A “Letter from Namora” video, featuring Galvo Dendraikas, one of Sostavi’s political movers and shakers.
Read the original Letter from the Council
To find out more about Fourteen Stones, and get your own copy, please visit the book’s page. If you’d like regular updates from the blog, please consider subscribing. As always, thank you for visiting!
How do you stay motivated on a long-haul project? I’m working on this a lot lately during the revision process on my third novel.
I’m one of those (maybe annoying) writers who usually does okay with motivation, at least when I’m caught up in a project. (Between projects is a totally different story. I get “mean” when I’m not working on something, but I’m no good at sitting down and tooling around and seeing what happens. I need a plan, an in.) When a project is in the works, I have trouble keeping some level of life balance, because I usually don’t want to do much of anything else.
This third book, Line Magic, was the first one I started without the benefit of months or years of brainstorming and world-building. The whole process was about seeing what shook out as I went. The writing process took longer than usual, and the end result was a lot rougher than I usually hope for in a working draft. Revision is raising a lot of questions. What were you doing here? What’s the point of this scene? How about this whole chapter? And sometimes, Why did you think any of this was a good idea?
At the same time, something is there. Writing the draft was a fantastic adventure. That excitement is still there, even as I argue with myself over paragraphs and sentences and individual words. (It’s fun when you change a word three or four times, and then put it back to how it was in the first place.) My main character might still be my favorite character of all the ones I’ve worked with. Hanging out with him is a delight, and I remember more about why I like him every time I sit down again and stare at these knotted-up pages.
Still, it’s often a challenge to sit down again. When I know I’m going to need that extra boost to look at another oh man, what’s this stuff?? section, I’ve started using one of my favorite tricks. It’s usually part of the brainstorming process, but this time it’s helping much farther down the line.
I call it Random Life Sketching. Novels are so much fun because you can learn everything there is to know about your characters. Your protagonist might be an adult on the page, but it never hurts to know about what they were like in childhood, what kind of family they grew up in, what significant moments might have shaped them growing up. Those moments may never show up in the finished story, but they inevitably make the characters richer to write. For me, they also remind me why I like these people so much. Creating sketches that aren’t part of the finished book means there’s no pressure to make them “perfect.” It’s all about play and experimentation.
Nicky True, my protagonist in Line Magic, shaped himself as I wrote him. In the novel, he’s an adult in his mid-twenties, a visual artist with an extraordinary gift for drawing which ventures into the magical. If I had done my usual brainstorming for this book, I’d have already had a pile of sketches about what he was like as a boy, when his gifts turned up, who knew about them and when…etc. Now I’m going back and filling in those gaps in my imagination.
The novel is set (mostly) in 1945. For Random Life Sketching, I’m sending myself farther back in time. Nicky was born in the 1920s and grows up during the Great Depression. He comes from a working-class family; his father is an Irish immigrant who works in a textile factory dye house (a fun research rabbit hole). Eleven-year-old Nicky is old enough to be well aware of his parents’ worries about money, old enough to hunt for ways to help. He hasn’t reached his growth spurt yet but it’s already clear he’s going to be tall, a fact that makes his parents wonder how they’re going to keep him in decent clothes. He looks a lot like his dad, Desmond, who might have been an artist too, if he’d had other options. Nicky gets along fine with the other kids, does decently in school, doesn’t stand out in a crowd: except for his quick sensitivity to the world around him, and that remarkable gift when he sits down with pencil and paper. Sometimes he skips out of games at recess to sketch the pattern of light and shade on a sidewalk square, or the angles of rooflines across the street. It did cross my mind that the other kids might bother him about this, but Nicky is also tough and able to defend himself – so they don’t interfere, something that my once-bullied younger self much appreciates.
The sketches I’m coming up with might never end up on a published page, although one of them did turn into a full-length short story. The real gift of them is the return to experimentation and discovery. Nicky can show me what he was like as a boy, and I can take a break from wrestling with the latest what’s this stuff? part of the novel and simply appreciate this new information about a character who caught me from the beginning. I have about eighty more pages of revision to do, into the final quarter of the book. Given how long the rest of it has taken, it’s still going to be a while, but I have a feeling these sketches will help me power through.
If you’re a writer, what helps you stick with projects when they hit the long-haul, painstaking, remind-me-why-I-got-into-this stretches? Please leave a comment if you’d like.
