It's About Time For the Synopsis

In a world where magic is a thing of mythology, and steam and gunpowder run the scene, Princess Maria's castle of Iassé in Tyrule has been attacked by a conquest-hungry king, Diorn. Her own father, Peter II, is powerless to defend against such a massive force, and their allies from far-off Altesea have hardly helped. The castle falls, and in the chaos of evacuation, Maria is captured, along with her cousin and bodyguard. Also among the prisoners is a teenage Altesean soldier, Wesley, who, after his regiment was slain, surrendered to avoid a terrible death. In anger over a dead spy, Diorn orders princess Maria killed, but the Altesean soldier volunteers to take her place hoping to redeem his honor; however, his life is spared by the intervention of one of Diorn's own officers. Wesley, Maria, and their two fellow captives escape in the night, and endeavor to reach allied territory. Diorn's officer, who overnight found a price on his head, soon joins up with them, though some in the company doubt his trustworthiness. They spend one week in the hill country, evading bandits and the elite forces of Diorn, only to face betrayal once freedom had been thought secured. 

Castles Part 4, El Ahir and Zayjudvis

I am doing two palaces today because Zayjudvis is so unimportant I can lump it in with El Ahir.  Zayjudvis is the palace of Prince Ilanaji in Brinidem.  Brinidem is a city-state on an island that takes up a meager forty-five square miles. It has always been ruled by a prince, and never a king. The powerful nations have never attempted to conquer it because it is basically good for nothing.  Five miles from the coast the ground slopes up a mountain of bare rock until you reach the city.  The road to the city is treacherous, and must be taken slowly by a carriage lest you plunge to your death on the rocks.  Ilanaji's marble palace takes up one quarter of the city, and has all the luxuries a tyrant prince could desire.  He only wanted princess Judah of Altesea to make his happiness complete.  When Diorn invaded Altesea, Ilanaji tried to strike a deal with King Ellyanus of Altesea.  He would give Ellyanus his entire army (Not that it was very big) if Ellyanus would give him his oldest daughter.  Ellyanus only scoffed at him.

El Ahir is more famous. It contains the palace of Omri Khanh, last king of the Namat. In ancient times the Namat rivaled the Altessi.  King Ellyanus the first, (not Ellyanus Tiberi also known as Marcellus,) did them some injustice, so they cursed him to enmity with their people.  He didn't believe their curse would alight, and drove them from their lands into the desert.  Three hundred years later the Altesean kings gave the Namat's lands to the marauding northmen known as the Cassidys.  Up until the 1820's the Namatti continually fought the Cassidys over their land.  In 1816 Omri personally ordered the murder of Royal Cassidy, whose pasture crossed the border into Namatti land by two miles.  Omri's cavalry burned Royal's farm and slaughtered his workers.  The only known survivors of the outrageous attack were  Royal's three young children, Victor, Royal Jr., and Prisca.  King Richard of Altesea paid Omri a large sum of money to stay out of Altesea, but his "successor," Ellyanus, would not kowtow to Omri.

Omri's palace is a vast complex of towers and gardens beautified at the expense of his people. When he lost his city to King Ellyanus and General Victor Cassidy in 1831 his palace was looted by angry Altesean soldiers who lusted after vengeance for slain brothers or fathers.  They ripped to shreds all the tapestries that told of Omri's ancestors, and made a bonfire of his fine furniture that was carved with lions and eagles. They toppled the stone eagles that stood guard outside the gate. Omri himself was murdered by his own people, who thought he should have done a better job of protecting the city.  I imagine Omri's palace looking a bit like this.

Yes yes, I know it's a Byzantine cathedral.  But can't you imagine the Haggia Sophia as a palace?

