Young Fabi

Ten-year-old Fabi Stok, who later grows up to be Fabi the Seer, is the protagonist of my new novelette, "The Boy Who Saw." The story will almost certainly appear in an anthology my writing group will be publishing soon.

To celebrate, I've created both a photo manipulation illustration of Fabi and a cover for the anthology. I'm far from being a great graphic artist, but you get the gist.  Enjoy!

Karen

Karen

Fantasy, Mâvarin, Fiction

The Boy Who Saw: Invitation

The Boy Who Saw

Excerpts from a Work in Progress

by Karen Funk Blocher

© 2017 by KFB

Part One: Invitation

7 Rose Lane
Linbeth
Sabedu, 2 Nefilem, 855

Dear Arti,

Credit: By Pi3.124 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50496795

Autumn is almost over, so I’m assuming that the harvest is in. I hope everything went well, and that you got a good price for your cotton again this year.

This being your slow season, I’m wondering whether you might be able to get away for a few weeks and come for a visit. It’s been about five years since I’ve seen you, and I miss my only brother! We have plenty of room, and we’ll make sure that little Fabi is on his best behavior this time.

Husband Fafi has adapted well to shopkeeping. His store is like a little marketplace, with goods from all over. He always seems to know what his customers are most likely to buy, and never gets stuck with unwanted leftovers. I think he misses the caravan, just a little, but overall he’s found his place here in Kinbeth and is quite content.

As for me, I’m still performing, in the local inn and in the occasional play at Skû. The theater troupe there has produced three of my shows, and I even make a bit of money off them. I know you don’t approve, Arti dear, especially since it sometimes takes me away from home for a few weeks; but I hope you’re at least pleased that Fafi and I are well and prosperous and happy.

Little Fabi is ten years old now. He tries very hard to be obedient and considerate, and he’s very loving and kind toward everyone. Even so, somehow he’s always getting in trouble, one way or another. Last week, his pet rabbit turned green for an hour. “Pucu isn’t really green!” he insisted, and it’s true that the animal seems to have taken no harm at all. Then yesterday morning, he came to us crying, and was just inconsolable. He insisted that he saw both Fafi and me dying in our beds. I showed him that we’re both alive and well, but he was very quiet and sad the rest of the day. It must have been quite a nightmare!

I hope to see you soon.

Love,
Alba

Many Steps Forward

So, what have I been up to in the past 11 months? I'll tell you.

Last November, I attended TusCon, the annual fan-fun sf convention in Tucson. This usually sleepy con was sold out, largely because the Guest of Honor was George. R. R. Martin. I was there because several other people from the Tucson SF/Fantasy Writers' Meetup were going, and to attend a few writing-related panels. The most important of these, to me, was billed as a pitch session. I spent a couple of hours at Denny's that Saturday, honing a one-minute pitch and a revised opening sentence for Heirs of Mavarin. Over the past several years, Heirs has evolved from one large novel to three shorter ones, each volume of the trilogy to have a proper dramatic structure of its own. The pitch, however, was for the whole trilogy. Describing a 200K word story in 60 seconds is a challenge!

The three people I pitched to that night were two small press publishers and an acquiring editor. The first guy had no use for a full-length work, let alone a trilogy. The second was unable to commit resources for a whole trilogy from an unknown writer. The acquiring editor suggested that I try to sell the first volume by itself first as an ebook, and make it as good as possible. If it sold, the second and third could be published, with maybe an omnibus dead tree edition later. This was not far off my own plan, which was to publish three ebooks if I could not get a publisher interested. 

In any case, my pitch should have been for the one book, not all three.

After the pitch session, I was starting to tell a friend that I'd pretty much gone down in flames when the acquiring editor gave me her business card, and asked me to send her pages. Since then I've sent her a revised pitch, and a newly-tweaked first chapter of the first volume, now renamed The Tengrem Sword. (This was the first name the larger novel had, lo these many years ago.) Just last week, having finished a supposedly-final edit of The Tengrem Sword, I sent the whole manuscript of that volume off to that same editor, by invitation. Huzzah!

