Shape Shifting in EOLYN

One of my favorite books growing up was T.H. White's The Once and Future King, based on the legend of King Arthur. Years -- uhm, okay, decades -- later there are still scenes and passages from this book that remain vivid in my memory. I liked White's portrayal of Guenevere, for example; his very sympathetic treatment of this legendary woman who loved two men, and the two best of her time. And I especially liked Merlin's tutorship of Wart (young Arthur) during his childhood. As part of Wart's instruction, Merlin turned the boy into one animal after another: a fish, an ant, a hawk (if I recall correctly), and others that don't come to mind in the moment. I mean, how cool is that? What I wouldn't have given to have teachers who could turn me into animals. Even JK Rowling's magnificent Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry could not replace, in my imagination, the wonderful tutorship of Merlin.

When I crafted the childhood of Eolyn and Akmael, I wanted them to have a touch of Merlin's approach in their training. So Ghemena and Tzeremond both include shapeshifting as part of their students' instruction. Both Akmael and Eolyn experience shapeshifting during their younger years while they are mastering the principles of Middle Magic. In one scene, they spend an afternoon trying to change each other into animals, but don't succeed. This is because in the world of Moisehén, mages and magas cannot induce shapeshifting on their own until they learn the techniques of High Magic.

In theory, a person who has mastered High Magic can shapeshift into any animal with which he or she has had contact. This gives Eolyn, especially, a very wide range of options, since she grows up in the forest and interacts with all its creatures on a daily basis. Yet, as magas and mages reach adulthood, they tend to favor certain forms over others. Both Akmael and Eolyn favor the forms of Wolf and Owl -- yet another expression of the underlying affinity between these two characters, who develop a strong friendship and mutual attraction, despite the circumstances and formidable conflicts that separate them.

There are few animals, in my mind, that embody as well as Wolf the image of fierce independence coupled with a deep need for meaningful companionship -- Eolyn and Akmael, through and through. I have a special love for wolves, though I have never had the privilege of seeing them in the wild. A few years ago, we went camping in northern Minnesota, where we heard the wolves at night. It was just spectacular.

Owl, of course, is a creature of the night, with amazing wings that are designed for an absolutely silent flight. Day creatures like ourselves are crippled by darkness, but Owl is at home in the night forest, which for us is shrouded in mystery and fear. When I do night walks with students in the field, I always include a moment when we turn off our headlamps. All of us. The darkness is astounding -- a deep inky black that is hard to imagine anymore for folks who live in urban environments. It makes you especially appreciative of what it means to be nocturnal.

If I could be changed into any animal -- just for a little while, because I actually like being human and wouldn't want to permanently shape shift -- I would be a mountain lion, or puma. The puma is more of a New World animal, so it doesn't appear in EOLYN, but one of it's cousins, Lynx, lives in the South Woods and shows up on occasion. I've always been partial to the strength and ferocity of the wild cats, and the kind of powerful sensuality that accompanies their every movement. African lions are another one of my favorites. They're just cool.

How about you? If you could shapeshift into any animal, what would it be?

Children's Magic

A couple announcements before getting into today's topic.

First, EOLYN now has a page on Facebook. There's a link on this blog -- scroll down the column on your right, and you'll find it. If you haven't already, please take a moment to "Like" the page, and spread the word about EOLYN by suggesting it to your friends. This will be my primary tool for making announcements about readings and other upcoming events for the novel, although -- for those of you who have yet to succumb to Facebook fever -- you can rest assured this information will also be posted on the blog.

On a somewhat related topic -- just because it's also about marketing -- this week classes start at Avila University, where I teach biology, ecology and related subjects. I'll be telling my new and returning students about the novel, so hopefully the blog will get some new visitors. For that reason, if you're a regular, you might see some repetition here. For example, I'll be reposting the first three chapters of the novel over the next few weeks.

So much for announcements. Let's talk about Children's Magic!

About a week ago, we went to see the Disney musical Beauty and the Beast at Starlight Theater, a lovely outdoor venue in Kansas City, Missouri. It was a warm and clear night, with a beautiful sunset, followed by a half moon illuminating the dark sky. The theater was packed with children, mostly little girls, all decked out in their princess outfits. It reminded me of how I, too, dreamed of being a princess when I was a little girl. In fact, my paternal grandfather's nickname for me was "meine kleine Prinzessin", German for "my little princess". And he put a lot of energy into reinforcing that particular fantasy of mine. Of course, one day I grew up, and started reading my history, and found out that being a real princess wasn't always what it was cut out to be. In fact, most often it was downright nightmarish. That particular disillusion probably ranked right up there with learning the truth about Santa Claus.

But children need their fantasies, and we cultivate them and indulge them, and value them in a way that only adults who have lived them, and lost them, can do. In the world of Moisehen, the capacity of children to fantasize is considered a form of magic. Just like Primitive Magic (which I talked about in my June 7 post), Children's Magic is thought to be innate.