Castles Prt. 3 The Castle Without A Name, and a Chance to Get Your Name In The Book

Today we are discussing the castle that doesn't have a name yet.  This castle is the palace of the Arazocos in Argenta.  The royal family of Argenta could trace themselves back to ancient times, almost as far back as the Altesean Tiberi.  They intermarried to preserve royal blood, and ended up with the terrible genetic trait that half the females born to the family were barren.Their palace is a "ranch style," so to speak.  It covers a vast amount of ground, but is not very tall.  They planted lush tropical gardens wherever they could. Due to the hot and sunny climate of Argenta the palace complex has 1001 windows without window panes.  The capital city (It also doesn't have a name) grew up around the palace, but inside the gardens of the palace courtyard all is tranquil.  The Arazocos adore silk wall hangings and ivory furniture.  Everything served at their table is grown in their own gardens, be it figs or bananas.  Meat is brought in from the royal farm a ways out of the city.  The throne room is an atrium with palm trees some fifty feet tall lining either side.  It is no less verdant than the gardens.  Vines had been allowed to hang from the ceiling, and orchids clustered around the king's throne.  Since most of the palace is open air, they have a special official just to keep the monkeys out of the throne room. A purple canopy is draped over the room in the rainy season. Hummingbirds are the most common courtiers.  Being daughters of King Abundio, Carmen and Christina spent their childhood here.  They and their brothers sailed their boat on the artificial lake in the gardens.  They often accidentally crashed it into the fountains and sank it. Christina had a pet elephant.  She was not able to take it with her to Altesea when she left to be queen. The crown prince of Altesea visited their palace and fell in love with the thirteen-year-old princess Christina.  He was at that time twenty-three. King Abundio was thrilled to find  that a prince of one of the powerful northern nations was interested in his daughter, especially since his daughter had a chance of not being able to give children. He had offered her hand to Prince Thomas of Tyrule, (he was King Peter II's younger brother) but Thomas said he would "never marry a kinky-haired black woman, whether she was a princess or not."  The Tyrulians were not very tactful when it came to foreign relations with anyone who looked different from them.  Prince Christopher, his father King Caleb, and her father King Abundio arranged the marriage without Christina knowing.  They waited three years to tell her she was to be married.  At sixteen Christina was taken to Altesea, far north across the sea.  Though Altesea has a warm  Mediterranean climate, Christina's heart always longed for the tropical paradise she grew up in.  The palace has no name, and the city has no name.  Please leave your suggestions in the comments.  The first five people to comment  on my blog get their first names in my book.  I am always looking for names for minor characters.

Alcazar De Sevilla, in Spain.  I imagine Abundio's palace looking a little like this.

Castles, Part two. Pamenwen

Play this song while you read.  I give most of my places songs that sum them up.
King Diorn's palace of Pamenwen is far out of the way of the smog and clamor of his capital.  It is fifteen miles Northwest of Tronanheim, in the little village of Milevonne.  It was built some three or four hundred years before Diorn's time, by King Elwood, who craved peace and quiet.  He designed it for comfort, knowing that in event of attack, the military stronghold was just fifteen miles away in Tronanheim.  He caulked the windows against the bitter Kantonese winters, and added a fireplace to every room, even for the army of servants.  The many chimneys made the royal residence look like a giant porcupine sitting on a forested hill.  The stables could house four hundred horses, and the teeming kitchens were capable of roasting twenty-five geese at a time, as well as pastries and whatever other delicacies Elwood requested to be brought to his immense table. I need not even tell you about the size of the cellars and his imported Altesean wines. His highness loved to hunt and throw lavish parties; to care for his kingdom, not so much.  He died from choking on a pheasant bone at a party held in honor of his mother's birthday.  By Diorn's time Pamenwen was no longer in its heyday. Diorn preferred the smelly canvas tents of military campaign and prospective glory to the decadent luxeries of his palace.  He viewed himself as a conqueror, not an entertainer of  flattering courtiers.  He spent more time within the thick walls of the citadel  plotting his conquest of the world with his Kiilothi than in Pamenwen with his lonely queen.  Queen Bernice left her nunnery to marry a king. She now had every material thing she could possibly want, but not the heart of her husband.  He built her an ice-rink in her private courtyard, but never once visited it.  The life of a conqueror's wife is a lonely one.  I imagine Pamenwen looking a bit like this, but taller.

Chateau de Luynes.  I do like these French castles.

