Technical Aspects

When one is writing a book, or especially a series of books, technical details must be attended to. In the Tellurae Aquaous series I have created such details as a currency system (based on the "stater" which is the equivalent to a penny, or a pence), and even new constellations. I thought my readers might be interested to hear the "legends" behind some of the constellations:

Yorien: the wandering warrior, unjustly cast out from his home and forced to wander the desolate plains of the night sky alone, with only his sword and a broken shield. He is said to be the protector of the innocent.

Chareele: the fair princess who fell in love with Yorien. But alas, he did not love her in return, for her love was kept secret even from him. Eventually her love was discovered by her enemies, for her heart shone in her eyes. She was banished from the kingdom and made to walk the nighttime sky as well, but upon the opposite horizon from her love and forever facing in the opposite direction. However, the brightest star in the sky is that of Chareele’s heart, and the purity of her love shames the blind eye of Yorien.

The Gryphon: with outspread wings, the gryphon is a symbol of courage and daring, he follows Yorien on every quest, but far enough behind so that Yorien never knows or sees who it is that gives him aid.

Wyvyrn: the long, powerful king of all dragons flies through the night at the top of the sky. He is the symbol of nobility and magic, both of which are now at best difficult to find in the world.

Artairus: The constellation named in honor of the great king Artair. When that King among kings passed into the shadow realm, his people named a group of stars after the great man who had led his people in peace. His is a constellation of seven stars, six forming a half circle, and one lone star centered beneath them, symbolizing the Great King as ruler over the six main powers of Tellurae Aquaous. (Llycaelon, Aom-igh, Effoin-Ebedd, Endalia, Kallayohm, and Yochathain)

Ethalon: The eagle, the symbol of pride and nobility, flies across the southern part of the sky

Alianna: A unicorn, the symbol of beauty and love, appears in the sky above Chareele’s head, protecting her.

What I Write/Why I Write

I wonder why my words
Never seem to stay
Exactly how I mean them
But change from day to day.

I write what I feel
Deep down inside of me,
Using my pen
Setting my emotions free.

I write what I see
In the world around
People I meet
Their stories abound.

I write to remember
Feelings I’ve felt,
Struggling to record
Hands that I’ve been dealt.

I write to fascinate
To evoke emotion,
I write to create:
Express fantastic notions.

I write to reveal
The deepest part of me
Thoughts, dreams, ideals
Helping others see.

I offer only insights
To try and leave you thoughtful
And perhaps to shed some light
Upon this darkening world.

And so, dear reader,
I give my words to you
Do with them what you will
Be harsh not in your view.

Names

One of the most frequently asked questions I come up against as an author is: "How do you come up with names for your characters?"

There are a number of factors that have to come into consideration for a character's name.
First of all is the question of meaning. I like for a character's name to have some sort of meaning that correlates to something in that character's personality. I have two invaluable resources for coming up with names, an old, battered baby name book, and the babynamesworld website.

Second, there is the sound of the name.

Third is spelling, fantasy characters can't be named mundane things such as "Bill" or "George"... however, a mundane-seeming name can be spiced up merely by re-thinking the spelling; thus, "George" becomes "Jorge", "Jeff" becomes "Geoff", etc.
If I don't like the way one name looks or sounds, I might even combine two or more names to create something new. For example, I liked both "Katrina" and "Katelyn", but neither one seemed quite right for a character. I combined the two and voila! "Kaitryn" was born.

If the character is a dragon or some other fantasy creature, the names become easier because I can just make them up. These names tend to pop into my head quite easily for some reason. Dragons need strong sounding names with lots of syllables. Gryphons have beaks and therefore their names need to have lots of hard sounds and few liquid sounds. Their names are more abrupt and tend to end with a "k" sound. Unicorns and Pegasus need names that roll off the tongue with lots of "l's", "w's" and "r's".

For countries and other things that need to be named, or in times of great frustration, I tend to swipe my fingers across the keyboard several times and then search the results for any interesting sounds that could be the beginning of an idea for a name: thus were "seheowks" named. The benefit to this method is that if no interesting ideas spring to life from the haphazard assortment of letters that come up on the screen, at the very least I get the satisfaction of whacking on the keyboard for a while. :-)

How it all began

Hello and welcome to my new blog. I am pleased to see you here. I hope to update and change the content of this blog often, but to begin with I thought I'd just introduce myself. I am a recently published author of two fantasy fiction novels entitled The Dragon's Eye and Dawn of the Dragon's Eye.

This blog is going to be a place where I post information about my books, excerpts of my latests works, and examples of my writing in general.

To begin with, let me tell you the story of how I was encouraged to begin the writing adventure that has become the Tellurae Aquaous Series:

I have been a lover of books my whole life. It started when I was just a baby and my mom read the entire "Little House on the Prairie" series to me. It continued with such titles as "The Chronicles of Narnia," "A Wrinkle in Time," "The Hobbit," "The Lord of the Rings," "The Cooper Family Adventures," "Hank the Cowdog," "The Wind in the Willows," "Lad: A Dog," and many more as my father made it a habit to read out loud to my siblings and me each night before bed. It continued as I astounded some of my high school teachers with the speed at which I devoured books they gave me. In high school I turned from the Young Adult section and found the Star Wars books, the Wheel of Time books, The Deathgate Cycle, and more. It continued to develop into a love for writing as I took every creative writing class they offered in high school and college, and it came to fruition when my dad proposed a challenge to me one summer:

"If you want to be a writer, you should be writing," he told me.
I know it doesn't seem like a novel idea (pun intended) but it seemed that way at the time.
"I want an adventure tale to read to Grant and Evan and Brittany." (those are my younger brothers and sister)
I wanted to tell him that there were dozens of good adventure tales at the library; even though I knew what he meant... it was just that the idea of writing a whole book was so daunting, but I decided to let him finish.
"I want ten pages a day."
TEN PAGES A DAY!?!?!?!?!?
"I'll pay you a dollar per page, and an extra thousand dollars if you finish it by the end of the summer."
Ten pages a day... if I write five days a week for 9 weeks that's roughly 450 pages... can I do it? really?

And thus, my new career as a serious author began. I wandered up to the computer room and pulled out all my old creative writing pieces until I found a journal entry that caught my attention.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

This morning before school I walked out on my porch as the sun rose, it was... amazing. The fog was stretching up to the sky, the sun shone through the fog casting an iridescent, almost unreal, fantasy type setting. The whole sky seemed to glow in a hazy orange hue, especially in the eastern part of the horizon.

There was a lot of fog rising up from the pond, so much so that I could not see the actual pond; just a vague outline of what could have been a wide, deep chasm. With the sun shining reddish-orange through the thick fog as it lifted, fairylike, off the pond, I could almost imagine that I was seeing the entrance to a dragon's lair. The fog, of course, was not fog at all; it was the steamy breath of the slumbering monster that lay within the unknown depths of the hazily outlined cavern.

The fog, if fog it was, was tinged with a fiery color and made the possibility of a dragon seem that much more real. I felt, as if by stepping out of my house this morning, that I had passed through another door entirely, and ended up somewhere completely different from my intended destination.

A shadow seemed to fall across the cavern and I could picture the dragon, rising up, fierce and powerful like the sun, out of the morning fog, and flying overhead: a blazing beast of light over the whole land. Then the fog cleared, the terrifying cavern became once again the idyllic, serene pond that I know so well. The sky turned its normal, clear blue, and the dragon, if dragon it was, became the fiery morning sun, content to travel through the sky, waiting for the time when he might rise again to meet the morning.

Thus "The Dragon's Eye" was born.