In an early draft of the novel, Eolyn's mother Kaie teaches her that Children's Magic

"is the magic of play and discovery. It is called Children's Magic because all children who are well kept express this magic. But a strong maga knows how to practice Children's Magic, no matter what her age. It is the magic that keeps us fresh and imaginative."

The final draft of EOLYN contains no explicit discussion of Children's Magic, though it is mentioned in a scene about a quarter of the way through the book, when Ghemena prepares a sacred fire as part of Eolyn's initiation into High Magic. For kindling, she uses "less traditional twigs of Linden, the protector of Children's Magic". But the friendship that grows between Eolyn and Akmael in the South Woods is infused with Children's Magic, and all the spirit of imagination, adventure and affection that comes with it.

I feel compelled to point out that a child's imagination -- and therefore, Children's Magic -- is not always a bright and airy thing. One of my favorite movies is Pan's Labyrinth, a story about a girl, Ofelia, who lived in Spain during an era of fascism. Ofelia lives a rich fantasy life set in a parallel world that -- while it provides an escape from her family's brutal reality -- is just as dark as the "real" world. The timeless popularity of Grimm's Fairy Tales is another testament to the appeal of the darkly fantastical to children the world over. Even Beauty and the Beast, for all the pretty songs and nice costumes with which Disney has dressed it up, is in the end a downright scarey little tale about the potential costs of being a princess.


Today's image is from the movie Pan's Labyrinth, showing Doug Jones as the Faun, and Ivana Baquero as Ofelia.

Hidden Magic

It turns out I have a mage in my family tree!

Meet Ed the Wizard, also known as Edmund Peuschel, pictured here on his wedding day, with his beautiful young bride Margaret.

Dad told me Ed's story just a couple months ago. He lived in Kansas City, Missouri, in the mid 19th century, where he ran a saloon with his brother. Ed the Wizard had the singular ability to take his head off and hold it in his hands. To this day we don't know what his secret was, but I suspect it involved getting his clients good and drunk before the show started.

Or...Maybe he was a wizard for real.

Ed was the grandfather of my grandmother, Rita Gastreich (Rita Peuschel, by her maiden name). Rita studied ballet as a girl, and during the 1920s performed in New York as a soloist with the Albertina Rasch Dancers, featured in many of the Ziegfield shows. (In addition to clicking the link to find out about Albertina Rasch, you can see a photo of my grandmother in my July 8 post, Celebrate.)

It was during the off-season, when Rita came home to Kansas City, that she met the man who would become my grandfather, Karl Gastreich. Karl had immigrated to the U.S. from Germany just after WWI, at the tender age of fourteen. He came from a proud old German family, and was slated to marry a bride handpicked for him from a similarly proud old German family back in the fatherland. But he fell in love with Rita, and scandalized his extended family back home by marrying an American woman.

When Rita married Karl, she abandoned her identity as a professional dancer. All the photos and letters from that time were stored away and never talked about, along with her last pair of pointe shoes. It was not until the mid 1970s, when my sister went to study at the Joffrey in New York, that Rita brought all the old photos out of the closet and revealed her charismatic past to her children and grandchildren.

I never learned directly from my grandmother why she chose to conceal this charismatic past for so many decades, but it's occured to me in recent months that something in the mystery of her silence provided one of the seeds for EOLYN, a novel in which we find a variety of characters who, for one reason or another, hide the full extent of their magic.

I suppose we all have hidden magic; a special part of us that we aren't comfortable sharing with just anyone, and that we often simply choose to keep to ourselves. But it's when external forces obligate us to hide our magic -- through repression or other forms of violence -- that we lose something very important to our lives and humanity. This is a core theme of EOLYN, where magic is denied first to one class of people, then to another, and always with adverse consequences.

To this day, I am very grateful Rita brought her photos out of the closet. Otherwise, I might never have known who my grandmother really was.

For those of you who may not have noticed, this week I added a new page to the blog, A Brief History of Moisehén. Read it to find out more about the prohibition of magic among Eolyn's people.

Names in EOLYN

It's not always an easy task to find the right name for a character. In fantasy, there's an added expectation that names will be distinctive, representative of the unique worlds and cultures from which our characters derive. On the other hand, I've had readers tell me that "strange" names with difficult pronunciations are one of the elements of fantasy that they don't like. So the key is finding something that's different, but not too different. Though I think the 'strangeness' of any given name is not only a product of how it sounds, but how it fits - or not - into the context of the fantasy world in question.

