Rachel Starr Thomson

Laura Fabiani of the Library of Clean Reads posted her review of Worlds Unseen yesterday. Here’s my favourite paragraph:

From the onset, the author easily transported me to a medieval-like world, where I could feel the dampness of the fog at night, smell the earthiness of the underground tunnels, and hear the flapping wings and the eerie cawing of the black ravens enough to conjure images of Hitchcock’s The Birds. The imagery is captivating, and I was plunged into the scenes, walking with them through the dense, thick forest or running through musty, dark tunnels. The action is well paced and vivid as Maggie and Nicolas live through heart-stopping and heart-warming experiences together.

Laura had other good things to say, as well as some critiques.  Check out the review, and be sure to leave her a comment to let her know you’ve come by :). She’s a terrific reviewer — I’d encourage you to take a look at some of her other reviews as well.

Many of my writer friends talk about characters who get away from them, running amuck all over the pages doing whatever crazy things come into their heads while their authors scramble to keep up and undo their characters’ messes. I have never been able to relate. My characters mostly do what they’re supposed to. Yes, they influence the direction of the story, but they generally do so before I start writing, not halfway through the book.

Then there’s Maggie. If you’ve read Worlds Unseen, you know that Maggie is soft-spoken, courageous but not bold, gentle and sweet — not at all the sort of girl who goes around wreaking havoc. And yet, when I originally wrote that one scene (in the house, with the wraith and the song), she knocked me for such a loop that I had to stop writing for two days so I could figure out what had just happened.

Well, now I’m writing The Advent, and Maggie features a bit more heavily again than she did in Burning Light. And I like her in this book; I think she’s lovely, and every time she’s in a scene it makes that scene feel more like home to me. (It’s fascinating writing about these characters after so many years — I finished Light in 2002, so it’s been a while.) But the other night I was writing away, trying to finish up my day’s five pages and still get to bed at a decent hour, when she did it again.

Changed everything, if only for a moment.

This time she hasn’t thrown the plot off-kilter, and because she sang in Worlds I understand her better now. But I’m — maybe grateful is the word — to be writing a character with so much life in her.

So here’s to you, my lovely Maggie. You’re making this a marvelous ride.

(If you’d like to read Worlds Unseen, and you haven’t yet, you can download it as a free PDF from this page.)

I received an e-mail from Rael, blog and book reader, when she finished reading Worlds Unseen a few days ago. It really encouraged me, so I thought I’d share part of it. If you’d like to read Worlds Unseen, it’s available for purchase or free download here.

Oh my goodness.  When you put Worlds Unseen on your site as a free download, you certainly knew what you were doing.  ;-)  I am so hooked.  Now I need to decide if my budget can handle hard copies of it and Burning Light.  I definitely want these to keep, in tangible papery form!

Thank you for this story!  I am in rather a state of shock (the end-of-an-amazing-read sort of shock), and it might be a while before I can write a coherent review for my blog.  But for the moment, I mainly wanted to thank you for your well-told story of life and death and tears and growing up, of ashes and newness and the bright, starry thread, of monsters and scoundrels and everyday heroes stepping bravely into battle against evil.  Thank you for a picture of worlds unseen, of faith that hopes and believes when the night is dark.  Of a King who is coming.  Oh, I loved it!

To which I say, thank you :). Readers like you are the reason I write and publish.

Yesterday I bought a copy of Cyndere’s Midnight, happy and excited because I rarely get to buy novels — especially ones I’m really excited about. I actually bought two books, because Cyndere’s Midnight is the sequel to Auralia’s Colors, and you can’t read a sequel first. At least I can’t.

Consequently, I’m halfway through Auralia’s Colors and really wishing I had more time to read. Jeffrey Overstreet is a good writer. I had read only two chapters when I realized that Auralia’s Colors was one of those books that leaves you with memories, with a feeling that you’ve been somewhere else for a while.

I’m currently critiquing a fantasy novel, and I’ve written several of my own, so after I’d put the book down I got to thinking about how authors do that. How do you create a world so real that readers end up immersed in it? Worlds are revealed through so many things — through their creatures, their cultures, their vocabularies, their landscapes. Fantasy writers know that if you’re going to transport your readers to another world, you have to know all about that world first. But even then, it’s not that simple. You also need to skillfully SHOW that world without revealing yourself as the man behind the curtain.

There are basically two kinds of fantasy story in the world, which I’ll call “portal fantasies” and “complete fantasies.” Portal fantasies involve people from one world (usually ours) being transported into another world (Narnia, famously), and when you write one of these, it’s not too hard to immerse your readers in the fantasy world. This is because Narnia is just as new to the Pevensies as it is to us, so naturally characters will explain things, and the unfamiliar bits will be commented on, and history can be retold and common knowledge reiterated without anybody crying “Foul!”

