Legion of Mono captures the resolve of a people’s last military leader in the hours before what he knows will be a final battle. His grief at leaving his partner and their child; his pride in his family’s honour; his strong bonds with his fellow soldiers: all are skillfully expressed. The author has created, in twenty-five pages, a glimpse into a world that feels solid and complete, a remarkable achievement. The ending left me wanting more, of both the world and the story. Highly recommended.

A hard truth about being a writer is that we mine everything that happens in our lives, if not to recreate the actual event, then to use the emotions involved.

My brother died last week, too young at sixty-four, taken by an aggressive cancer diagnosed too late, a lack of symptoms until it had spread irrecoverably. I am devastated; even writing these words is hard.

There is a difficult balance to maintain, too: I am the bereaved sister, but I also must be the strong adult aunt, the practical sister-in-law, all at once. Not easy, and tiring, on top of the jet lag.

But. There is that detached observer in my brain, saying: remember this. Remember how you feel, every bit of it. Watch how your family members are reacting, remember it. Remember how the two days and 5000+ miles of travel felt, the exhaustion. Remember that peanut M&Ms and Tim Horton’s coffee made you cry, because that’s what we shared on birding trips. Remember the deep breaths you took before facing your sister-and-law and the nieces and nephew. Remember everything, because some day, you’ll use it. Not in its present form, but you’ll use it.

And part of me hates that. I can’t stop it, though; it’s who I am. I shape and define and explain my world with words, some of them – most, these days  –  fiction. Imagination can take a piece of writing only so far; it needs to be fed by honest emotion as well.

So I accept that detached observer in my mind, recording dispassionately what’s happening. Some day these feelings will make their way into a story. I have no idea when, or what story.  Maybe they’ll generate their own. It won’t be soon. But when they do, that story will be, in its way, a memorial for my brother, whom I loved, and love, and will miss forever.

In the third book of my Empire’s Legacy trilogy, my protagonist Lena is thinking about language:

“I tried to sort out the inchoate ideas forming in my mind. About language, and meaning, and if all concepts were universal, and could be translated. About the gap between intent and comprehension, between what was meant and what was understood, and the assumptions and shared experience encompassed—or not—in any exchange.’

While this is a theme in the Empire’s Legacy trilogy, and the sequel currently in progress, it’s also recently become of immediate personal interest to me. Exactly how to categorize the series for Amazon’s keywords and classifications is very far from simple, because of that gap between what is meant, and what is understood.

I’ve always called the series ‘historical fantasy’. But that has resulted in some vocal protest: it’s not fantasy, because there is no magic. But the world is not real, I would counter, so doesn’t that make it fantasy?  Not in everyone’s mind. I tried ‘alternative history’. Again, disagreement, because there is no historical event being mirrored, only an echo of the Roman Empire and its provinces. Speculative fiction? Perhaps, but a term misunderstood or not familiar to too many.

This is minor, of course: I’m marketing books, not trying to create a shared understanding of world-changing issues. But in Book III, Empire’s Exile, and more so in the work-in-progress, Empire’s Reckoning, that’s exactly what my characters are doing, trying to negotiate treaties that change the world. Which makes me think about Lena’s question, and its applicability to both my fictional world and our real one. How do you reach a shared understanding when simple words like ‘fantasy’ – or ‘equality’ or ‘citizen’ – mean such different things to different people? When a word like ‘immigrant’ conjures up positives in one mind and only negatives in another?

As writers we often strive for clarity (unless perhaps you are a poet, or James Joyce), but there will always be a gap between what is meant by the writer and what is understood by the reader. That is good, because it makes the world the reader enters theirs alone: shared by others, but always comprehended slightly differently. As long as we recognize that, and recognize too that another reader’s experience may different from yours. A starting place to discuss assumptions and shared experience, not a reason to end a conversation that might enlighten, illuminate and surprise.

As for the series?  How about ‘imaginative fiction’?

This is a reflection about coincidence, or synchronicity, or possibly about me seeing connections where there are none, except in my mind. It doesn’t matter, really.