My own surname "Gastreich" originated in fourteenth century Germany. It's a "real" name, but I suppose it sounds like it could have been pulled from a fantasy novel. Certainly very few people in the U.S. can pronounce it, or spell it, without explicit instructions. And even then, it seems to be difficult. But I like the name Gastreich because it has such a deep history, and ties me to a wonderful family of very talented and loving people. In its earliest derivation -- that is, in Old German -- it literally means "taster of wines" -- a tradition we have been faithful to now for more than five centuries. (Though please don't ask me to tell you about wines; I just like to taste them!)

Ever since I can remember, I've had a sense that names are important part of our identity. So as an author, I put a lot of thought into the names of my characters, and will play with different versions of similar names over and over until I find something that 'feels' right. Every name in the novel EOLYN has a history and meaning, if not for us, then for that character and his or her culture.

The name Eolyn was derived from 'Eowyn', of Tolkien fame, a name I have always liked and a character I have always admired (though it's an interesting irony that my protagonist Eolyn is intent on shunning all arms, while Eowyn seemed rather intent on taking them up). My friend and fellow author, David Hunter, has pointed out that the prefix 'eo-' can be taken to mean primeval, and 'lyn' signifies 'pretty', making Eolyn, in a sense, an 'archetypal beauty'. It's an interpretation I like a lot, though it wasn't what I had in mind when I chose the name. In the untold backstory of my novel, Eolyn's mother Kaie chooses 'Eo-' in reference to one of the pagan names for spring equinox, 'Eostar'. Eolyn was born in the springtime, but also Kaie was expressing a hope that her daughter would bring a new 'springtime' -- a renewal of magic as well as life -- to her people.

The name Akmael was derived from 'Asriel' (Lyra's father in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy), and 'Achim', a German name that I have always liked, but that wasn't quite regal enough for a king, although I let Akmael use it anyway when he first meets Eolyn. I wanted the -iel or -ael ending, because in our culture these are suffixes associated with angelic names (Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael, and so forth). While Akmael is not an angel, and angels don't really exist in his world, I wanted to give him a name with that kind of power. That's how I found 'Akmael', but in the imaginary world of Moisehen, Akmael's mother Briana chooses the name, derived from "ahkma", which is the sacred word for "first". For Queen Briana, Akmael represented the start of something entirely new for her people, the first king to be born of a mage and a maga; the union of the blood lines of Vortingen and the Clan of East Selen; and also the birth of a new beginning after the annihilation of her people and her sisters in magic, the magas. In other words, she was packing a lot of hope into this one boy.

So, both Akmael and Eolyn are meant to represent a 'first', a 'something new', for their people. In hindsight, I now realize they represented something new -- and wonderful -- for me, too.

Today's image is of Miranda Otto, who interpreted the role of Eowyn for Peter Jackson's film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.

Leaving Las Cruces

I'm just going to check in this week -- no particular reflections to offer on EOLYN this time around. I am wrapping up my field season at Las Cruces, so I'm busy with packing and such, taking that last hike through the woods, caught between the sadness of leaving and the wonderful anticipation of going home.

Some little news bits:

The Dead Horse Society will have a public reading at the Writer's Place in Kansas City on September 11, 2010, starting at 6:30pm. I'll be participating, along with nine other great speculative fiction writers from the Kansas City area. If you're in town, please stop by for a listen!

This year I'm attending World Fantasy Con for the first time. That will be in Columbus, OH, October 28-31. I've heard great things about this conference and am really looking forward to it. My editor Eric T. Reynolds is working to put together a reading table for Hadley Rille authors, so hopefully I'll have a chance to share some of EOLYN there as well.

At Las Cruces this summer, in addition to supervising three students who have completed very nice research projects, I finished up my own edits on the manuscript for EOLYN. Right now, it's in Eric's hands, and will also be read by author Terri-Lynne DeFino, before it comes back to me with some final suggestions for tweaks and changes.

Another gift of Las Cruces: I've penned about five chapters now of the sequel to EOLYN, some in better shape than others, but all very solid and exciting. I'm really looking forward to the adventure of this new novel. It's a great feeling to be working on another project with these characters whom I've come to know and love; and challenging to explore new characters or old characters with new stories to tell; and fun to see that Eolyn's story -- and my story with her -- is not over yet.

So, those are my news briefs. Tomorrow I travel all day from Las Cruces to San Jose, where I'll spend a day packing and saying goodbye to friends and family before I fly home to Kansas City on Thursday. Oh, I will miss this place. But it will also be good to be home.

Today's photo is one of my favorites from this summer. I can't tell you what this buttefly is, but we found it along the Rio Java during our last hike yesterday. It was very patient and cooperative while I took the photos. Butterflies area a great symbol of growth and transformation, and the stages of their lives -- egg, larvae, pupae, adult -- are often likened to the stages of the creative process. I'd say the novel EOLYN right now is in the pupal stage. The sequel has officially hatched and is now a (very hungry) first instar larvae. Me and my entomology geek metaphors...

