than this, I cannot express to you the joy I feel in walking in this world. The creation of a proto-Celt language was enjoyable; the discovery and extrapolation of archeoastonomy was delightful; the creation of a complete world that was real, yet also magical was fulfilling in a way that most projects are not.

And the creation of the characters has been wonderful. Here is Raol again. Just as a note: Anieth is from the Gaelic "an Aiath" which means "the land" and is pronounced "AWN-ya" or a pun on my name, which is pronounced the same way in Gaelic. It would also be correct to say "an-YA". Raol could mean many things in Gaelic or Welsh, depending on how it is pronounced, reel, rile or rail. His name could mean "sustained effort" "stellar" "ruler" and etc. Aveldonacc means "son of Veldonacc" and Veldonacc is a morph of Faol Daoine which means "people of the wolf."

I had to create a different picture of Raol for the cover to keep consistent with the eye look. (See below)

Raol was a difficult character. He began as a bad guy, the key man in the Invasion. In much of history, there was a chieftain or a king who "sold out" or made a pact with the devil (an empire) to attack his neighbors. Raol started there. A long journey!



I am very happy with what is happening in this world. I'll keep sharing as I get time.

For God hath Wrought no Greater Beauty than Man, part II

If I could explain my fascination with the human form!

In The Tales of Anieth I wanted to show a diversity of character, not just write the same plot with similar personalities. When I first began to write, it was enough to have a hero and heroine and a spread of other people, protagonists and antagonists. However, something in me demanded that I give my characters integrity, that they believe in who they are and what they are doing. As a consequence, no on in the series is evil or bad. I've come to believe as the Buddhists do, that no one is evil or bad, that the evil and badness we see around us is not the result of man, but of actions ill-considered, words said in anger or fear, the lack of responsibility or ownership that is fostered in each of us at an early age when we imitate our parents who give no reason for their anger or demands. We are born into slavery and why should any of us learn otherwise? I think that some people, like me, are also just born perverse, unable to accept anything as it is, doubters and questioners who say, "is there not a better way?"

I was also born without the ability to believe. You will read the word "god" here, but it is pointing to a feeling in humanity that is beyond what most people consider human. A creative force. A guiding force. A universal love. You could substitute "benevolence" or "the greater self" or "nature" in the place of this word; I leave it as god because I have discovered that even Christians want to better themselves, to be more like angels than like apes, to be rid of fear and pain and grief and to rise up and know joy. The pointer to god is the pointer to joy; it is not the fault of man that he is so critical of himself that he can't always see his own heart of glory.

Korutos Cheros o Gallanis began as a "bad guy." From interacting with this fictional character and his creation, I have learned some profound things. I have learned to respect the power of my own mind and to listen to myself. Characters can take on life for the author and Korutos rose up against the role I had assigned for him and demanded better of me. For twenty years, I have been on his path, "walking in his shoes" so to speak. From a beginning as a brutal, thoughtless man, he became another profoundly moral man, a man who defied an entire Empire to keep his word. He is also a tragic character, restrained by his belief in a corrupt system, trying to use himself as an example of enlightenment when he himself is the only one enlightened. But Korutos's heart evaded me for a long time until I heard a piece of music, a song, which made me understand him and honor him. It is only when we honor characters that they can have integrity.

Korutos was also an attempt to get away from stereotypes in Fantasy of British looking people. He is a Zelosian, rather like a Persian. I wanted to get away from beauty as the beauty shown in American films. A consequence of the creation of Korutos is that people identify with him very heavily and he is a favorite of many readers.

Kileen Ivava was another challenge. Original to the 1983 book, The Star of Aragon, Kileen was my attempt at drawing a character who was very different from a "normal" heroine. She turned out to be too much of a challenge for most readers who saw her passive resistance as open compliance. She was a character motivated by the superego and did what she thought she should do to save other people. She was so selfless that people overlooked that her path in the books was to discard responsibility for others and to take up responsibility for herself alone. She was another character who thought she was doing the best thing when all that happened as a result was to get more ensnarled in the wrong path.

Kileen was also an attempt to break out of American standards of beauty. She is based on several models who were popular in the 90's, but her coloring was anathema to British standards and American standards. She became four characters as the books expanded into a series.

