Wednesday, June 22, 2016

New Characters For Us To Meet



Beginning with the eldest, we'll start with one we do already know: Ullin of Iona.

While yes we do know him quite very well, we perhaps do not know him as well as we think.

In 'Come Hell and High Water' we will get to see a side of Ullin that even our Characters will probably never know about. He has kept many things to himself over his very long life. Some he might one day share with others; some he may never reveal ... even to us.

We know him as the mentor, protector, and friend of our fictional family.

He is probably seven feet tall, very slender (okay downright skinny), very Powerful, and very bald. There's an ungainly grace about him that endears him to us - and a strength that seems to have no bounds. He carries his authority almost carelessly but there's never been any question about it being quite very real. Ullin of Iona bears the Staff of Authority by the grace of the Holy Trinity and the Mother Spirit in particular.

So what are we going to learn about Ullin?

We're going to find out what is maybe his most personal secret, and we are going to find him at a time in his life that nobody really ever knew for sure even ever existed.

Enough about Ullin.

We've got a whole slew of other Characters to get to know.

Attitudinal Alia of Tarnos, for one.

Alia is the daughter of LittleEthan and his pert little wife Julia of Tarnos, as you might recall from Mamm of Dunnottar. She was only a baby when we met her; now she is a very old woman, although true to her name. They don't call her Attitudinal Alia for nothing. Ruler of the Tarnos holdings, she will brook no challenge to her authority. Not that anyone has ever tried to challenge her that we know of. She raises the colts and fillies of Red Rogue the Unruly and Ordha (just as unruly) with the love and discipline she would have spent on her own young ones had she had any. Her husband was reckless although charming and loving. He was chasing a bandit or some such and chased him right over a cliff, if I remember right.

When little Alianora Lairdubh (called simply Lairdubh as there are already enough Alianoras to try to keep track of) was born Keeper of the Faith, to follow Alianora of Dunnottar (see? three right there), old Attitudinal Alia of Tarnos chose little Lairdubh as her heiress.

Little Lairdubh has a Destiny to fulfill and it isn't going to be an easy one. She will one day wield great Power but must first learn to curb her own little tempestuous self.

On the day of little Lairdubh's birth Ullin of Iona shows up in his 'official' fancy dress robes so everyone knows there's something extra special about this little one. They are all called on to help keep track of her (she's an Alianora, after all) by Hart who is her designated Guard and Protector.

Hart was brought by Ullin as a newborn, some twelve years or so back, where he was sheltered for a time. Ullin 'adopted' him as his protege and teaches Hart a lot of Druid things that a lot of people don't know.

At any rate, Hart too has a Destiny to fulfill. He has a dozen or so battles to fight and a leadership role to play. He is our 'Arthur' Character, if you're wondering, although not so's you'd notice really. His life hasn't got much in common with the traditional version of King Arthur.

Hart is of an age with the Young Ones of Dunnottar. These are four cousins born in the same year as Hart: Colum, Saorsa (means 'freedom' in Scots Gaelic), and Marra and Mamm the Younger who are red-headed twins. The five of them grow up knowing each other pretty well as Hart is always with Ullin who is often at Dunnottar.

Colum, Saorsa, Marra, and Mamm the Younger take their early training on Dunnottar itself. Their parents are fully capable of training them, plus they've got the brothers of the Old Ones, Dedan and Saba, to help with that. Because Dedan and Saba have powers of their own that are a surprise the few times they wield them, these four Young Ones of Dunnottar get more of an 'education' than just about anyone else in the world. They wind up with powers that Dedan and Saba have shared with them and can throw fireballs and make snakes and such appear and disappear.

The four of them are ... well ... 'wild child times four' I guess might work. They get into all kinds of trouble but get themselves out of it by being kind, generous, creative, and more charming than the law should allow. Everyone loves the dickens out of them - when they aren't wanting to flay them alive.

They're all tall and slender (actually slender, not skinny and bony like Ullin) with long long legs. Colum is dark haired and dark eyed; Saorsa is blonde and blue eyed (or is it green?); the twins have red hair, and the deep blue eyes of Alaric. Our OWN Alaric, not Alaric II who had no business bearing the name but that's another story altogether and we're not going to go into it here.

