I've never had any great desire to participate in NaNoWriMo, mostly because fiction isn't my
thing. Apparently my subconscious wants to do it, though. The main character was a
post adolescent boy (I think he was a boy). This being a dream, I was him part of
the time and observing from outside part of it. He was the son of a famous sage
or enchanter (who was dead or away) and he had to travel by water for the and
then by air in search of Tamburlaine's sword. It was a task laid on him, not
something he'd chosen to find. There were several other things he had to retrieve
on the way to the sword, rather like the plot of a video game. By now I don't
remember any of it clearly, but I did imprint one episode on my memory just after
waking up, when it was all still clear. I think I had had one part of the dream,
woken up a bit, then returned to it and dreamt the following, which is why this
part was clearer in memory.
The boy had just come home to his
mother and, I think, a few sibs or other relatives. There was a lake or beach in
front of their cottage. He saw something across the water he needed, and got on a
raft or floating debris to get there. A swift and strong current carried him
toward the object; by then he was all or partly in the water and had to dodge a
couple of logs and other floating things that would have been painful to run into.
Then the wind grabbed him up out of the water and carried him away. He ended up on
the top floor of a house in a city or town, talking to an enchanter. The enchanter
told him, "You'll need this," reached down, plucked the fire out of his grate, and
handed it to the boy. There was a faint flickering, like the shadow of a fire,
playing over the logs remaining in the grate; the enchanter told him/me, "That's
just to finish consuming the firewood, so it won't be there to risk an
uncontrolled fire later."
Clearly, my subconscious is lousy at
plotting, because there are all sorts of holes in that story. For one thing, I'm
not sure who Tamburlaine was, though I have a dim memory associating him with the
Crusades and the French Romances like the Chanson de Roland. But also: Why did the
boy have to seek the sword? What does the sword symbolize? What had happened to
his father? (The questions seemed to be related.) Why traveling by water and air,
or was that just my own preferences? Why could the air carry him? Who was the
other enchanter, and why could he and the boy handle the fire? What was the fire
for? If there's water, and and fire, where does earth come in, or was that just
part of the dream I've forgotten? Why did the boy get into the water in the first
place? He seemed resigned at being carried away from home at the
time.
Second-guessing the subconscious is always a bit futile, but
I'd have to guess this one owed something to Patricia Wrede's Talking to
Dragons, and something to Arthurian legends, and something to a book that I
think was by Lloyd Alexander, in which a lost boy found out he wasactually king of
the land, after a trip in which he teamed up with a man who turned out to be a
lord and advisor who had lost his memory. (Note: not a girl, a boy. It's not the
Westmark series. The amnesiac lord was named Hilary, and either the boy or the
lord had a silver lock in his golden hair. ) Hmmm ... given the common thread of
those stories, maybe the boy was meant to be a lost prince.
I'd like
to write the rest of the story, because I'd like to read it, but I don't think I
have it in me to make it satisying, or to put in the enchantement and hints of
forgotten lore that it needs.
An aside: I've been reading about some
of the English purists who wanted to purge the language of all foreign borrowings.
I think the idea is silly and would impoverish the language, but their sample text
and those of others, like Poul Andersen and Douglas Hofstedter who were writing
in "Anglish" only as an exercise did leave me wondering. Why do the constructs
with the oldest roots somehow seem so much more magical and potent than the modern
equivalents? "Starlore" sounds like it encompasses (even) more wonder than
"astronomy", "wyrd" and "doom" have greater portent than "fate". Is it just that
those writers have specifically chosen evocative words, or is it just the archaism
that attracts? After all, I can't say I find "guma" more interesting than "man",
or "lych" than "body", but then those words are completely archaic and have no
modern connotations at all (except for nearly invisible presences in "bridegroom"
(was "bridguma") and "lychgate" (the gate through which dead bodies are carried
into a churchyard to be buried).) Or is there more to it?