I’m thrilled to announce that book two of the Terra Trilogy is now available in e-book and the print publication will be available in May.
In the years after the ‘Big One’ destroyed most of human civilization, a lone city perches precariously on the Pacific Northwest coast of North America.
When nomadic marauders attack the Independent city of Couver, seventeen-year-old Terra Vargas must choose: use her Cartos powers to protect her city, or rescue her mother from the marauders’ camp. But as her control over the earth power erodes, so does her ability to choose wisely.
Stay or go?
Either way, there will be a horrible price to pay.
I’m thrilled to be able to post the cover of the sequel to TERRA Incognita. Again the fantastic artistry of Cristina Otero provides the model of Terra coming apart from her power. The book will be available April 2012.
Rhumb Lines, Novel Writing and How to get from point A to Point B
Dhow in coastal waters off Zanzibar Island (1994) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m in the midst of a year of writing sequels. Actually it may take two or three years to get through all the sequels needed for my current novels. As I have already mentioned on this blog I’ve found writing my first sequel a bit of a challenge even though I knew where I was going. It seemed that I kept straying off course.
This puts me in mind of the challenges mariners had back before Gerard Mercator created his famous projection in 1569. A projection is a way of taking three dimensional landforms off of a globe and placing them onto a flat surface (a map) while retaining relative conformity of shape and relation between the landforms. What Mercator did was take meridians of latitude and longitude and make them all aim straight north-south or east-west creating 90 degree angles at each intersection. Sure it expanded the landforms closer to the poles, but it also gave mariners a means of plotting courses over long distances.
Picture this overlaid on top of a typical world map with latitude and longitude laid out.
You see, prior to Mercator, mariners shared two fears – bad weather and getting lost. (Actually I share their fears, the latter most particularly when I’m writing.) In the years before Mercator’s projection, mariners had generally confined their sailing to the Mediterranean and coastal waters. The transatlantic voyages to America were done by the stars, but there were no helpful portolano (mariners maps using compass roses to show sailing routes) of the great oceans. Mercator’s grid made sailing the open ocean as easy as sailing the coasts because it gave sailors a means to chart a straight line (a rhumb line) from Point A to Point B across the ocean. From this they could plan their headings and make their voyages.
Of course sailing the distance from Cape Town to New York is about as huge an endeavor as writing a novel (or a sequel) from page one to the end and neither route actually takes a straight line. Sailors travelling that distance recognized that they didn’t travel a flat earth, they travelled a globe and so they added to their calculations, the curve of a great circle that was the largest circle they could draw through a sphere and this route showed the actual shortest distance between two points. Sailors then chose their routes by drawing straight chart lines between the great circle and rhumb line that allowed them to approximate the great circle along the route.
Tall ship off Portuguese coast (2006) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
This seems a lot like the process I use when I’m writing. I know where I start and I know where I want to finish (most of the time). The writing process then becomes one of deciding how far to travel from the rhumb line (the plot or the backbone) of the story, for it seems to me that novels have great circles, too. These are the themes you are writing about and you don’t want to allow your plots to take over, so that your story is nothing but plot, but neither do you want your subplots to take you so far out of your way that the story no longer fits within its themes. And that’s where sailing and writing diverge in their process. Sailors use the great circles and rhumb lines to plot their course and they follow it from Point A to Point B. A writer, on the other hand, will use them to plan their novel or their series of novels, but also to look behind and check whether they have wandered too far off course to get to their final destination. This is the challenge in sequels: viewing the second or third book as just one of the charted lines between the rhumb and the great circle, building its way to the ultimate end of the voyage.
Vallon Drake continues her investigation into a dead girl where no girl should be. In a school with too many students with too much power, continuing the investigation might just lead to a second body: Vallon’s.
Free Fiction this week is part one of Pretense for Murder.
A dead girl, an empty phone booth where one shouldn’t be and a school full of suspects with too many unusual powers.