Complete fantasies, exemplified by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, are different. They’re harder to write, because the characters must seem perfectly comfortable and at home in their world, but at the same time, your readers who are NOT comfortable and at home there must be able to follow along.

In this first chapter of Auralia’s Colors, two thieves discover a baby dripping with riverwater. The conversation that follows is slightly bewildering, but it’s as drenched in this fantasy world as the baby is drenched in the river, and it stays just anchored enough in things and concepts familiar to us to help us follow along. It also masterfully reveals much about the geography, history, and superstitions of this world. Before the book is through, we’ll have come to understand what this place is and who these  people are, and their voices will echo in our heads always.

“Now don’t you get it in your head to leave me here with this orphan,” Krawg called, “or I’ll rip that patch off your dead eye!”

“Have ya thought  . . .” Warney paused, turned, and clasped his head with both hands, as if trying to stretch his mind to accommodate a significant thought. “Has it occurred to ya that . . . Do ya think . . .”

“Speak, you rangy crook!”

“Oh ballyworms, Krawg! What if she’s a Northchild?”

Krawg stumbled back a step and narrowed his eyes at the infant.

The tailtwitcher, the crowd, and even the river seemed to quiet at Warney’s question.

But Krawg at last shook off worry. “Don’t shovel that vawn pile my way, Warney. You been eatin’ too much of Yawny’s stew, and your dreams are gettin’ to you. Only crazies think Northchildren are actual. There’s no such thing.”

They watched the baby’s hands sculpt shapes in the air.

“And anyway,” Krawg continued, glancing northward at the sky purpling over the jagged mountains of the Forbidding Wall, “everybody knows Northchildren are taller, and they drape blankets over themselves.”

In my own Worlds Unseen, you might say I cheated a bit. The Seventh World is first of all very much like ours, right down to its geography, which is loosely based on Europe. And even though Maggie has grown up in her world, its true history and entire spiritual dimension are foreign to her. When they come crashing into her reality, she has to learn right along with the readers.

How about you, writers? What tricks and tips have you learned to help immerse readers in your worlds? When have you felt most successful at it? What authors do you feel have done this best? For that matter, what fantasy worlds are you carrying around memories of?

Tomorrow, the last day of the February CSFF tour, I will actually blog about Cyndere’s Midnight. Stay tuned :).

Maggie Sheffield has just begun her adventure when she meets Nicolas Fisher and his black bear. Nicolas takes her to an inn called the House of Dreams, where they quickly come face-to-face with a living nightmare. I love to write description, and the House of Dreams has always been a particularly vivid scene to me.

Nicolas and Bear took Maggie to a dilapidated, two-story establishment with a sign that proclaimed it "The House of Dreams." Light poured into the street from the wide windows. Inside, the dining room was filled with happy chaos. Bear waited outside while Nicolas led Maggie in.

The brightness of the room hurt her eyes. The walls were painted with brightly coloured murals, showing fantastic, dream-like scenes. Shouting, singing, laughing people packed the room. Galcic men with small pots of ale and Gypsies in brilliantly stitched and coloured clothing sat at round tables, eyeing one another suspiciously while they drank and ate a rich smelling stew. Pipe smoke and noise mingled together and rose to the bright red ceiling.

Lost in observation, Maggie hardly noticed that Nicolas was talking to a gaudy woman wearing huge earrings and a green dress. The din of the room was overwhelming, and it took a moment for her to recognize Nicolas’s voice shouting over the cacophony.

"There’s a room upstairs for you!" Nicolas said. "Follow me!"

Nicolas and the woman weaved through the crowd. Maggie followed after them, feeling out of place with her drab brown coat and battered trunk, shyly moving through a world filled with colour and laughter and reeking with the pungent smell of ale and cheap wine.

excerpt from Worlds Unseen by Rachel Starr Thomson
Click here for a free e-copy of Worlds Unseen !

Virginia Ramsey is one of the key characters in the Seventh World Trilogy. She makes her first appearance in the passage below. This scene is special to me because it was the very first scene written in Worlds Unseen. I jotted it down on a scratchpad when I wasn’t even sure what the story would be about, and from it spun the rest of the tale.

Virginia Ramsey’s hair was a very dark brown. Most of it was on the verge of turning black, but enough of it was near to turning red to make her overall appearance very striking. Her eyes, which could not see, were green.

She spent most of her time sitting cross-legged on top of an outcrop on the side of the mountain, where she could smell the passing of the seasons and hear the birds fly by. The birds thought her a friend, and they would light on her shoulder and whisper to her. Her right hand usually rested on the head of her shaggy old deerhound, who was as deaf as she was blind.

