We only have to get the files copyrighted, and up.
For those who’d like to know. there’s been a little change in Rusalka, a greater change in Chernevog, and a massive change in Yvgenie—in the latter, I’ve rewritten it line by line: nothing’s left untouched.
This is because, well, between multiple parental illnesses, publisher deaths–2–and things too sad to mention—I wasn’t with it. And then my publishers went into meltdown.
I had a vision of these books—I loved these books. But—at the end, I turned them in as less than they could be because I had to survive. And my publishers at the time—don’t ask. I was very glad just to survive, but then the distributors started into warfare with my books as the centerpiece of their accusations.
Don’t ask. But these are what I wanted them to be. ‘Nuff said.
If you’ve ever wondered what I meant, if you’ve ever wondered about the ancient world, if you’ve never walked in a forest alone, if you’ve never wished for the impossible, or wondered if it was a good wish—skip these books; otherwise, read these, and think better of me than what you read the last time.
And spread the word among your friends.
I have walked by myself in several forests and been mesmerized by age. I know that the world is still full of mysteries and wonders. Years ago in Wales I kept hearing the refrain of an Al Stewart song running through my mind as I stood in an Iron Age hillfort– “down the legions of years, the invaders have taken this land and bent you to their will. And the memories fade of the ancients and all that they had, though the magic lingers ’round you still.” We need the wild lands and the wisp of the old ways. I enjoyed these books the first go around (and the 2nd and 3rd times), and like Faery Moon, I can’t wait!
I live in an area of glacial moraine and secondary growth forest. In places there is living rock with scars from the glaciers. There is something, that I can’t really verbalize, about touching rock from another time.
Congratulations on completing Protector! I look forward to its publication.
I assume Peacemaker is another Bren novel?
I’m looking forward to these – I am glad you managed to put your vision on paper.
And I’ve been thinking about you a lot as I’ve started my new WIP, about finding the courage to trust readers to follow a story with three-gendered lizards and their associated pronouns, to throw them deep into the story and let them swim.
@Kirk, yes, it is.
@GK, go for it. Start familiar and add strange slowly.
@RR and SC—thanks!
Forests? Out here on the flatlands? But seriously folks, I did spend almost a year in Monterey, CA, in a very enchanting forest, with a view of the bay — studying Russian, no less. I got Rusalka when it first came out but something side-tracked me from reading it, and I never got the other two. Worked out for the best, as far as I’m concerned, since now I can meet them as you intended them to be. Funds have been allocated, and the Kindle Fire has a full charge.
he Sunken Forest on Fire Island – before they built the bridge(I haven’t dared to go back) was incredible. We hiked down the ocean beach from a couple of villages away. Coming to the top of the second line of dunes there was a line of what looked like small shrubs visible beyond the third dune line. Got over the third dune and kept going down. And down. The trees were huge ancient hollies – primordial. And the silence after the ocean was as if we had fallen into another universe.
If you get the chance, ever, to go out to the Olympic Peninsula—pretty well a 2 day trip out from Seattle, car a must—there’s a place called the Hoh Rainforest. On the one hand you have the sea…and on the continent-facing side you have the Olympics, which are snowcovered; and then you have the little towns, even gas stations offering oysters. There are some hardscrabble towns, no fancy dining in most places, but some nice little cafes. And then there’s the lodges, set within view of the Olympics. http://www.wallpaperbydesign.com/wp-content/gallery/ipad-nature/hoh-rainforest.jpg And the Hoh Rainforest. Do not wear your good clothes. It’s constantly wet. It drips. But take your camera. Not to mention the many trails above Seattle, in the Cascades. But be careful if you take one. These are mountain forests and there are dropoffs.
I must say, however, that the forests that have a permanent place in my memory are those of Eastern Oklahoma. People think wheat fields and oil wells when they think of Oklahoma, but south of Tulsa, and on down toward the lakes, the woods take over, tangled woods. You can tell a forest where deer graze—but not enough deer have grazed in these. They lost an elephant in southern Oklahoma…for quite a while. He’d escaped, and they kept getting reports—but he’d duck back into the woods and they had a merry time catching him. People began to wonder how he was going to stand the winter. They did get him back before the weather turned.