When the Young Ones are about twelve or so the New Younglings start coming along, led (sort of) by little Lairdubh. These are the children of the original Younglings of Dunnottar, although one of them is the son of one of their close friends, Comgaill of Dal Riata. Most of them belong to Dothann and Rua, and Brann and Andras (of Cornwall) - a half dozen redheaded girls with dark eyes and a half dozen blond green-eyed boys who are like clones of Brann. Four come from Diann and Corrbed, two girls and two boys. 

Yep.

And that's just the 'Dunnottar Folk'.

The other half of Hell and High Water's story line has to do with a really ancient time. Not dinosaur ancient, but mammoth and saber-cat ancient is still pretty long ago.

We've got the first (that we know of) Mamm character coming into our story. She is Mamm of Phi and is in line to be Queen but we don't really pay much attention to that as her 'queen-dom' isn't exactly a part of our story in any real sense of the word.

In escaping a horrible event, at least the initial horrifying part of it, she rescues a little boy and the pair of them hook up with Danann of Phi (who is a true Danann as he's big, strong, smart, and maybe a little arrogant). These three Phi Survivors make it out of the danger zone of *North America* and get to *Australia* where Old Dan teaches them a thing or two or three about survival and then sends them on their way to do what they have to do when they have to do it by being where they're supposed to be when they're supposed to be there.

They stop in Morocco to pick up Clara whose people have been so devastated that only a few of the young ones choose to even try to rebuild.

Then they head to Andorra where they add Etan and Ellae to their group. Etan is the son of a smith (silversmith) and this is one strong and skilled little boy already. Ellae is the eldest daughter of a brood, and has a magical smile.

It is at Andorra's Gateway to the Realm of the Gentle Ones that the above group comes to join with another group of survivors.

This second group has been hanging out with the Gentle Ones for a while; before that they were at Orkney, which hosts a school of navigation that lots of folk come to for training. 

In this second group, we find our own Alianora and her husband Drustann of Dunnottar. They have gone deep into the past in search of the true meaning behind the Faith which they will be passing on to little Lairdubh, the next Keeper, and they landed at Orkney.

There they met Elder, Coinne, and Deene - these are the figures of Authority at Orkney. Coinne and Deene are Star Folk come home to teach and to learn. Elder is an old man with cheerful eyes.

Also from Orkney are a pair of brothers who are Drustann look-alikes. They are Dru and Brod with whom Alianora has a love-hate thing going. They're as annoying as any brothers could be but look so much like Drustann (and have good hearts) that she can't help liking them.

There are two others who show up at the Gateway of the Gentle Ones at this meeting of the paths: Lann and Birchta of the Southern Forest (which has burnt to a crisp and is no more) have been rescued by the Gentle Ones and brought here to connect with the rest of this growing group of survivors. 

Poor Alianora about has conniption fits when she sees all these people who look so very much like members of her own family.

Birchta and Lann look just like her youngest sister Aine and her husband Kalann.

Mamm of Phi looks just like Mamm of Dunnottar but has sea-eyes instead of green ones.

Danann of Phi looks just like Wally of the West, one of the brothers of Mamm of Dunnottar.

As they continue their journey, the group has to stop at the shore of the North Sea while they figure out how to get across to Orkney.

This is where our final Character, Maggie, joins them. She has been saved and kept safe (from the destruction got that the rest of her people) by the giant Eagles of the area.

And so ... the above is our Cast of Characters for Come Hell and High Water.

Welcome to our Story. Find a hearth to sit in front of and we'll tell you the Story as it unfolds. If you don't want to wait for this one, try this link to get you started on (or continuing with) the books before this one.




Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Part One - New Cover, Additional Content !!!


CLICK HERE to learn more and get a copy if you want  :)  

What An Odd Sensation

To journey back through the twists and turns of your own path is strangely both comforting and disturbing.

Goals that have been set and met (or not), the thoughts of moments gone by, pictures and words that seem as though surely they must have belonged to somebody else ... but of course they're your own ... have a kind of haunting quality attached to them.

I've finally been able to take a tiny bit of time to peruse at least a part of my own back-path - I've had rather a busy life I have to admit.

All of which is neither here nor there. It was just on my mind.

Sunday, June 19, 2016

Changes, Changes, Changes ...



When something awful happens, a person expects to have the associated stress to deal with. Knowing it's going to be part of the deal doesn't really make it any easier to cope with, but yeah, we expect it - in ourselves and in others who are going through something rough.

What has taken me kind of by surprise is the amount of stress associated with some really positive changes going on right now in my life. They're exciting and fun, not anything a person would expect to stress out over. But there you have it.

Good changes are just as stressful as bad ones.