Kileen's counterpart, Faol Abluaith, was also a controversial character, but remains my most "Objectivist" character in that he is a man who is completely self-contained. One of the ideas I got from reading Rand, was that of the maker or the creator. Faol became the essence of creativity, both creating art, his home, and his own self in the sense that he is a shapeshifter, but a shapeshifter of the mind, making of himself multi-mind, or the mind of the creator who lives through the images of Truth that he creates. He is another instance as well of a non-standard beauty. He was also my first attempt to do a character solely from a description since I have never found a picture that resembles him. I often find pictures of people who resemble my characters. Some, like Korutos, are a mix of those pictures.

One of my best characters remains Dubh Daracha. He is a successful instance of the creation of a character that was not my own personality. He is also an instance of a character who is not a intellectual character, but a character who is very wise. I was fascinated by characters like Quai Chang Kane who were not "head" characters but were still capable of wisdom and curiosity. I wanted, in Dubh, to celebrate a beauty that was very unlike what is usually shown to us through writers like Rand. I also wanted to show a male character who was not like the Luke Skywalker/Harry Potter type, but still very "male." I wanted to create a character of the earth, to contrast with his best friend, Trean Alonrach, who is a fire and air character.

But I wanted my characters to be the reality of man, to look like the sublime in man, to be men, not elves or another species that could be written off as "that's how elves behave because they're elves" rather than a reflection of what is possible in man. When I created the world, I also went to history to create societies that were possible for man and not an ideal that could not be realized. The irony of the Libertarian dilemma is that it was a common model for many societies, but cannot exist in this day and age, not because men are not capable of it, but because the model requires certain conditions, the largest of which is a very mobile society that is NOT real estate based. To expect Libertarianism to succeed under Empire conditions is like asking a starving man to share his food. Some will, some can, but it is not a successful model for a society.

The power of fiction in creating a sense of life has been demonstrated. Fiction is also very powerful in creating the illusion of a living society filled with instances of personality that are not common around us.

It is my goal, in creating a world, to be the god who wrought no greater beauty than man, for god is me and I am god and I am greater than any beauty by creating it.

Trying to Reach the Heart

When I was young I was extremely shy. I was also very private. My mother, who was not only a performer, but a teacher, wanted to draw us out into the world, to nurture our talents, and to have us be fulfilled as creative people. This rather backfired in some ways in that, while I loved being creative, I was way too shy to show off. I got to the point that I wanted to hide what I loved from my mother so that she would not want me to turn it into a performance. Competition made it worse. My mother enjoyed and thrived on competition and I found it shameful and somehow sick, as if my work became sullied by the act of comparison. I was too young to understand this.

But the young learn to protect themselves. I ended up hiding my heart, or the heart of my work. I found that she was baffled by intellect, so I found safety in engaging my mind and trying to get more and more obscure in order to turn her off of what I was doing. This had several unfortunate consequences, but the worst was that I got to the point where I could not longer enjoy doing my own work, inspired from within, without feeling guilty. Creative work was for money, competition, and admiration, all of which I despised. But one had to do it in order to do what was expected. I never questioned that I had to perform, only that it was shameful and bad to do things in secret that might not appeal to other people.

I buried my heart and did some of my work on my worlds in secret. I was also an avid journal writer, in secret. Artwork could not be secret, but writing could. However, because I was talented as an artist, that was the pressure point. I might have wanted to be a doctor or a writer, but the expectation was that I would be an artist. I never felt I had a choice. I'm sure now that I did, but I never had to courage to face down enthusiastic people. I was a child who wanted to please others and to make them proud of me.

I found later that all of this agony over the arts messed up my ability to contact the heart through art. For art to be art, it must be from the heart as well as the body and the head. You can see art that is head art: protest art, style art, art that is interesting but not spiritually appealing. Luckily, I loved music. In music I found all the heart that I could not find in the graphic arts, or even in writing. Although I do not have the ability to believe in god, I found that, though music, singing in particular, I was able to access a spiritual dimension in myself that is essentially worship, or rapture. After being criticized, singing for me became an intensely private affair.