Iasse

Josiah asked me to do a series of posts on the different castles in my book.  I will start with the most famous--Iasse.   Iasse was originally intended to withstand siege for months.  It had extremely high walls and towers from which trained archers could pick off the enemy.  However, it fell twenty times in five hundred years.  Its owners put their heads together and realized their problem was  that they built their castle at the bottom of a valley instead of on the convenient hill nearby.  The nearest river was five miles to the east, and they completely forgot the moat.  Sometime in the 17th century the Tyrulian monarchs revamped it as a summer residence. King Peter 1st had the remarkable stained glass dome built to cover a hole in the ceiling caused by an earthquake.  When Princess Maria was just a child she visited the palace and fell in love with it. After her father gave up on finding a husband for her she moved there.  Since the castle is drafty in winter she would stay there from April to October, and spend the winter in Jezamine. Iasse was never repaired after King Diorn captured it in 1822. It looks somewhat like a cross between these two castles, the one in France and the other in Wales.  It has strong walls, but is also beautiful.

Chateau de Pierrefonds

Chepstow Castle.

Names. Everybody has one... and that can drive an author crazy.

A question I get asked a lot is, "How do you come up with all these names of peoples and countries?"  Most just come to me while I'm riding my bike or vacuuming.  Once an idea comes to me, say Aethahil, the capital of Altesea, I write it down to see how it looks on paper.  Then I determine whether it fits with all the other cities in this nation or region.  Then, I Google it. The worst thing to happen is to come up with a beautiful name for your heroine, or a really cool city name, only to find out out someone has already used it, or it means back-end-of a-waterbuffalo in Vietnamese.

People names are hard.  I like to use normal names for main characters, such as Anna, or Tory, or Priscilla.  Made-up names are so hard to pronounce.  Oftentimes I come up with a name and find its meaning matches its character perfectly.  Alyssus is formed from the girl name Alyssa, which means rational.  Alyssus considers himself a wise and rational person.  In reality he is a skeptical fool, and goes to a bad end.  Or, a name could be the complete opposite of how they are.  Adelina means noble and courteous.  I laughed when I found out what it meant.  Sometimes I decide the meaning and find a name that fits the meaning.  As to Marcellus Lyston; his name means warlike one, son of Mars. The reason his name does not fit him is because warlike one is not his true identity.  Sometimes I have to make up a name and meaning, such as Issaje, which in the ancient Altesean means "My God has forgotten me."  Gudried in Kantonese means high wall, or rampart.  Ellyanus is derived from the Hebrew, Ellyana, "The Lord has answered me."  Ellyanus's full name means, "The Lord has answered His servant the Christ-bearer."  That is quite a nice change from warlike one, and forgotten one.

Surnames: I know a girl with the last name Tiberi, and I encountered Cassidy in a book on ancient Irish history.  The Cassidys are vikings, though.  Lyston was the name of a drummer boy in the civil war.  I also keep programs from high school graduations.  There are also lots of websites with list of interesting last names.

I have one other way to get names, but it has never worked in a story.  I take an atlas and randomly open the pages.  I take the first letters of a city, take the second letters of another city, and the last letters of another city, and smash them all together.
When I have to name a minor character I ask my brother Josiah.  He named Diorn.

My Story pt. Two.

And so, I continued with three more installments in that series.  I invented Altesea and made my technician its long lost prince.  With each installment the characters became less cartoon, and more flesh and blood.  After the story was all finished, I felt something was missing.  I had contrived happily ever afters for all the characters, but something was definitely missing. I set to revising.  I threw out the improbability, and signed the death sentences for several of my favorite characters.  In the end I had a story very like Escape From Iasse.  But I didn't write it all down.  I was afraid to start.  A friend of mine, (lets call him Themistocles, since no American boy has that name,) said I should forget my hesitation and start writing.  Early in February of 2011 I wrote my first sentence.  In August I wrote, "the end."  My characters had surprised me along the way.  When I started I had no idea just how wicked Alyssus D'Avdion could be, or that Adelina would fall in love with Dr. Marcellus Lyston, or that Marcellus had a wife and two kids back at home.  That was a shock.  Three months ago, at the end of my rewriting, I learned Princess Maria had some spunk in her.  We sent the first few chapters to my writer friend Becky Melby, who said the story had potential, but it needed work. After a few months of rewriting I sent the first five pages to a contest.  The judges ripped my work apart and fed it to their cats.  One incredibly cynical judge said the only likable character in the story was the evil king.  I was at that time fourteen years old.  I sobbed and threw the judges' responses on the ground.  I declared I would never write again.  Daddy talked sense into me, and Mama helped me cope.  About a week later I rewrote those first five pages.  I wrote the first scene from a completely different viewpoint.  That contest grew me in ways I could not imagine.  Wherever you are, cruel anonymous judge, I thank you.  Over all, we rewrote for a year.  A whole year.  I am now working on book two. I want to get the five book series finished before I query agents.