I am, by training and education and part of my working life, a scientist; an applied geneticist, precisely, and that training and education spills over to my avocation as a birder and amateur field biologist. But by possibly a deeper inclination, a desire for a mythological interpretation of existence that goes beyond the seeming black-and-white of science, I find deeper truths in the worlds created by certain writers: JRR Tolkien first and foremost.

A friend of mine is groaning at this point…not elves, he is thinking, much as CS Lewis said at the meetings of the Inklings. Which brings me back to the coincidence, or synchronicity, I mentioned at the beginning. The Inklings, or more precisely their meeting place, are part of this: for many years, their famed Oxford writing group met at a pub called the Eagle and Child, better known as the Bird and Baby, in St Giles’ Street. Here CS Lewis and Tolkien and many others shared and discussed their writing, giving feedback on what are some of the most influential fantasy and science fiction novels of the twentieth century, the books that made me, first, want to be a writer, and then taught me how to write.

But about 75 miles away, and a few years later, at the pub named the Eagle (but once the Eagle and Child, too)  in Cambridge, Francis Crick and James Watson announced their discovery of the structure of DNA at lunchtime one day. This too, later, caught my imagination, in a different part of my brain: there is another magic in unravelling the secrets the double helix carries, deciphering the language written in the pairings of arginine and guanine, thiamine and cytosine.  Nor are the day to day processes of scientific research – the planning, the first attempts, the repetition and the fine-tuning, interspersed with moments of inspiration and realization – very different from those of writing.

There is a place – not a physical place, or not one in this world – where the helix of life and the helix of story intersect. The axle-tree of all the worlds, Guy Gavriel Kay called it: Spiral Castle, the still point around which the worlds spin, a mystical, sacred place from Welsh mythology, where resurrection is possible and life can be created, or recreated. As it can be, from DNA, or from story.

DNA writes our stories in one way; words write them in another. That both these crucibles of meaning in my life occurred in part at pubs that at one time shared the name of The Eagle and Child is only coincidence, but out of such connections we create meaning. Or perhaps, recognize it.

If you are lucky enough to live in Guelph, Ontario, or nearby, your options to purchase any or all of the Empire’s Legacy trilogy, including the third book, Empire’s Exile, include:

The Bookshelf – this would always be where I would direct purchasers first, as buying here supports both the business and myself

or

directly from the publisher arboretumpress.com (which includes free delivery in Guelph and nearby).

In a world reminiscent of northern Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, this historical fantasy series explores the meaning of loyalty and love in a rapidly changing society. Following the protagonist, Lena, over a period of four years, from the day a soldier rides into her small village with an audacious request – that women learn to fight – to a last, desperate battle to save her land – Empire’s Legacy considers the impact of war and violence on men and women, and the price we pay for freedom.

“Involving, evocative, intelligent – an outstanding historical fantasy…Lena is many-sided—soldier, sailor, horsewoman, hunter, student of history. She is also appealingly complex—bisexual, willful, sensitive, caring…” Maria Luisa Lang

“The consistency of the ever-evolving plotlines and character development has been nothing short of brilliance…” Cover to Cover

“Lena is many-sided—soldier, sailor, horsewoman, hunter, student of history. She is also appealingly complex—bisexual, willful, sensitive, caring…”  Maria Luisa Lang

“..a goldmine of anticipation, apprehension, joys and hardships, survival and all-consuming, accepting love.”  Liis Scanlon, Cover to Cover

99 cent weekend continues on Amazon

https://tinyurl.com/empireslegacy

Available Nov 29 – Dec 4 for 0.99 cents each on Amazon

In a world reminiscent of northern Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, this historical fantasy series explores the meaning of loyalty and love in a rapidly changing society. Following the protagonist, Lena, over a period of four years, from the day a soldier rides into her small village with an audacious request – that women learn to fight – to a last, desperate battle to save her land – Empire’s Legacy considers the impact of war and violence on men and women, and the price we pay for freedom.

