Being about half a Celt (Irish, Scottish, and Welsh ancestry), I’ve always been fascinated by Celtic culture and the druids; a religion based in nature is badly needed in our modern world. (The druid practice of human sacrifice is greatly debated by scholars. Many believe they only resorted to it when they came under extreme threat from the Saxon invasion.) Because of my fascination with the Celts, in my Kronciles of Korthlundia series, I looked to ancient Celtic traditions for inspiration. While I changed and adapted them for my purposes and by no means claim to have remained faithful to ancient tradition or their modern pagan adaptions, all the holidays in Korthlundia have a Celtic origin. Korthlundia has four major holidays throughout the year–Litha, Mabon, Solstice, and Ostara. Today, I start a series of posts dedicated to explaining how holidays are celebrated in Korthlundia, starting with Litha. To learn more about how the ancient Celts or modern pagans celebrate these holidays, this is a good site: Celtic Holidays.
Litha
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.
The Quest Continues To Stop A Killer “Curse!”
Ellis has always loved staging adventures in her head before going to sleep each night. When she was twelve, she started putting these adventures on paper.
the desperate queen forges a risky alliance with the ruthless and cunning Mage Corey. Determined to defend her son’s claim to the throne of the Mage King, Eolyn prepares for her last and greatest battle, this time against her own sisters in magic.
where she is part of the biology faculty at Avila University. An ecologist by vocation, Karin has wandered forests and wildlands all her life. Her pastimes include camping, hiking, music, and flamenco dance. In addition to THE SILVER WEB trilogy, Karin has published short stories in World Jumping, Zahir, Adventures for the Average Woman, and 69 Flavors of Paranoia. She is a recipient of the Spring 2011 Andrews Forest Writer’s Residency.
When Sean Frazier was growing up, he never really paid attention to the written word. It wasn’t necessarily something he enjoyed at the time. Once he graduated college, however, the spark ignited and he decided to write something and try to get it published.
Exiled from his homeland, Cor’il Silvermoon was left to roam without direction. Bestowed with unimaginable power by the awakening Threads, he struggles to understand his purpose.