Restoration Ecology and EOLYN

We just got out from under a major tropical depression – that means lots and lots of rain – and the sun is out again, to the delight of all creatures great and small. I took a nice morning hike yesterday along the Wilson, Melissa and Water Trails, about a 3 hour loop through primary forest, secondary forest, and abandoned pasture.

The Water Trail cuts through land recently acquired by Las Cruces, about 40 hectares of mixed habitat, all in various stages of recuperation. Las Cruces is unique among tropical research stations in that it is not tucked away deep in the uncharted territory of primary forest. Las Cruces is a large forest fragment in a fragmented landscape, an area that was once covered in primary forest but is now primarily devoted to pasture and coffee cultivation, with a few patches of forest here and there. So research at Las Cruces is, for the most part, devoted to restoration ecology, the study of how to recuperate trashed habitats.

During the last 10-15 years, Las Cruces has grown, acquiring three adjacent properties. The first of these, Melissa’s Meadow, used to be pastureland and now supports a thriving secondary forest. The most recent property, where the Water Trail is found, still has large areas of abandoned pasture with tall grasses, but you can see the trees coming up here and there as the forest begins to reclaim its home.

I find it encouraging, in an era of so much destruction, that there are places in this world where restoration and recuperation has already begun. Close to my Kansas City home, we have Jerry Smith Park and other sites devoted to prairie restoration, such as the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. All over the world, places are being set aside – however small or humble - to bring back what we’ve lost, or almost lost.

Since all things in my life seem to relate back to my novel, I found myself thinking the other day as I hiked along the Water Trail, about Eolyn and how her story is also one of near extinction and restoration. Eolyn is the lone guardian of a rich cultural tradition that has almost been lost to her people, the tradition of the magas. Akmael shares this status, though it is rarely explicitly stated in the book. He is the only mage warrior of his generation, a man capable of integrating magic with warfare, the lone heir to a tradition once shared by thousands. Their forbearers were destroyed by war and intolerance, and now it is up to them – if they value these cultural traditions – to find a way to bring back what has been lost.

Restoration is not an easy task for Eolyn and Akmael, just as it is not an easy task for us. There are countless forces that work against them as they try to forge a friendship - and a future for their magic - against seemingly impossible odds. I'd love to go on and talk a little about whether they succeed, and why or why not, but of course I'd just be giving the plot away if I did!


Today's photo is a view of Melissa's Meadow, surrounded by primary forest. The "meadow" is no longer a meadow, but a stand of secondary forest that, at only 10 years of age, is nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding stand of primary forest. Melissa's Meadow is in the center of the photo, a triangular patch of forest that is somewhat lighter in color than the surrounding canopy. (If you click on the photo, you should be able to see a larger version to pick out the details.) It is also shorter - you can just barely see the line that marks the border between the two forests. Of course, if you hike through these habitats, you will see they are very different. Melissa's is packed with small fast-growing tree species, with an open canopy and dense undergrowth, while the adjacent primary forest has very large trees, a closed canopy and very few plants on the forest floor.

Celebrate!

Okay, time to toot my own horn.

This week I had one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever lived. I read EOLYN from start to finish, "cover to cover", in a handful of sittings. No longer do I have a chapter 1 that has yet to read smoothly, a chapter 8 that needs to be rewritten in another pov, a chapter 12 that has 1000 words too many, or a battle sequence that stands like an insurmountable wall between me and the end of my novel. It’s done. It’s done, and it’s beautiful – the end of each chapter urging me forward with the desire to read more, even though I know what’s going to happen. The story makes me laugh, cry, love and fear. But mostly, it just fills me with awe.

I’m the one who wrote this. Not George RR Martin or JRR Tolkien or Ursula LeGuin or Kage Baker. I wrote this, and it’s one of the most wonderful stories I’ve ever read.

Where did it come from? To what do I owe this miracle of the mind? Can it even be called a miracle? After all, it's not like I snapped my fingers and it suddenly appeared. Nearly four years of hard work, possibly twenty years of imagination, and shaping and molding and countless obsessive moments with my journal or in front of the computer, the thoughts and ideas and feedback of so many friends and fellow authors feeding into my creative journey. All of it to weave 119,000 words into a novel only I could write. Pure magic. EOLYN.

I am awed and humbled and deeply grateful for whatever forces brought this story to me, for whatever power it was that gave me the talent and the perseverance and the resources to write it. Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto! Thank you, life, for giving me so much!

Today's photo is from "Rio Rita", a 1920's production by the Albertina Rasch Dancers in New York City. My grandmother, Rita Gastreich (then Rita Pueschel) was a soloist with this company. She's the second dancer on the right. Her life story inspired some of the characters, scenes and situations in EOLYN, a fact I've come to fully appreciate only recently. But more on that in another post...