As always, thank you for visiting the blog. If you’d like to receive automatic updates, please consider subscribing. See you next time!
A reflection on the trip to Spain that inspired Fourteen Stones. My memories of Cudillero, the real town that became Sostavi, capital city of Namora.
The first thing I feel is what I wouldn’t give to do that again. We can’t have exactly the same experience back; if Paul and I were to go to Cudillero again, or to Noia to see the castros, or any of the other places we saw in northwestern Spain, it couldn’t be exactly the same as it was in the summer of 2015. But I can’t help but think that the same magic might still be there to meet us.
Cudillero, on the coast of Asturias. That’s the place we were able to imagine spending a week in, instead of a single night. The town with its houses clustered on the slope that ran down to the harbor. They were like crystals in formation. In the morning, we walked along the narrow streets, too narrow for a car to drive, threading from one level down to the next. The houses were tiny and bright: bright whites, vivid turquoise, raspberry-pink, butter-yellow. There were window boxes overflowing with color. Each of the rooftops made of undulating terracotta tile.
Down at the harbor: the turquoise water, the smell of salt. The sea in Spain seemed wilder and lovelier than it is here, except maybe along the coast of northern Maine. The bustle of the town: shops and businesses open, the little plazas, the voices and footsteps. That morning, Paul met a Romani accordionist and the two of them improvised together, Paul on his clarinet. They had very little common language, between Paul’s English and Alex’s Gallego; my Spanish couldn’t do much to translate. But they played, skirling and dancing lines, the two instruments’ melodies weaving in the bright morning.
The taste of bread. The shops so close together, intimate as hugs. The rich yeast scent of a panadería, timeless with its baskets hanging on the walls and bread piled in bins, modern with its refrigerator offering soft drinks in bright bottles. The long golden loaf of bread with its hard crust and soft white center, poking out of a brown paper sleeve. Tearing off pieces to eat as we walked across the sunny plaza to the nearby church. The shouts of children playing soccer and the ring of the ball against ground and sneakers. The intense whiteness of the sun on white concrete. The cool darkness inside the church.
It was nothing like home. And yet it woke my imagination and gave me dreams that came to life in a story, and to a part of me, it is home. What I wouldn’t give to go back and see it again.
**
Excerpt from Fourteen Stones, chapter 14:
In the sun, Sostavi Harbor was a spread of turquoise crowded with fishing boats and the pleasure craft of the city’s wealthy. Above the water, on the hillsides, the light turned the city’s buildings into clusters of white crystals. Ribas breathed the fresh cold air off the water and remembered why coming here had been worth it. […]
When he was eighteen, he’d had to come to the coast to see for himself what Kenavi had seen, what she had gone out to meet, when she walked into the water to offer herself to the old gods. He had seen the ocean in pictures and read countless stories and texts about it, about gentle Kenavi and rebellious Klaya both, but Ribas had still had trouble imagining those “fields of water” and believing in the power and authority of the gods of sun and wind and water.
When he saw the ocean, he understood. An infinity of water stretching away to the horizon. Waves rolling in, rearing up, crashing against the sand in a heartbeat huge enough to belong to the whole world. The size and power of it all took Ribas’s breath away. He had wondered, many times, what Kenavi had actually felt on the day she decided to lay her life down. The stories all said she did it with pure courage and self-sacrifice, to earn the reward the old gods had granted her. Ribas himself had always thought she must have felt afraid, even if only a little, even if she didn’t want to admit it to herself. When he saw the ocean, when he stood on the sand and let the wind tug at his clothes and rake through his hair, he knew he had been right. She must have been afraid, but she had also given herself to that water gladly. She had walked forward into that enormity and let it swallow her. In that moment, she had felt joy. Ribas knew it because he felt it himself.
Now, after he and Maryut and Gedrin took in the harbor, they went back up into the heart of Sostavi. Shoulder-to-shoulder houses and shops lined the narrow cobblestones streets, so close together you couldn’t see daylight between them. […] Some buildings had third and even fourth floors added: you could see the join work that linked new stories to older ones, like stacking books in a pile. Houses on top of houses, weaver’s shops with grocers above, wine sellers perched above jewelers. The shade of the buildings felt like a burrow.