My story. Pt. one

When I was a tiny girl I got a notebook for Christmas.  I immediately wrote down whatever came to mind.  I stayed up late writing about the kitty dynasties of South America.  There was good Queen Nimba, and her  daughters.  They fought mighty battles against the dogs of the dogskill mountains.  At the end of the war an old dog named Navill, (I liked N names,) prophesied that Nimba would die.  Sure enough Nimba "Fell ill, and the parties of the war ending came to an end."  The came Orfa, who was and orphan.  She did terrible things, because she thought it was her fault her parents died.  Thousands of years later the only heir to the throne was Kitty Witty Pitty, a stuffed animal belonging to a small bespectacled blonde girl named Michaella.

I was always coming up with stories, but I never considered sharing them with anyone else.

That changed. It all started with a dream.  A dream that I was a girl spy sent to infiltrate a bad guy base.  What made the bad guy bad I did not know.  He had plenty of clone henchman hanging around, and he used teenagers as his officers.  Sounds like any dystopian novel out there.  I, my name was Raven, fell in love with one of the officers.  He claimed that the bad guy was his dad.  Whenever any of the teenage officers became friends with me, they would disappear.  The strangest thing about the dream was when the officer I liked kissed me on the mouth.  When I woke up I decided it needed to be told as a story.  I serialized it in my head and told it to my little brothers every night after Daddy told us to go to sleep.  When the story ended, I came up with a sequel, involving two bounty hunters named Gopher and Angus.  Angus was short and was always buying tall hats and shoes. After that ended my brothers demanded a new story.  I thought and thought.  I came up with stories involving knights, stories involving Star Wars, stories where all the characters ever in stories came to play together. Darth Vader vs. Inigo Montoya. "You killed my father, prepare to die."  "No, I am your father." Interesting prospect, but all my new stories fell flat.  Then came a wet day in the spring.  I had stopped trying for a story, but one came.  We were taking a nature walk at the conservation department.  The ground squished under my feet, and water droplets dripped from the pine trees.  A futuristic tyrannical society...gladiatorial games..a brilliant technician stepping in to save a doomed gladiator. What would happen?  Lets add a princess in there, how about Princess Peach from Mario? The boys had recently gotten a Nintendo GameCube.  Yes, yes. Lets say she was captured in war by the bad guys.  What would happen if the doomed gladiator and the technician teamed up to help her escape?  I thought I had something really good going on here.  I think Link from Legend Of Zelda came along for the ride, and there was some other girl.  They battled villains such as Donkey Kong and one really slimy spy.  They were waylaid by bandits, and barely escaped with their lives.  They had just reached the border of their country when the bad guys caught up with them.  The other girl and the slimy spy had struck a deal.  The bad guys shot an arrow through Link's cap and arrested the technician.  My technician was a nice guy who looked a little like Severus Snape.  he somehow was friends with the bad guys sent to catch him.  I felt bad to have him leave the story.  Princess Peach and the others escaped.  So ended the story.  How could I have thought that was a masterpiece?

An Introduction by Michaella Valkenaar

I, the author of the most admirable book, Escape From Iasse, am inviting all you people to explore the world of Altesea, Kanton, Tyrule, Namat, Argenta, Brinidem (ooh this could take a while.) All those places and people of my fantasy world.  If I am extremely lucky, find some pictures to post.  Alas, cameras have not yet been invented in my world.  I will give updates on book two when I can.  This is a lousy first post.

On the way to Colorado, working on a chapter I eventually cut.