Go figure.

I'm supposed to know this stuff, and so are all of my wonderfully-trained daughters. All of us have the education and experience to know what to expect. 

Yet we kind of got a little blind-sided by it. Smack in the middle of the fun we were having planning and executing our change, BANG! There came the stress factor. 

My own could perhaps have been anticipated, as it's my life that is in the process of making said change. And, being as my daughters are in the process of helping to make that happen, theirs should have been expected as well.

So.

Thank the Powers Above that each and all of our skills seem to have kicked in just when they're most needed. We haven't lost our way in this journey we're on - and I don't expect we will lose our way as we continue along our path. If one of us falters, we've got exactly what we need to help us keep our balance.

Now if that ain't teamwork I don't know what would be.


Sunday, June 12, 2016

Current Events And The Sass and Caileen Books



As you may or may not know, there's a series of books coming out. 

They're not exactly focused on politics or cultures but on a family's determination to protect and preserve what is most dear to them through the times they are destined to live in - from ancient days through to the future. 

Besides one another, the Legacy that is theirs to defend includes the following:
Faith
Family
Friends
Freedom
Future
These are the Circles of Dunnottar, inextricably woven together.

The Voices of SONG, which are the pillars of their lives are:
Choice
the Spiral (Creation, Life, Death, Eternity ... aka God)
Peace
Faith
Healing
Hope
Love
Unity

Some of the times our fictional family has to make it through include:
The Mamm Books ... the time of the Fall of the Roman Empire
The Alianora Books ... basically the Dark Ages
The Sass Books ... Viking era, the seeds of a 'new' religion
The Caileen Books ... the Crusades
The Aine Books ... the New World
The Younglings of Dunnottar Books .... Revolutions
The Young Ones Books ... Expanding
The New Younglings ... Growth of Technology
All of the above in one way or another ... the Future

That's the general over-all 'plan' and we've only just begun.

Considering current events, and aligning them with historic times, the writing of the Sass and Caileen Books will likely be something of a challenge. While our stories are about a family, the times in which they live do heavily impact all aspects of their Legacy and the SONG they are born to Sing. Whether it's a natural disaster (like the one that pops into the first of the Alianora Books) or human-generated angst, our Characters have their work cut out for them.

Today we mourn, again. 

We too live in a time of escalating tension.

We also live in a time when Hope is a lot stronger than we might think. It's a time when Healing is possible. It is a time when humankind will determine its own Future, and the future of our world.

Can we please try not to mess it up any more than we have to?

When our own 'Hell and High Water' comes, and it will, do you think maybe we could try a bit of the SONG elements, and perhaps focus on the Circles as we make our way into the world which will belong to the ones who will come after us?

What do we hold most dear?






Saturday, June 11, 2016

2016.06.11 - Background and (hopeful) Timeline for Publication



Soon SOON I'll be on track to be able to focus on finishing this set of books!

The symbol(s) are a helix fossil shell and the Circles of Dunnottar. The ancient spiral shell represents ... well ... ancient times. The Circles of Dunnottar are familiar to anyone who's read any of the books of SONG - the outer ones are Family, Friends, Freedom, Future - all interlocked - and bound together by the central circle of Faith.

That they are together in this image has to do with the times they represent ... sort of. The ancient spiral comes into play because in the upcoming set of books COME HELL AND HIGH WATER a couple of the Dunnottar Folk head back in time in search of confirmation that the Faith they share is indeed what it's supposed to be. 

They end up a LOT further back in time than they had anticipated, and find that 'Something Happened' way back then - more than ten thousand years before their own time and more than twelve thousand before ours. What it has to do with their Faith they aren't sure but they're there to find out.

The 'Something' that 'Happened' was an Extinction Level Event (ELE), the one that took many of the big mammals from us, especially those of North America - mammoth, mastodon, giant sloth, camelops, saber cats, dire wolves, many of the larger birds including the Aiolornis (look it up, you'll be amazed!), along with a whole long list of others. The Bison survived; so did the American Bald Eagle and the Crane ... so did others ... but not many of any of them. Whatever people were on North America at the time were also lost to us.

At any rate, the fictional premise of the book has a lot to do with our own incredible rate of technological advances in just the past century, decade, year - and the fact that we are no different from the people who came before us. If we can figure this stuff out, so might they have been able to, at least some of them. The Story Line premise is also based on recent archaeological findings that tell us our ancient forebears were a lot more 'advanced' than we give them credit for. 