It was Tretdina, Third Day, which at home would have meant a quiet village square as everyone went about their usual business. Here, people seemed to have time to run in and out of shops, gather in groups to chat, stop to buy apples and roasted nuts and tea from vendors with their carts and baskets. To Ribas, it felt like market day in Lida, except the market spilled into every street.
[For more about Fourteen Stones, including purchasing info, please visit the book’s page. If you’d like to receive regular blog updates, please consider subscribing. As always, thank you for visiting!]
These days, I’ve been doing a lot of revising. Right after the New Year, I pulled out the draft of the novel I wrote last spring and summer. Taking another look at it has been teaching me a lot.
I loved writing this book. It started out as a short story that I wrote in response to a contest prompt. One of the contest’s judges commented that they thought it should be a book, and they hoped I would try writing it. I’d never based a novel on a story before (although I’m going to try it again, pretty soon), and had no outline or plans.
Jumping in and winging it, figuring out my main character and his life as I went, was hugely fun. I often put a lot of pressure on drafts. (“If you’re going to spend this much time writing, it’d better be good!”) This time, I had no expectations going in. It was all about seeing what shook out, and it was wonderful.
When I finished the draft, I was really excited. The story had taken on all kinds of layers. I adored my main character. Putting the project aside was really difficult, because I wanted to keep hanging out in that world.
Looking at it now, with a little more distance, I can see how many corners I cut. When I didn’t know what to do, I’d put something down and plow ahead. I didn’t think too hard about precision or fine-tuning. Now I’m finding entire placeholder sections, and other parts that feel like scaffolding without masonry. There’s lots of sloppy language, and lots of “clunkers,” as I call them: awkward transitions, extra verbiage to trip over.
About a third of the way through, I hit a chapter that left me thinking good lord, what a snore! As I slogged through, trying to see how to fix it, I wondered if, really, I’d come up with much of anything workable in this book at all. Maybe I’d tried to do too much with all those layers, and it was like mixing too many colors of paint: you didn’t end up with a rainbow, just a sludgy mess.
I’ve stuck with it, mainly because I do still love this character, and hanging out with him feels like solid ground underfoot. I don’t know if this story will ultimately shape up into anything that it feels right to share. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the revision now, and when it’s done, it’s probably going to go back into a folder for a while. Sometime later, I might take it out again and look at those spots where I know something still isn’t right.
With my first two books, especially To Love A Stranger, I felt a lot of pressure to finish-and-publish. What else would justify all that time? This time, it feels okay to put in these hours dickering with a puzzle. In revision, I love figuring out where the problems are and how to smooth them out. Every one of them teaches me something I can keep in mind for next time. This story took a bunch of risks, and uses some devices that maybe, ultimately, can’t work. That feels okay too. If I can’t fix them, I can still learn from them.
This experience is reminding me why, at the end of the day, I do this work even when no results are guaranteed. Storytelling always just feels right. Doing it keeps me grounded in who I am. Every project has some kind of joy in it, a motive power that keeps me coming back.
One of these days, maybe this current main character really will make his way into the world, whether in a version of this book or in some different story. That might be a while from now. Meanwhile, he makes me smile, and I’ll enjoy the time I can spend with him.
As always, thank you for visiting the blog. For automatic updates, including installments of the “Letters From” series featuring Fourteen Stones’s people, please consider subscribing!
In which Fourteen Stones‘s matriarch introduces herself. “Orchard-keeper” is only one of her titles, by no means the most important – but she will tell more.
**
My name is Pelayut Silvenis. You’ve met my elder son Ribas, who is the zhinin of our little village, Lida. He is the caretaker, so to speak, of all who live here, and many who are linked to us by threads of all kinds. In a village this size, where everyone knows everyone else, each of us has a particular place. I am the apple-grower.
In truth, my younger son Gedrin has charge of the farm now. He and his family care for the trees as well as I could; as well, in fact, as his great-great grandfather, my father’s grandfather, who first planted them, and who set each seedling into the ground as gently as an egg into a nest. That was long before I was born, but I remember my father’s stories. The orchard has been our family’s work and delight for five generations. I suspect Gedrí’s children, Raulin and Asira, will make it six.
Time often seems to leave a small place like Lida behind. In many ways, the village looks the same now as it did some forty years ago, when I was a girl coming to the eighth-day markets with my father. The square is unchanged. The Circle House, our place of worship, looks much the same as in my earliest memories; although the building behind it is much newer, built since my son’s time as zhinin. He is the reason that trainee priests now come to Lida: many want to apprentice with him. The rhythm of the village itself is perhaps a little quicker, a little busier, than it was when I was young, but the quiet current of it moves along as it always did.
