Synopsis for my NaNoWriMo novel - Maybe.

I promise nothing, but this MIGHT be a synopsis that will have something to do with whatever I end up writing this month. 

After a year full of the deaths of friends and family, Janette was tired, emotionally hollowed out, and in need of closure. Or Fun. Or Both. So when her pagan friend Allie invited her to a Wiccan "ritual" with costumes, dancing, and an introduction to a hot guy she wanted to meet, it seemed like a good alternative to a night alone handing out (scarfing down) Halloween candy. As it turned out, Janette's dead were not as ready as she was to say farewell.Now on the wrong side of the veil between the worlds, Janette has to navigate across the Isle du Mort, making peace with "beloved dead" who want to weigh her down with rummicube rules, very odd favors, and midlife crisis advice. If she can make peace with every dead person she has ever known - and FAST - she might make it back to the world of the living in time for her date.

Jump from a good platform

high dive, 60's, a photo by Jimmy's Classic Drive-in on Flickr.

I only jumped from a very-high-dive platform once. I have no memory of where, or why or how anyone talked me into it, but I remember doing it.

I also remember wanting desperately NOT TO.

During the olympics I sometimes catch the diving, and although I admire the sport, watching it requires me to actively quiet a visceral cringing. It feels like every internal organ I've got is sandwiched between a convulsing spinal column and the shriveling of every skin cell covering my body. It is a recoil against height from the inside and out.

So now that I've decided to "leap into" writing more publicly, and chosen to do it from the tall, supportive backs of persons I know and admire, utilizing the very tall platforms of OTHER folks I know and admire...I'm having that moment where I'm high up in the air, and I know SOMETHING will go wrong.

My writing will be truncated. My intended message will fall flat. I'll write too much, or not enough. I'll look like an idiot...or worse, panic and take someone down with me into a fatal bellyflop.

So, I'm visualizing the climb, the foot-thick, solid, stable, grainy concrete platform, my toes are off the edge, and I'm just telling myself over and over, "It's just water."

Horror

I'm almost finished reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane. The boy is in the fairy circle, surrounded by all the spectres of seven years, and I have come to a sudden realization about why I don't write. As I am crying, and blowing my nose, and breathing in hiccoughs, I realize that I am afraid of writing and being a writer because I am afraid that I will write stories like this. Horror stories. Stories that I do not like to read.

The Scroll of Years - A Review

The Scroll of Years

A Gaunt and Bone Novel

Having finished The Scroll of Years by Chris Willrich only moments ago, I hereby judge that it is not an average, everyday book. By that I mean it is not about a cast of characters placed in stories and committed to the written word.

Instead, Willrich has written a magical invitation to peruse a series of bound pages where, by happy chance, fantastic figures’ own paths direct them to travel back and forth in this specific vicinity…and they happen to have been captured by a sensitive translator.

My ruling on The Scroll of Years is based on many things, but foremost the structure of the book.  Willrich’s debut novel is comprised of long and short chapters, tales within tales, and shifts in time, location, culture, perspective, and language.  The result is deceptive: the simple exterior of a fantasy softcover hides an interior that is a complex literary work. This book insistently demands that any prospective reader thrust away their grasp of linear tale telling as a prerequisite to jumping into this adventure.

I will not mince words: This is not a book everyone will enjoy. The protagonists travel an entire world of territory, and the stories told are drawn from every major occurrence of a human lifetime. I found it difficult at times to catch up again after putting it down, as if somehow the story had continued to evolve while I wasn’t actively reading it.

To enjoy the work, I suggest that you be a reader who can be dropped without warning or explanation onto the back of a Springfang, into a bottomless pit, or through the portal of scholarly monastic life. This is not a book for any reader requiring reason or exposition. Persistent readers will find some of each inside this novel, but it will be wrapped carefully and carried next to a character’s true heart.

The Scroll of Years is a collection of tales about persons generally meeting the modern definition of “westerners” and “easterners.” The travels and antics of the characters are guides or perhaps crutches, for the reader seeking wisdom about an astonishing range of life experiences. From the book, readers can steal treasures about true growing up, forgiveness, partnership in love, parenting, and even coming to peace with our own flawed selves.

The thrilling cover illustration of high-fantasy artwork, and Willrich’s own description of the novel as “sword and sorcery” does the book an injustice.  I believe it is well beyond what the traditional fantasy novel has provided. The Scroll of Years is more than one rich world-building adventure; it is easily three or perhaps, lucky seven. Characters go beyond the traditional troupe of scout, fighter, thief, wizard, and cleric, to include the avocations of monks, politicians, assassins, poets, mothers, fathers, adolescents, emperors, dragons, walls, ways, ghosts, vampires, accountants, sailors, outcasts, and even a loyal log-chasing dog.

What I enjoyed about the novel was being tossed into a wonderful new way to use language. Willrich has invented novel techniques for dialog and storytelling that derive from opposites. His writing incorporates east and west, man-on-the-street and sage, human and animal, child and adult. I can only describe my reaction toward writing so completely new and different as similar to how I felt reading Gibson’s cyberpunk for the first time. Reading this book is likely to cause a disturbance in your Chi, but channeling will reward the reader tenfold.

What I had to overcome to enjoy the book was the idea that I was picking up a recreational-fantasy drug. This book requires attention, commitment and participation from its readers. If you allow it, this book can teach you more than a little bit about life’s biggest lessons. To the inattentive, I imagine this book is just a muddied flood that will wash over you, scrape you up with pointed words, and carry you away, without ever allowing you to plumb its depths of meaning.