The earth there is red, and deep. Streams cut courses deep as a man is tall. Grapevine grows in woody long streamers…good for swinging on. The trees are mostly oak and hickory, osage orange, cottonwoods, locust— those sort, leggy and tall, except the blackjack oaks, which can make a thicket a horse can’t get through. The trails are animal-made, many of them, and can play out on you unexpectedly, by some burrow, and leave you wondering did you miss a connection somewhere…the streams wander, and the trees close in, and if you don’t look back occasionally to record some landmarks from *both* directions, you can get very, very lost when you turn around and try to find your way through what looks very different from this direction. People can indeed, get quite scarily lost in a few acres of woods, unable to see anything but trees all about, and no paths that go anywhere a human being would be looking for.
I took the trip from Hoquiam to Port Angeles back in the early 70’s. It’s sort-of off the beaten track for tourists, so there weren’t many “amenities”. I finally had to give up looking for a town, a restaurant, and stop in a roadside tavern that offered smoked salmon. Got a chunk and gnawed on that all afternoon. Did walk through the rainforest. Great place for a fern fancier.
My dad’s family’s farm is in the heart of the Appalachians near Cumberland Gap and the Old Martin’s Station. When I was a boy and young man, and we’d go there to visit, you could step out the doors of the farmhouse and look into the smoky blue mist that gave the mountains their names, rippling over the lush greens of the forest and farmlands, up and down the hills, valleys, by the spring above, by the sinkhole and caves nearby, and across the one road through the area. You could wake up and smell clean air, crisp or mellow, with the smells of woods and earth and water and smoke. It was quiet and peaceful in a way you will never find in any city’s concrete, glass, steel, and smog. If you open yourself, you can feel the ancient oneness of the land. On that land, my father’s people, their grandmothers and grandfathers, kinfolk and neighbors lived and died, going back more than the 150-plus years they lived there, and including fighters and scavengers from both sides in the Civil War and after, and during and before the Revolutionary War. In that history too, is an unhappy incident between two men, one white and one red, friends and possibly relatives by marriage, that lead to an unhappy outcome for both, more than a generation before the Trail of Tears would move the one man’s people from the land they shared. It is quite likely I’m related. It’s certain my ancestors would’ve known all the people involved, and likely were themselves involved. There is unspoiled beauty in that land, tales told and some passed down and others forgotten or hidden. There’s heartache and joy alike. But yes, when you grow up with that, or with the Texas Hill Country and Coastal Plains, or with that red dirt and wind and hail from Oklahoma relatives on the other side, well, there’s something enchanted and mystical beyond ken there.
For those interested, the one incident I mentioned is written about in a book called The Bear Grass, a small independent press book that you may still be able to find used. I don’t recall the author. My dad believed Hobbs and Benge were not only best friends but in-laws, forced by events and public outcry on all sides into a tragic outcome. Whenever I’m reminded of it lately, I keep thinking there must be a lot more to the story that isn’t gathered in one place, besides how much likely will never be known. But I keep thinking it deserves to be told, fact or fiction.
Fleenor, Lawrence J. Bear Grass, The. Publ. and copyright © 1991, Lawrence J. Fleenor. ISBN-10: 0963291807 ; ISBN-13: 978-0963291806 ;
I believe there was an earlier edition too, HB and PB. I don’t know if Mr./Dr. Fleenor is still around, but at one time, you could get a reply from him. I need to relocate my copy (should be on a handy shelf, will look) and reread. — I’d love to see the book available in ebook.
Ooooo forests. Its surprising sometimes how different forests can be! I grew up mostly in New England, where the trees were mostly hardwood. There was just something magical about the change from the leafy green summer canopy with life everywhere you looked to the stark winter skeletons standing waiting for spring. Walking in the winter woods always left me thinking the trees were watching me, just waiting, waiting, waiting.