That isn’t to say that nothing changes here. My memories are full of change. I don’t often speak it, especially of the darkest time when I was a young mother, but when I look back along the path of my own years, sometimes I find it hard to recognize that much-younger woman. She lived through a great deal. I could not survive those things again. I wish, for her own sake and the sake of her boys – Ribas was six then, Gedrin only a baby – that when she saw the darkness coming for them, she could have stood up to it. Protected her children. They deserved it, and so did she.
But she survived it – I survived it – and I am still here. My sons are grown, both of them good men. They are very different, so much so it’s hard to see they’re brothers. Ribas – Ribé – has always been quiet and studious, even before the dark time that shaped him so much. Gedrí is active, eager, rushing. My husband died when Gedrí was much too young to remember him, so he always looked to his older brother as a kind of second parent. Ribé and I had our hands full with him, to be sure, but he was sunlight when we found our way out of shadow.
Now I am the elder orchard-keeper, still at work, though slower than I once was. I live here on the farm with Gedrí and his family. Every spring, as I watch the trees come into fragrant bloom, I think of their strength. How firmly their deep roots grip the soil. No matter how cold and dark the winter comes down, and no matter how their beauty fades and withers with the old year, they stand strong until the sunlight comes again.
Now I will close this letter, with my thanks for lending a silver-haired woman your ear. Yours in the fellowship of the Goddess,
Pelayut Silvenis
**
[For more about Fourteen Stones, its world, and its people, visit the book’s page. Please consider subscribing to the blog to receive future letters and posts.]
I’ve been looking forward to writing this post for a long time. Yesterday, I finally got to hug my brand-new book, Fourteen Stones.
If there’s anything like the experience of seeing your own story – the one you dreamed of, sweated over, adored and fought with, and gave the best of your energy to for years at a time – seeing that story standing on its own, lifted out of your imagination and captured in ink on paper to go out into the world, I don’t know what that experience is.
In other posts, I’ve talked about what Fourteen Stones meant to me. I’ll be posting more about that again, as I try to give the book a gentle nudge along its way. For now, though, I’m celebrating.
This is my second novel. Getting to see it “in the ink” was even better than with my first book. Jax Goss and Will Thompson at The Patchwork Raven did an absolutely amazing job of realizing this dream. Every detail is beautiful: I couldn’t have asked for better.
The start-to-finish process with Fourteen Stones, from first draft to published book, took a little over seven years. Along the way, I learned that though I’d started out as a straight-up-literary, “real-world” writer, I loved to work with fantasy and magic. That’s changed the way I write, ever since. Almost everything I work on these days, from 100-word microfiction to my newest novel in progress, brings in a twist of magic somewhere.
In this profession, sometimes there isn’t much to celebrate. There’s a whole lot of rejection, and discouragement, and wondering “why did I sign myself up for this??” For me, the process of storytelling, that delightful experimenting and problem-solving, is full of joy. Sometimes, though, you really need a gift. Yesterday was that for me.
Fourteen Stones is now available for sale, too! If you’d like a copy, there are a couple of different ways to get one.
E-Copies are available on my publisher’s website, here.
Print Copies are also available on my publisher’s website, here, or:
For readers in the U.S., you can buy one directly from me. I have a small supply of them; first come, first served. 🙂 Email me at kfaatz925@yahoo.com if you’re interested!
As always, thank you for visiting the blog. If you’d like to stay updated about Fourteen Stones, upcoming book events and other events, and other news, please consider subscribing!
Join me next Monday, December 12, at 5 pm EST for a wonderful Zoom talk with my friend and colleague Dr. Julia Lee Barclay-Morton! Julia and I have both recently had books published: her hybrid collection The Mortality Shot is her first, and Fourteen Stones is my second.
Our books are very different, but Julia and I have a lot in common. Both of us came to writing “sideways,” as we call it, from other fields. We’ve gone at it in non-traditional ways; neither of us has an MFA, and we both work with indie presses and have found unique paths to publication. We’ve engaged a lot with questions and challenges relating to mental health. As middle-aged women, we’ve found ourselves navigating that tricky period in midlife where the sense of self can shift, and we run up against a real sense of our own mortality (Covid of course contributed to that a lot).