“Involving, evocative, intelligent – an outstanding historical fantasy.” Maria Luisa Lang

“The consistency of the ever-evolving plotlines and character development has been nothing short of brilliance…” Cover to Cover

Since I wrote my last blog post on the quotes that kept me focused while writing Empire’s Exile, I’ve been noticing what else I use to keep to my themes and moods. Unsurprisingly, and especially for the work-in-progress, music is a large influence.

In Exile, the ear-worm that both plagued and focused me throughout was REM’s Losing my Religion. (Those of you who’ve read the book may see the connection.) But in Empire’s Reckoning, the chief narrator, the lord Sorley, is a musician, and so music is very important.

Given that my imagined country of Linrathe and its administered land Sorham are analogues of Scotland, Gaelic or Gaelic-influenced songs make up the largest part of the tracks I’m playing over and over again. The band Runrig is almost always on my i-pod, and most especially their song The Beautiful Pain. The lines:

All that’s constant and wise

I still see in your eyes

And it was always that way from the start

Right here where I stand

On the last of the land

But you’re still breaking the heart.

so perfectly captures my narrator Sorley’s angst that I’m hard-pressed to find a better way of expressing it.

But then there’s Stan Rogers’ beautiful song Turnaround, and its lines:

Now it’s not like you made out

To hang around

Although you know I made some sounds

To show that I cared

And when it looked like you heard the call

I didn’t say a lot,

Although I could have said much more

Had I dared

But yours was the open road

The bitter song, the heavy load

That I couldn’t share

Though the offer was there

Every time you turned around.

which again is a flawless summation of Sorley’s regret.

Whenever the story appears to be becoming too easy on my protagonists, I play these again. Sure, I’d like them to ‘live happily ever after’…but that is neither a good story nor realistic. We cannot shape the circumstances to fit our lives, only our lives to fit the circumstances. What defines us, as men and women, is how we respond to those circumstances, my character Casyn said in the first book of the trilogy, Empire’s Daughter. It’s still the overriding theme.

In war there are no unwounded soldiers.

This quote from José Narosky is written in large letters on the whiteboard in my study. Its purpose is to focus me on the main theme of my work-in-progress.

In all the books in the Empire’s Legacy series, the titles reflect the main themes of the book. In Empire’s Daughter, the theme  was duty, and how that is perceived by a daughter of a mother, a village, a country. My mother served in the British Army in WWII, as a teletype operator, both in London and in France. After the war, and after emigration to Canada, she was a member of an organization called the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire (IODE).  I don’t remember what that group actually did, but from its name, and my mother’s own attitudes towards volunteering to serve, came the title of my first book.

Empire’s Hostage looks at the concept of being held hostage, both physically and intellectually; hostage to ideas and concepts, reflecting the growth we all make in determining what aspects of our upbringing we accept, and which we reject. I’m just old enough remember the end of the Viet Nam war, the protests and anger, but I am also very aware of the damage done to veterans who had served, in patriotism or in conscription, who returned to be repudiated and vilified for what they had done, sending them into a form of exile in their own country. From that came the title and theme of the third book, Empire’s Exile. Its title refers to exile in its many forms: physical, emotional; exile by choice or by decree, by forgetfulness, by history…and whether redemption from any of these is possible.

Exile is a longer book, divided into four sections. Each section  has a quote heading it, defining the sub-theme of that part. The final section, which deals with battle and sacrifice, was the easiest to find a quote for. Fittingly for a historical fantasy series set in an analogue of Europe in the days after the decline of the Roman Empire, it is from MacCauley’s Lays of Ancient Rome: And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his father and the temples of his gods?  The quote also brings the series full circle, to the themes of the first book: what is duty, in the face of war?

The work-in-progress, tentatively entitled Empire’s Reckoning, examines the price paid – by soldiers and civilians and nations – for war. It’s not proving to be an easy book to write, but that’s all right. It serves to remind me, on this Remembrance Day weekend and every day, of the truth in Naroksy’s words: In war there are no unwounded soldiers.