A little while ago, I found an interview with Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance, who expresses exactly what I feel about music. I have never seen or heard anyone else who came close to expressing what I feel about god, if I can feel that way without belief. This interview is profoundly moving, so much so, that I have to share it with you. She sings in the same range as I do and I feel very close to her pitch and tone.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRsptfVAwmw&feature=related

Although I cannot bear to sing around other people, I sing when I walk places by myself, or sing in acoustically interesting places like garages and underpasses and stairwells. I love the way the tone vibrates all through the head, almost as if you were becoming tone. I always feel an immediate connection to the godspace, if you want to call it that, and an immediate rapture, that I know takes people years to achieve in meditation. For me, it is a necessary part of my emotional life to express myself though singing. It has remained private, and it would take an enormous effort for me to perform. But watching Lisa Gerrard, I know that it is possible to achieve the space without doing the competition/performance/"look at me" thing. She is singing as a dedication, as a service to the spiritual, which is what art is, or can be.

A few months ago, I gave myself permission to abandon all attempts to make money doing writing or art. At first I was lost. I still am a bit. I had been driven for thirty years to publish and make money through publication. So much so that I was torn between what the market wanted and what I wanted, always. I could force myself to do things that would sell; the artwork I liked the least was always the most popular; and I hated myself through the whole process. I hated the process of drawing and painting when I knew that it was what other people wanted. I loved giving art away; it was a justification of it all if someone liked the art and I could be rid of it. I could not even see if the art was good or bad because the market does not care that much. Styles come and go and good and bad becomes popular or unpopular.

What a snarl! I realized when I went back to bookkeeping for money and freed myself from the quest for publication that I had little idea of what I wanted to do. I kind of knew, but I had no confidence, no compass. I was faced with the fear of exposing my soul only to find out that no one liked it. So what? I asked. So what. So what.

When one has done art since one was a pre-schooler to appease people and do what they want, that so what? is a powerful phrase. I realized that I had no ability to defend myself and my art from criticism. Rarely do artists have this ability. If they did, we would see better art out there. I had seen, over and over, art that was on the right track get messed up by well-meaning publishers, editors and teachers that feared that it would not be popular enough to justify publication. This happens even more in writing and music. I knew that it was wrong to judge any art by the one criterion of "will it sell?" but knowing that and feeling it are two very different things.

I started looking at art to see what I liked, not what I thought was good. You may wonder at this, but it is one thing to judge art by how many hours you know went into it and how skilled the artist is. I had to see what appealed to me on a deeper level--what art appealed to me as art I would want to do.

I wanted to do art that would cross boundaries. I have never felt that I was separate from reality. I felt that when I touched a tree, I was that tree. Outside, I feel that I am outside. There is no "me" to speak of, but only the action of living. In my mind there is no way to separate out things and say, "that goes over here and is called this, and that goes over there and is called that." When Lisa Gerrard stands under a highway and listens to the cars and starts singing with them, she IS those sounds. You can tell immediately by the way she can harmonize into them. I wanted that feeling in the visual art that I did, the feeling of overlapping.

The music that I find appealing is this same sort of overlapping, music like rounds. I love the Celtic knot art where they see the world as interwoven and overlapping. Things float to the surface of awareness but are quickly buried again and overlapped by something else. But I also wanted to animate this feeling, not to abstract it, but to show it with living images.

This is the result.



This is a photo of a painting (did not photo well) from my world of Anieth. It shows the Raven Dance done at midsummer for the Alder people. The man in the picture is a shapeshifter. I have tried to interweave the ravens, the alder tree, the raven skulls and the alder cones with the dancer. The picture also is very symbolic with my layers of meaning that I like to do in writing. The number thirteen is balanced with the number three, the colors are that of the Alder people, and so on. But mostly I wanted to show that Bleid here is not separate from the ravens or his world.

I'm hoping that I can continue to find the heart. I'm writing a new novel in the Anieth series struggling toward that goal. I can achieve it in poetry, which I will write about, and maybe in painting/drawing, but to achieve heart in fiction is also a challenge after years and years of writing groups and publishers and trying to market writing.

Wish me luck!