Alaska (at least out on the islands where I got to get out and go hiking) had little ‘pocket forests’, dips in the ground where trees could grow, but they were always tiny, barely hanging on, a few trees here, a few over the hill there. You always feel like a giant, looming over the trees there.
Now I’m on the northern edge of redwood county, where the ancient redwoods take off for the sky and don’t stop. There is surprisingly little brush in the redwoods, and its almost always moist. The huge looming trees make you feel tiny, and the scale is such that you can’t even tell that fern you are looking at is 5 feet tall until you are looking it in the eye. I’ve heard it very aptly described as ‘walking in a cathedral’ because the canopy is so far overhead and the sound muted by fallen needles. LOL I’m definitely a child of the ‘Star Wars’ era, and Ewoks SHOULD be hiding behind the ferns!
We also have forest areas here that are almost rainforest, where the moss just drips off the trees. Huge bigleaf maples so thick with moss and ferns you can’t even see the trunk. Moss everywhere. I’ve been out in that forest when the salamanders and newts were wandering around (mating season I think!), and that’s spooky, they look so awkward walking that you can almost feel aliens have invaded.
The first time I flew out west as an adult, from New England where I have lived most of my life, I got terribly worried about deforestation: there’s so few trees on the slopes of the Rockies! I know New England woods, the same forests Smartcat and Weeble describe. They are thick: in the summer from afar they look like a solid, green blanket covering the hillsides and in the winter like a grey-brown brush. But the mountains I looked down on from the airplane showed a tree here and then, over there, another: “oh no, is this what untrummled logging has done?” I thought. It was a long, worried while until it dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, forests and ecosystems are different in the Rockies than in the White Mountains.
(A friend from Nova Scotia used to sing the praises of its mighty Cabot Trail and the towering trees therein. On a visit up there, we went out to the Trail. The trees are stunty: spruces maybe 30 feet high. On an island to the North of New England, the ecosystem changes once more.)
Lol—of course: the tree line. Trees can’t grow without oxygen, and the snow up there gets so thick little trees just get buried for months. Another sort of thing you see in Montana, where all the hills are brown and look utterly dead. But for a little while in the spring the grasses green and store food that all the critters, including the pronghorn antelope, an ancient species, use. Just that one burst of green, corresponding to the spring rains—but it produces a prairie hay that’s good for months, give or take wildfires—where a sheet of fire up to 40 feet high just comes rolling across the prairie like a tidal wave.
And following it—the grass thrives. It’s a natural cycle. Like forest fires, that take out the brush that shuts out the light. I’m always sad when a hill burns and a forest is gone, but mostly they come back.
Two places where they didn’t: Oklahoma’s Crosstimbers, which used to be so formidable a barrier the early explorers had to detour around it: they hacked it down and plowed it, and then came the dustbowl. Now Oklahoma fights back with a farm pond on nearly every acre. It’s been said that Oklahoma has more ‘shoreline’ than Minnesota.
The other place was the Palouse, near us—dizzyingly smooth rolling hills now covered in wheat, deep loess, that probably blew here from the Dakotas. It buried mountains. Literally. Steptoe Butte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steptoe_Butte is literally up to its neck in loess. But that all once was wooded. What the settlers in Oklahoma and the southwest—and Nebraska and the Dakotas—didn’t know—was that that kind of dryness is cyclic. It’s cycled for a very long time—and will again, I’m sure.
I love geology and wilderness.
The Rockies are just what they are called,great upthrust walls of solid rock,with pine forest on their lower slopes. The pine trees prevent sunshine from reaching the forest floor, so where they grow thickly, you don’t have the underbrush. You walk under boughs with sharp clean-smelling green needles on a carpet of dead brown needles. You hear the trickling little streams working their way down through the trees, and you hear wind moving and murmuring among the branches. A favorite memory is of taking the train through the Rockies in the winter, evergreens bowed with sparkling white snow and little waterfalls caught in frozen lace on the rocky walls, too cold and white to be a Christmas card scene, but incredibly beautiful!