On the side of the mountain, Virginia Ramsey heard all that she ever wished to hear. She heard wind, grass, and the songs of creation. And sometimes, on the side of the mountain, Virginia could see.

excerpt from Worlds Unseen by Rachel Starr Thomson
Click here for a free e-copy of Worlds Unseen!

I wrote an article the other day on being self-published (coming to print soon, hopefully), with an expression of joy in my readers:

“Last week a young lady sent me a picture she drew of Maggie Sheffield, the main character in my fantasy novel Worlds Unseen. My characters are alive in other people’s heads. I have succeeded.”

And that’s really one of the things I love best about publishing my own work. Here’s the picture of Maggie, drawn by the Elisabeth of this recent blog post:

I’m putting it up in the Gallery as well. Check out the rest of the fan art there! I’ve also added a couple more pictures of me to the author gallery. One of them is me with Carolyn Currey, my cousin, cohort, and co-author. We appear to be having, if not exactly the War of the Roses, then perhaps the War of the Weeds, more Properly, the Queen Anne’s Lace.

P.S. Yay, I just remembered how to put this up in better quality! Task accomplished :).

Have you ever read a story that was full of dialogue, but left you feeling like you were floating in white space? Or a book that was so full of description you couldn’t remember what was going on? Have you ever wished the action would slow down long enough to let you get to know the characters?

Stories are best when their many ingredients–dialogue, description, action, etc–are held in a delicate balance. You don’t want a story that’s too airy, too heavy, or too bland. The goal is just the right touch of spice.

For example, let’s look at a conversation from my fantasy novel Worlds Unseen. The main character, Maggie, has just discovered that her traveling companion has the unusual ability to hear things no one else can.

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“What else do you hear?” Maggie asked. “Besides dangerous voices in the dark.”

“I hear the grass grow,” Nicolas said, “and I hear the stars singing.”

“They sing?” Maggie asked.

“Yes,” Nicolas said. “I hear other things, too … sometimes I can hear what Bear is saying.”

“Bear talks.”

“Well, not exactly talks,” Nicolas said. “He feels things, and thinks things, and sometimes I hear what he means.”

“Does he speak the language of the Empire?” Maggie asked.

“No, of course not. He just feels things, and sometimes I understand them. That doesn’t make much sense to you, does it?”

“Have you always been able to understand him?” Maggie asked.

“No,” he told her. “When I was a child I would listen to rabbits and squirrels and birds, and it was hard to understand them, too. But I kept listening, and trying to understand, and one day I did. I still don’t understand everything.”

“What else can you hear?” she asked.

“When babies cry,” Nicolas said, “I know what they want before their own mothers do. Sometimes I can hear a baby talking while it’s still in its mother’s womb.”

“What do they say?” Maggie asked.

“It’s hard to understand them,” Nicolas said. “But not so hard as with the animals. Mostly they dream about the world out here. And they wonder why so many of the voices they hear are angry and worried. They dream, and they wonder, and then they go back to sleep. And when they wake up they wonder all the same things over again.”

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That’s not bad, but it’s sparse. We don’t get any sense of where these characters are, or of what they’re feeling. By adding a few spices to the dialogue, I can bring the scene more fully to life. In this scene, I chose to use facial expressions and thoughts to help my readers understand what these characters were feeling. I added a bit of background history, a campfire and some interesting shadows, and a tiny bit of body language to bring the scene to life. Here’s the result:

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Nicolas appeared in the firelight and collapsed into a cross-legged heap. The firelight glinted on the gold in his ear and traced strange shadows on his face.

Maggie rolled over and lifted herself onto her elbows so she could look across the fire at her half-wild friend.

“What else do you hear?” Maggie asked. “Besides dangerous voices in the dark.”

“I hear the grass grow,” Nicolas said slowly, “and I hear the stars singing.”

“They sing?” Maggie asked.

Nicolas nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I hear other things, too … sometimes I can hear what Bear is saying.”

Maggie looked up at the hulking form just beyond the glow of the campfire. “Bear talks,” she said flatly.

“Well, not exactly talks,” Nicolas said. “He feels things, and thinks things, and sometimes I hear what he means.”

“Does he speak the language of the Empire?” Maggie asked, feeling ridiculous but unable to stop herself from asking.

“No, of course not,” Nicolas said. “He just feels things, and sometimes I understand them.” Nicolas laughed a little nervously. “That doesn’t make much sense to you, does it?”

Maggie ignored the question and asked another of her own. “Have you always been able to understand him?”

“No,” he told her. “When I was a child I would listen to rabbits and squirrels and birds, and it was hard to understand them, too. But I kept listening, and trying to understand, and one day I did. I still don’t understand everything.”

Maggie felt herself drawn to the strange young man across from her. It was fascinating, what he was saying, perhaps absurd. Yet she believed him.