They knew math, geometry, physics, architecture, geography, astronomy, cartography, and who knows what all else, and they were skilled enough to produce what even our most powerful equipment cannot replicate. All of this a long time before we thought they could possibly have been doing much of anything except hunting, gathering, and just trying to survive.

Fictionally speaking, we've located a small but extremely advanced society in the middle of North America back in the day - more than 12,000 years ago. 

Nobody can prove they existed. 

Nobody can prove they didn't. 

For our purposes nobody has to try to prove anything. That's one of the joys of writing fiction. It doesn't matter, not really, for our purposes, whether anything like Phi is 'real'. There's no absolute 'evidence', that anyone knows of right now anyway, one way or the other.

Because, you see, 'Something Happened' right around twelve thousand years ago - and about a thousand years worth of life on North America is now compressed into a condensed black mat of carbon way down there under our feet. Beneath that 'black mat' lie the remains of what was here before 'Something Happened'; above it lies the archaeological story of what's happened since. The black mat might have its own story to tell if we can find a way to read it.

The Little Dryas was a rather trying time for everyone but North America bore the brunt of it and was practically scrubbed clear of almost all life forms. 

The fact that our fictional culture of Phi was as technologically advanced as it was (fictionally) allowed some of her folk to escape - but they could not escape the consequences/fallout/impact to all of Earth that the ELE brought.

So that's the general idea of one of the two Story Lines of this set of books.

The other one has to do with what was going on with our fictional Dunnottar Folk  and in the world in general (sort of) starting in the year 500 CE. The Dark Ages were actually a pretty busy time, much more so than I expected when I started writing about them.

We've got the Younglings of Dunnottar following their Destinies here and there and all over the place. The Young Ones are right on their heels and the New Younglings are by no means willing to allow their older cousins to hog all the attention. 

Mythology, Legend, and History merge partly for the fun of it and partly because how do we know there aren't other Dimensions and Realms all entangled with us on one eternal Journey through Time and Space via the Spiral (PHI, the Golden Mean, the Perfect Balance, etc. known to us as 1.618...)? 

We're only just beginning to grasp the possibilities that quantum physics (for example) might present us with. Give us a few millennia (or a few years at the rate we're going!) ... which our fictional Phi Folk would have had before that ELE hit and 'Something Happened' ... the point here being that all this might be pure-dee fiction as it's intended to be - or it might not.

I ain't even kiddin' ya.

Trying to keep up with our Characters is hard enough once they all get on a roll - throw in trying to keep up with our own archaeologists, physicists, astronomers, technologists, and plenty of other '-ists' with all the darned recent things they're all coming out with and it's no wonder I'm wondering what the heck our Characters are getting me into this time.

Even so, it's a Journey I would not trade for all the tea in China or almost anything else.

We've got a preliminary Part One out and the 'actual' one in the works with the additions and changes. It's slated to come out at Summer Solstice; Part Two will hopefully be ready for print at Fall Equinox; with Part Three coming out at Winter Solstice to round out the year. That's the 'plan'.

Considering the fact that this is an extremely busy time for me personally, it's a good thing our Characters have proven to be effective and efficient when need be. All I have to do is write stuff down ;) 

The Mamm Books, Danann, and the Youngling Books are all about the same fictional family that has to make it through some seriously trying times as they both survive themselves and make sure the Legacy of which they are the Keepers survives - and they succeed, which isn't really a 'spoiler' because we are living proof of the Inheritance they've lived, fought, and died to Preserve and Protect on our behalf.

Just sayin' ... the Circles of Dunnottar : Faith, Family, Friends, Freedom, Future : are just as important to a lot of us today as they've been to all of the generations the SONG series is going to take us through as we share the Journey.

In case you were wondering what these books are all about, that kind of sums it up. 

They aren't 'fancy'; they aren't 'scientific'; they aren't 'provocative' (unless you're in a mood to be provoked); they don't have a lot of graphic sex or blood and gore. They're just 'family stories' that are told around the hearth fires of a lot of generations of these Characters.

Welcome to the Alianora Books of SONG!!

A side note here: all royalties generated by on-line sales of all my books go into a 'kitty account' and the current crop of 'Younglings' chooses a charity to donate them to. Last year they chose one of their own local groups, the Stonehaven Fireballs, in honor of the great job the Fireballs do to Protect and Preserve meaningful traditions, and because it was a Fireball event that led to the development of some wonderful friendships.