Out here in HI, it depends where you go. You can see 10 of 12 recognized climate zones, from high alpine down to shore, within the state. There are pockets of heavy rainforest left, mostly in deep mountain erosional folds. You get trees there that make you certain there are ents about, koa and kukui and ficus. It’s not so much the density of the undergrowth that makes it hard to move about, although digging through a stand of hau trees or uluhe ferns can be its own task. It’s the uncertainty of the footing underneath: those same ferns can conceal a pit in the lava that goes down 30 feet, or be a covering over a jumble of aa that will break your ankle. Once it starts weathering, the lava of the islands is friable, which is why no one in their right mind will try to scale any of our cliffs. Little rock stacks off the coast are the last refuges of plants that don’t grow anywhere else. On the tops of the most ancient mountains on Kauai are perched bogs, with ohia trees only as tall as your hand, and the highest rainfall on Earth. Nope, nothing here that in any way resembles Old Russia’s forests, unless you want to go up to the top of Mauna Kea during a winter storm advisory for your Siberian experience.
When I was writing Rusalka, I happened, out of the blue, to get in contact with a group of Russian fans—this was in the last days of the USSR…and we had an agreement: I’d send them packets of science fiction books, and they’d send me picture books of Russian wildlife and woodlands: there are some beautiful national parks, of course bears; and deer, and the most wonderful Mr. Spock style squirrels with tufted ears. THey’d send me fairytale books—and I’d send more sf. I asked for a Russian dictionary—mine was pretty limited—because I wanted to be able to look up Russian words for some of the mythic creatures; but there weren’t any. It was all grey-flannel party-line official Russian—no words for the old titles like tsar, no word for the vodyanoi…so…I gritted my teeth, pulled up my one Russian class, and construed the plural as best I could. I was very pleasantly surprised, finally, to find out I’d done it correctly. Russian folklore is now enjoying a revival, thank goodness.
I remember a German primer, received from my Oma, which had a picture of one of those European tufted-ear squirrels. I was adamant that whatever that was, it was NOT a ‘proper’ squirrel, which have normal rounded ears!
We have those too. The Kaibab Squirrel. Even has a white tail. The related Abert’s Squirrel from the other side of the Canyon goes white on the belly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaibab_squirrel
http://www.naturalvisionsphoto.com/blog_images/2009/sep/m-KASQ1004-thumb.jpg
http://www.pets-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/abert_squirrel.jpg
Yep we have the Abert’s squirrels at slightly higher elevations east of Payson and the more traditional brown squirrels with nice round ears here in town and out in the forest too. The Abert’s are cute little buggers but flightier than the more typical brown squirrel. Had a brown squirrel scare the beezus out of me the other day at work.
I can remember walking in the hardwoods up in Quebec and being totally lost after 3 feet in — and walking on about 3-4 feet of deadfall. Spooky stuff! Other areas were a mass of ferns everywhere with foxes jumping out and scaring the horses as we zipped down narrow, but very visible trails. Lodgepole forest up in the Canadian Rockies and even in the Northwest Territories were just as thick, but much less brush like someone mentioned — no sun up there getting to the forest floor, not much undergrowth. Here in Arizona, Ponderosa pine forests below the Mogollon Rim [the south edge of the Colorado Plateau] are intermixed with junipers, and have lots of chaparral — some of this is just simple geography and having south facing slopes and ridges extending from a 2500+ foot escarpment. Archaeology in the area shows this has always been pretty much the mix, although the pine forest in the past was not as vast [we’re part of the largest ponderosa pine forest in the world]. Never did have a chance to wander in an old forest in Ireland, England or Europe [but sure wanted to!], but what I remember from Wales was a mix of glorious oak and other hardwoods, with a mix of ferns, nettles and other brush. One of my favorite though, was a larch/alpine tundra mix in a wilderness area in the Canadian Rockies. I just knew there were mammoths around the corner. That had to be the most primeval feeling so far. Looking forward to sampling the Olympic Pennisula some day as well as scampering back to Europe.