I turned 60 years old on Friday, and it seems to me that my writing is finally coming into its own, after decades of fits and starts and lots of misfires. I'm about a quarter of the way through my edit of Book Two, The Road and the City. I just did a little light housekeeping on mavarin.com, and taken down old drafts of the first book from this very blog. I'm more confident and more productive with the books than I've been in years, perhaps decades. Best of all, the books themselves are miles better. 

Onward!

(Just Like) Starting Over

Gee, has it been so long? It's been nearly four years since I last wrote on this blog, positing an experimental reorganization of the trilogy Mages of Mâvarin. I gave up on that particular idea after about a week.

Since then, all my blogs have fallen by the wayside, my social media presence has mostly been on Facebook, and much of my writing has been non-fiction as the newsletter editor and social media consultant (and bookkeeper, photographer, etc.) for St. Michael and All Angels Church. But just over a year ago, I joined a writing group, hoping to jumpstart my fiction writing again. If you live in or around Tucson and write sf or fantasy, feel free to join us:

Tucson SF/F Writer's Meetup

In the past year, I've gone back to the first novel, Heirs of Mâvarin, and revised the heck out of it. Now it's a trilogy of short novels instead of one really long one. The idea is that this configuration is easier to market than the longer first novel, especially if it ends up as an ebook.

To do that, though, I needed to restructure the first book in the trilogy. It was fine as the first third of a book, but it lacked the proper dramatic structure for a stand-alone novel. So a major character, who originally learned something important a hundred pages in, has to figure it out toward the end of the volume. Another character has to escape from a place, while the first character has to escape into a different place. Overall I think it's gone well, and I have the meetup group to thank for the motivation and feedback. Thanks, you guys!

The book's new opening is as follows:

Rani Fost set down the belt he was embossing and slipped out the front door of the deserted leather shop. Del was already in the stable yard next door, shading his eyes and staring in the direction of the river. He pointed. “There!” 

Houses and trees blocked much of their view, but Rani spotted two riders, a man and a woman, barely keeping their seats as their horses neighed and plunged in fear of the large, dark creature that pranced in the middle of the normally quiet street near the lumber yard. Other hunters milled around, apparently trying to surround the creature. 

It was the monster from Rani’s dreams, the one he had been desperate to catch a glimpse of in his waking life for the past three days. At first glance the tengrem could have been another horse and rider; but there was no saddle. Instead of a rider, the equine back sprouted a furry torso, like a bear on its hind legs. Two long, hairy arms ended in pink-clawed, five-fingered hands. The dirty yellow horn in the forehead was long and slightly curved. 

The tengrem opened its wolf-like snout, revealing teeth so large that Rani could see them even at this distance. A moment later it spouted fire as a hunter ventured too close to the tossing head. The hunter’s horse shied as flame touched its legs.  

The tengrem bolted for the woods that covered the hills at the village’s edge. The hunters shouted and plunged in after it. Rani and Del watched for a few moments longer, but saw no more of the quarry or its pursuers.

The Clarion Write-a-Thon starts in two days, and I'm thinking of participating. This fundraiser for the workshop, where I first met my husband of 36 years, runs from June 21 to August 1, the same dates as this year's workshop. (I'm pretty sure that my Clarion started on July 3rd, 1977.) Their website explains the What and How of it:

Welcome to Clarion UCSD's Sixth Annual Write-a-Thon! What is a write-a-thon, anyway? Think charity walk-a-thon. In a walk-a-thon, volunteers walk as far as they can in return for pledges from sponsors who make donations, usually based on the number of miles the volunteer walks. Our Write-a-Thon works like that too, but instead of walking, our volunteers write with a goal in mind. Their sponsors make donations to Clarion sometimes based on number of words written, sometimes based on other goals, or just to show support for the writer and Clarion.
All donations are made through The Clarion Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

As I embark on my revision of Book Two of Heirs, should I make it a Write-a-Thon project? If I do, will you sponsor me? Better yet, will you join me?

Update: I signed up.