Being about half a Celt (Irish, Scottish, and Welsh ancestry), Celtic culture has always drawn me, and in my Kronciles of Korthlundia series, I looked to ancient Celtic traditions for inspiration. Last week I discussed how Litha, the summer solstice, is celebrated in Korthlundia. Today I bring the winter solstice to life. Winter Solstice is the shortest day or the longest night of the year and has special significance in Celtic and most pagan cultures. It is the origin of Christmas. The Bible gives no indication of when Christ was born, except a ruler would hardly call for a census in the middle of winter. Early Christian leaders timed Christmas when they did because they couldn’t get people to stop celebrating Solstice, so they co-opted it.
Solstice is also deeply important in Korthlundia. It is the crown princess Samantha’s favorite holiday and is featured prominently in The Goddess’s Choice. At court on Solstice morning, the nobles parade through town giving presents to children who line the road way. Samantha loves this part of the holiday. The villain Argblutal is able to impress her with his generosity on Solstice, so she chooses him to lead the men in the Solstice, a clear sign of her favor that is the next thing to announcing a betrothal. At night the court gathers in the courtyard where a huge pile of wood awaits the light of the torch. The priestess (or priest) speaks the words of the Solstice blessing, “Oh mighty Sulis, we dedicate this night and this dance to you. Let our fires and our energy feed the sun and bring it back with the strength of summer.” Then Samantha lights the wood with a torch and begins the dance around the bonfire alone.
The other members of the court gradually join in until all dance with wild energy that differs from the traditional court dance. The energy of the dancers is said to feed the ritual. Also, “the mingling of a man and a woman on Solstice night was said to be pleasing to Sulis: the energy produced by the mating encouraged the sun’s return.”
The commoners celebrate in a similar manner with bonfire, dancing, and sex.
What is your favorite holiday tradition?
War. It’s here. The last war of mankind. The winner takes Earth as its prize.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Maggie grew up listening to Cardinals baseball and reading anything she could get her hands on. She remembers her mother saying if only she would read the right type of books instead binging her way through the romance aisles at the bookstore, she’d have been a doctor. While Maggie never did get that doctorate, she graduated cum laude from the University of Missouri-St. Louis with an M.A. in History.
Litha is the summer solstice, a time to celebrate the fruitfulness of the earth. The people from nobles to peasant get together in groups to gather flowers, greenery, and wild herbs. They use them to decorate everything from the shrines, the palace, shops, their homes, and even themselves. The night is spent in dancing. They attend the temple or shrines “celebrate her [the goddess’s] blessings, purify our hearts, and express our faith in the promise of the harvest to come.” They are cleansed with the water of new life and partake of the first fruits of summer. In the capital of Murtaghan the festival is even more majestic with flowers decorating the streets and even baked into the pastries. Vendors and street performers fill the streets, and at midday everyone gathers in the city square where the crown princess blesses the community garden as “a sign of [the goddess’s] blessings upon this land and this people.” The night is spent in dancing.
Before they even begin to write the story, an architect takes days, weeks, months outlining every intricate detail of their world from economics to politics to magic. They will create whole notebooks full of climate data, geography, types of inhabitants, religious systems, and even holidays. There are two basic dangers to this type of world building. The first is using it as an excuse to delay beginning the actual story. It can become a distraction/procrastination tactic to combat a writer’s anxiety about whether or not they are truly good enough to be a writer. (An anxiety nearly all writers share.) So a writer needs to know when to stop world building and start writing. The second danger is to use every detail imagined within the novel itself. You spent time creating it, so you need to share it, right? Wrong. The writer will always know more about the world that actually appears in the story itself. As an author, you only reveal as much of your world as the reader needs to know. The details of the world should emerge gradually as they are needed for plot and character development, not be dumped on the reader because the writer created a cool aspect of their world that doesn’t matter to the story itself.
The second type of world builder is often called a gardener. A gardener will have the seeds or the very basics of their world in mind and allow that world to grow as they write the story. They don’t know everything about their world when they begin, but allow it to emerge as the story needs it. This type of world builder also faces potential problems. The first is a shallow or insufficient developed world with too many aspects of it unexplored. A shallow world will not satisfy the reader. The second problem is continuity errors. The author may claim one thing about the religion on page 5 that is contradicted by the scene on page 94 that doesn’t mesh with what they bring out on page 296.
Some people believe that since they are creating something that doesn’t exist, they can do anything they want with it. This is true only to an extent. When you are creating a new world, you are asking your readers to suspend their disbelief for the length of the story. The reader knows that dragons and magic don’t exist, but during the time they are emerged in your story, they should be willing to pretend they do. In creating a suspension of disbelief, the author will find the reader a willing accomplice. Fantasy readers come to a fantasy novel with an absolute willingness to loose themselves in a make-believe world. If they didn’t want to temporarily believe in unicorns and fairies, they would have chosen a different genre. But the reader will turn against the author if the author doesn’t create a believable world, and once a reader loses their suspension of disbelief, it is almost impossible to get back. They probably won’t finish the current novel, and they certainly won’t read another by the same author.
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Lisa Robin Phillips Colodny was born and grew up in the rural countryside of Kentucky. She attended the University of Kentucky and Broward College in Fort Lauderdale, graduated with a Doctorate in Pharmacy from Nova Southeastern University in 1994 and later obtained an MBA in 2004. Her non fiction publishing history includes approximately 34 publications in the health and science industry and 5 book contributions (also medical). Additionally, she’s been interviewed for 15 television programs or newspaper articles and participated in over 50 healthcare related speaking events. Fiction publishing history includes a short story publication (My Name is Edith) for the Broward College newspaper and an X-files story (H2O)that appeared in a magazine entitled to the Fullest X tent in 1997. In 2014 the fictional story The Town Time Forgot was published and is currently still available. In 2015 she published a children’s story, Ms Abrams Everything Garden, which received the Purple Dragonfly award in June 2016 from Five Star Publications. Current projects include a second children’s story, Jericho Alley, which focus on the homeless and “Yellow River Pledge” (a fictional piece currently being edited). A third novel, Sanctuary Road, is currently in the works as is another children’s story.
Author Lisa Colodny has pulled it all together in her 700-page saga that starts in modern day New York City, as U.S. Marshal Devon McKenzie and NYCDetective Chris Gates are transporting a well-known prisoner along the interstate. The two have nevergotten along and are squabbling as usual when their prisoner is forcefully removed from their custody. Their vehicle is wrecked and the officers are injured. This all happens on a night when the Aurora Borealis is at its brightest. Devon and Chris spend the next three days surviving in an isolated wilderness area. When they come upon a farmer, they discover they’ve been transported back in time to 1869 Nebraska. Devon and Chris are assumed to be a married couple, so they play along until they can figure out how to getback to their own time. Three months pass and the two fall in love, but will they spend the rest of their lives in the past – or will they make it home –with their romance intact? Travel back with them to The Town Time Forgot.