In our talk, we’ll share readings from our books, and talk about our experiences of the writing life and how our work as writers has been shaped by the other circumstances we have in common. As the publishing world continues to change, growing in some ways and contracting in others (especially with respect to traditional “big press” publishing), we think it’s important to highlight the many ways one can build a writing life, and emphasize the idea that there’s no single “right way.”
Because of that, we’re calling our talk “How Not to Get There Directly.” We think there’s a lot to be said for the roundabout, adventurous kind of path that lets you see a lot of the world. We hope you’ll join us on Zoom on Monday 12/12 at 5 pm EST!
Registration is free but required. To sign up, please click here. When you come, please also bring any questions you have; we’ll have an open-ended Q & A period at the end of the session. See you then!
I’m very excited to share a wonderful upcoming event. In a couple of weeks, on Monday December 12, at 5 pm EST, I’ll be giving a Zoom talk with my friend and colleague Dr. Julia Lee Barclay-Morton. Julia and I have both recently had books published: her hybrid collection The Mortality Shot is her first, and Fourteen Stones is my second.
Our books are very different, but Julia and I have a lot in common. Both of us came to writing “sideways,” as we call it, from other fields. We’ve gone at it in non-traditional ways; neither of us has an MFA, and we both work with indie presses and have found unique paths to publication. We’ve engaged a lot with questions and challenges relating to mental health. As middle-aged women, we’ve found ourselves navigating that tricky period in midlife where the sense of self can shift, and we run up against a real sense of our own mortality (Covid of course contributed to that a lot).
In our talk, we’ll share readings from our books, and talk about our experiences of the writing life and how our work as writers has been shaped by the other circumstances we have in common. As the publishing world continues to change, growing in some ways and contracting in others (especially with respect to traditional “big press” publishing), we think it’s important to highlight the many ways one can build a writing life, and emphasize the idea that there’s no single “right way.”
Because of that, we’re calling our talk “How Not to Get There Directly.” We think there’s a lot to be said for the roundabout, adventurous kind of path that lets you see a lot of the world. We hope you’ll join us on Zoom on Monday 12/12 at 5 pm EST!
Registration is free but required. To sign up, please click here. When you come, please also bring any questions you have; we’ll have an open-ended Q & A period at the end of the session. See you then!
This week I interrupt our Tuesday Creativity series to mention a couple of upcoming events…but the first one is also a creative boost, so that counts. 😉
Next Monday, October 24, at 6 pm EST, I’m giving a FREE workshop on Zoom: “Writing with Musical Inspiration.” This fun, no-stress workshop uses musical prompts as a springboard for writerly creativity. It also offers a taste of the multi-week workshop I offer in partnership with Tiferet Journal. If you could use a dash of inspiration, this free session is for you! Writers of all experience levels and styles welcome. To sign up and reserve your spot, click here.
2. Book event!
Monday November 14, at 6 pm EST, my friend and colleague Julia Lee Barclay-Morton and I will offer a talk on Zoom: “How Not to Get There Directly,” about our newly-published books and our unusual paths in writing and publication. Join us for readings from Julia’s fascinating collection The Mortality Shot and my brand-new Fourteen Stones, discussion about our unique paths as writers, and a Q & A session. I’ll be posting more about this event and our books as it gets closer. To sign up, click here.
Hope to see you at one or both events! Stop back next Tuesday for another installment of Tuesday Creativity. As always, thank you for visiting the blog!
A musical prompt for today. This piece is an old favorite of mine that I’ve recently started re-learning (slow process!): Frederic Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp Minor, Op. 27 no. 1, performed by Artur Rubinstein.
I first learned this piece when I was thirteen. The name “nocturne,” “night music,” gives us a sense of the atmosphere Chopin had in mind when he wrote it. Chopin often delves into storytelling in his solo piano pieces, especially the nocturnes and his four Ballades. Each of them takes the listener on a journey, exploring emotional contrasts and conjuring up all kinds of images and ideas.
I love this particular nocturne because of its excitement and drive, and the arc of tension that gradually builds to a catharsis. When I first learned it, I created my own stories to go with it, imagining that the music was the soundtrack to a movie and thinking about what the action would be.
As you listen to this piece, what does it conjure up for you?
As always, thank you for visiting the blog. See you next time!
Kris Faatz 