“What else can you hear?” she asked, leaning forward with her chin resting in her hand.

Nicolas’s eyes met hers. How many people had he ever spoken to like this? Who, in all his life, would ever have believed him? Even the Gypsies thought he was mad when he spoke of hearing, although they were not so quick to dismiss it the way others did. They wondered sometimes, if madness was not a gift.

“When babies cry,” Nicolas said, “I know what they want before their own mothers do. Sometimes I can hear a baby talking while it’s still in its mother’s womb.”

“What do they say?” Maggie asked, a smile of wonder beginning to tug at her own face.

“It’s hard to understand them,” Nicolas said. “But not so hard as with the animals. Mostly they dream about the world out here. And they wonder why so many of the voices they hear are angry and worried. They dream, and they wonder, and then they go back to sleep. And when they wake up they wonder all the same things over again.”

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As you can see, a good mix of elements can bring characters, a conversation, or an entire scene to life. I hope you’ve enjoyed this writing tip! If you’d like to read more of Worlds Unseen, be sure to check out the free Ebook Edition at www.littledozen.com/worlds.html .

With the teaching semester behind me, I am really and truly settling in for this summer’s work. Chief on my list of projects? Seriously revise Burning Light, the sequel to Worlds Unseen. I want it ready for release in December.

A little history: I wrote Worlds Unseen in 2001. Almost immediately thereafter, I sat down and banged out Burning Light. It took maybe three months. It was a milestone for me: the best thing I’d written to date and my favourite.

I liked it so much that I never really wrote a proper second draft. So while Worlds went through four incarnations before it saw print, Burning Light has never really changed. The time has come.

Over the past few months I’ve outlined each chapter in Burning Light, summarizing every scene and marking places where changes should be made. I’ve flagged all the major plot lines that need work. I’ve made lists (and checked ‘em twice).

And what am I doing now? Blogging, obviously. The adventure is about to begin, if only the author will quit procrastinating.

“The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the LORD hath made even both of them.”

Proverbs 20:9

I wrote the fantasy novel Worlds Unseen six years ago. At the time, I had some loose ideas about what it could say–besides telling a good story, which was my first priority! It touched on some of my beliefs about life: the spiritual realities behind the physical world, nature’s allegiance to its Creator, and the way most of us live our lives ignorant of the world’s true history and what it means to us today.

Worlds is primarily about Maggie Sheffield, a very normal young woman who stumbles into the spiritual realities of her world by accident and must learn to deal with them. However, equally important to the story are the two Gifted: a wanderer named Nicolas Fisher, who hears things no one else can, and Virginia Ramsey, a blind girl who sees visions.

Proverbs 20:9 made me think of these two immediately: “The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the LORD hath made even both of them.” In Worlds Unseen, Virginia and Nicolas are not only Gifted, they are gifts–gifts to the world. Those who believe what the Gifted tell them will arrive at the truth about life, and with it, real freedom.

In the story, though, Nicolas and Virginia are both outcasts. One wrestles to accept his own gift and thus refuses to live among people; the other is feared and ultimately betrayed because of the truth she sees. It’s not easy to be the only people in all the world who understand what life really is–especially when the truth shatters everything we have believed.

Nicolas and Virginia aren’t without parallel in our own world. They are my fantasy version of the Old Testament prophets, of the New Testament apostles and saints, of everyone to whom God has given clarity of vision and ears that understand. Often, these real-world Gifted were despised and rejected, driven out and even crucified. Isaiah was one such Gifted man. David, king and psalmist, was another. Mary; Anna; the Apostle Paul. John the Beloved, witnessing the Revelation while in exile on the Isle of Patmos, was one. And ever since their days, God has not ceased to send to us people who see and hear, and who will open our own understanding if we let them.

Perhaps you can think of someone who has filled this role in your life. A parent; a sister; a friend; a teacher. A singer or poet. Such people do not create or renew truth. They simply show us, through scripture and by the Spirit of God, what has always been there.

Perhaps, in the darkness of the world around, the one who sees and hears is you.

Like my fictional Seventh World, the people around us live in darkness and deception. We who have the Word of God at our fingertips and the Spirit of God in our hearts are in this world, not just as passers-by, but as gifts. In prayer, Jesus said of His disciples, “As thou [Father] hath sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world” (John 17:18).

You, believer in Jesus, are in this world not as an accident and not as a judge. You are here as a gift, bearing the gifts of sight, hearing, and true reality.

May we use these gifts well: to bring into the darkness a burning, holy light.

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Worlds Unseen is available for purchase or as a free ebook from www.LittleDozen.com. It’s sequel, Burning Light, is due out December 2008.

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This post is cross-posted from Peculiar, where I blog each week on scripture and walking with God.