Talking about windfall takes me back to the Columbus Day Storm in 1962, record low pressure and winds gusting to 179 mph on the coast Most official peak wind measurements were either limited by pegged scales or catastrophic failure of the anemometers. 11 billion board feet of timber was knocked down, more than the annual harvest for the West Coast. In my little briar patch, it got me two ways, first, we had 14 acres of 8-10′ corn scheduled to be chopped for silage the next week. Well, there wasn’t a single corn stalk more than 6 inches above the ground, so my brother and I were privileged to walk the rows, stoop and cut every corn stalk at the ground, and throw it into the chopper. The next summer we went up near Crater Lake and cut 400 20′ lodgepole pines for a corral. Anywhere you looked in the lodpole forest, 30-50% of the trees were wind fallen and lying about belt-high on me at 12 years old. I was always the smallest by 2 1/2 years when the tough jobs were handed out, so while everyone else was stepping/sliding over the windfall I was scrambling over it carrying my end of the pole a couple hundred feet out to the road, and my brother on the other end thought I was just dogging it.
Wow—
We used to get winds in Oklahoma: had one at 94mph that cost me a new fan motor on my air conditioning unit. Lesson: turn them OFF in a wind like that.
Japan just got hit by a 96 mph wind, trucks blown over—wild, wild weather.
We always sweat it in the Pacific NW, because of the tall evergreens that grow up here, and that don’t have a strong central root: as above, so below, the old poet Vergil put it, regarding tree roots, —but in the case of evergreens, they’re NOT shaped like that below: they spread out in all directions, unable to get a taproot down through the basalt—and they go over when there’s a blow like that. If the several beside our house were to go, they’d likely either take out our fence, or a sizeabove portion of the pavement of the avenue, depending on which direction the wind was blowing, and it’s usually the direction that would take out the street, while the trees landed on us. We don’t have many earthquakes on this side of the Cascades, our tornadoes are a piffle, and wildfire, while a threat, doesn’t threaten the cities—but our trees are a terror in a windstorm, especially after heavy rain.
The forests (known as The Bush) where I used to go bush walking in the ranges west and south of Sydney are all Eucalypt and its relatives. It has a very different look, feel and smell to anything I’ve been in here in the US.
And CJ, was that elephant escaping from Hugo? I seem to remember that there was a circus that wintered there.
You’re right. She was doing just fine. All the weeds and grass she could want. Trees. Probably willow in abundance. Not to mention wheat and watermelons.
I remember when I first read those books I wondered if perhaps you were of Russian descent and were writing from your own family folklore or at least from your roots. It was very convincing and compelling! I think I may have read them before I read the Celtic ones, which were equally convincing and compelling, and then I got very confused…..
Lol! The only Russian in my background is from a long, long time ago. Irish—a wee bit closer. My grandmother-by-birth was 2-3 gens from County Antrim.
I’ve been noticing two things lately when I look at design and fonts. Designers, including font designers, from formerly Soviet countries have been contributing a lot more. There’s the increased flow of contact with more freedom there, and there’s the need for global businesses to have materials and advertising in foreign languages, such as full Latin-based and Cyrillic based character sets. This has included partnering with major American and European type foundries and ad agencies, and the work’s high quality. Then there’s the partnering with the Russians for space flights. A cabbie friend had said that business trips between American and Russian people had increased a fair bit over the past few years, and generally, they were good customers. All in all, the changes and increased contact I think will be beneficial. Oh — last I’d heard, Russian science fiction fans are still hungry for American SF&F, often banding together to translate things into Russian for fellow fans. This includes books, comis/manga, films, TV, and audio. Buying and selling, trading and information sharing, on the whole, greatly preferable to shaking sabers or shoes at one another!
I’ll look forward to the Rusalka trilogy when they’re up.