When student, Vallon Drake discovers the dead body of a girl and a British phone booth standing outside the American Geological Survey Preparatory Academy, she knows someone with special power committed the murder. Heck, her school exists to teach students with the talent to rewrite the landscape as future special agents. But while Vallon wants to solve the crime, everyone else wants to cover it up. Trust Vallon to break the rules to take the investigation on—even when the cost of doing so might be her life.
I’m sitting here watching the snow fall on the western edge of North America and contemplating how with the spread of people over all of the continents leaves no mysterious ‘promised land’ to cling to. As I’ve written in previous posts, in earlier centuries people sought Prestor John or mysterious islands. They sought an easy route to India and the Northwest Passage. All of these were, over time, debunked, but in our restless human need to seek, we replaced those distant vistas with something else. At least in the past we did.
Old Ranch, Yukon (2009) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
The exploration of North America helped with that. As the surveyors moved west they opened up awareness of a great mysterious place called the American West. The acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase brought Lewis and Clark’s expedition and knowledge that the western mountains were more than one range and a new awareness of how broad the continent was. While they set to rest the final hopes that the Columbia and Missouri Rivers might connect and form a Passage to India, tales of what they had seen brought a new hope that, if not a promised land, there might at least be a Garden of the World in the rich lands westward.
Channel at edge of Yukon River (2009) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
Lewis and Clark were followed by the Topographical Engineers – a small elite branch of the army, whose most famous member was John Charles Fremont. Fremont took with him a red-faced German topographer named Charles Preuss. With Kit Carson, these three set out to map the trail west, determine where to establish outposts, and scout passes over the mountains. While the results of their first venture were of only limited value for its maps, Fremont’s dramatic escapades of planting a US flag on a high peak to demonstrate the national resolve of ‘America strong and triumphant from sea to sea’, and his colorful journal, apparently launched many settlers westward. Subsequent Fremont/Preuss ventures resulted in some of the best maps of the day, extending knowledge down into California and erasing as much fanciful cartographic information, as it established. Preuss’s expertise in creating maps led not only to cartographic information, but also to the first ‘road map’ to the west.
Other explorers like John Wesley Powell, extended our knowledge of areas around the Grand Canyon as they travelled down the Green River and into the cataracts of the Colorado River within the Canyon. His further expeditions surveyed much of southern Utah from the Colorado to the Nevada line. Powell’s work also resulted in warnings about the old methods of agricultural farming. The warnings weren’t heeded and it took the dust bowl dirty thirties to prove him right. But Powell gave America an even greater legacy. He lobbied for, and finally achieved, the creation of the United States Geological Survey, which continues to this day to provide detailed maps of the country.
Old Ranch, Yukon River (2009) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
The only problem with this is that detailed maps removed the mystery and it seems to me it impacted the human psyche. From America, explorers joined the Europeans in the further exploration of our planet. We delve into the depths of the ocean, the frigid wastes of the Arctic, and into the humid breadth of the Amazon Rain Forest. But even those areas are being explored and the race for space seems to have died. It makes me wonder if part of the anger and anxiety we see in our culture isn’t partially due to the fact we have no new vista to call us and no new ‘promised land’ to bring out our best.
Two new short stories are now available on Amazon.com and Smashwords.
A small child, a string of pearls and a colony of swans converge in this short story of family life gone wrong. In Bella’s world of beautiful swans, her mother is the most beautiful creature of all. But swans abandon Bella every year and now her mother may abandon her, too. In a world filled with magic, what’s a child to do?
Lost in Rajasthan, the home of camels, hevalis, ornate men’s turbans and women draped in mirror-embossed saris, freelance journalist, Lena, must deal with strange customs and two men who profess to love her. Choosing the right path can be as convoluted as the twists on a Rajasthani turban.
In the years after the ‘Big One’ destroyed most of human civilization, a lone city perches precariously on the Pacific Northwest coast of North America.
