From Cathedrals to Alternative Histories

Throughout the years, I have acquired an eclectic collection of knowledge both speculative and factual. I like to research and I like to study but what I enjoy most is taking ideas and theories I learn and extrapolating and conjecturing further with them, even modifying typical applications of them.

I have always liked cross-applying knowledge over varied subjects. In my work experience, I take what I have learned from one job and see if I can apply any aspect of it to my next. Creating, making, building, conceiving and implementing are my action words; the verbs of my existence. I once took methods I learned working at a corrugated box factory and re-applied that knowledge to making a massive dollhouse out of bristol board, masking tape and craft paint to house my daughter's dolls. It was light weight and sturdy as I used box design to accomplish my goal. She kept it until she outgrew it and it was still sturdy years later. I was proud of that dollhouse for many reasons but mostly because I had taken knowledge on my own and re-applied it to create something new. I would like to think I took a  step towards wisdom then. because isn't knowledge without use or application merely rote and memory. Intelligence is nothing if it isn't utilized.

Likewise, emotion is similar to knowledge in that sense. You can feel something but if you don't embrace it or understand or even just face it, it is just a feeling without validation or use. Wisdom can be learned from what you do with emotion just as you do with pure knowledge. Emotion is not just what you feel stemming from your interaction with others. It stems from your interactions with everything as well as everyone. Can not a sunset bring certain positive sensations to mind just as the gloom of an approaching thunderstorm sometimes bring less positive feelings?

It was a feeling such as that but deeper and longer lasting which came upon me in my late teens on a spontaneous adventure one weekend to the historic city that is Montreal, Quebec. I had quickly gotten lost there and ended being helped out by a young bilingual woman I had met at the bar the previous night when I had first arrived in the city and subsequently been separated from the co-worker I had come on the adventure with.

Despite, the girl's penchant for gin and dancing; she was also a devout Catholic and dragged me with her to Notre Dame Basillica the morning after we met. As I sat on the pews waiting for her to finish her business which I gathered was confession though she never really did confirm that, I took in the amazing setting I found myself in.

At that time, I knew much less of religion than I do now though I had already formulated certain opinions on the subject. I had also yet to really set myself upon the path of the spirituality I experience. I had however studied a bit about art history and architecture.

The church amazed me. I could feel the age of it; the creative lives that had been poured into its foundations and crafted into the vault of its ceiling. I could feel the essence of the congregation and each and every individual who had ever passed through its doors. It drew me through the stories of those who had worshiped there, those who had sought sanctuary there; and those who had come there not for themselves or their gods but for others at their bequest.

The stone, the wood, the windows and the furnishings emanated with the seemingly venerable age of the church and I learned later that Notre Dame Basilica is one of he oldest structures of its type in North America. The old stories that I heard from its walls captivated me and enchanted me.

I remembered reading the few pages of Richard Challenger's story I had written again not long after that, having come upon them in a box in which I kept far too many other seemingly random things. I remembered Challenger's desire to visit the ancient neolithic site we call Stonehenge. I remembered the feeling of age and history that had accompanied my visit to Montreal and the countless tales it had told me. I thought to myself then, if that was what I could sense from an edifice a mere few centuries old, what would it be like to stand among something thousands of years older. Richard wondered the same thing.

My visit to Montreal has been reflected in Richard's journey ever since then but the journey to the Standing Stones has changed and matured in its descriptions and what lessons it has taught the two us  since it was first conceived. No longer does a busty Morgan Le Fay try and seduce Challenger in a back alley in Salisbury. I think that part might have been a holdover from Richard's days as a blond detective with a porn-stache and my own hot-blooded youth.

Regardless, the basilica is a part of Richard Challenger's history now and forever will be. Parts of the story have been fleshed out over the years and this reality I live in has helped inspire other parts of Richard's life. They still do, though since this volume is about to be released; any new influences on this character's past will have to be added as backstory, possibly through flashbacks.

I think my wife just groaned inwardly at that. When you read my work, you'll notice I have a fondness for backstories and flashbacks as a forum to explain certain details of the story. Richard's mind, like my own, does not relate to everything in just linear time. Everything is co-related. The reasons I use this method of story-telling is explained a little more in the foreword found a the front of A Strand of Grey.

More recent influences have affected the re-writing and continued telling of Richard Challenger's tale. My original description of Richard's visit to Stonehenge included a vivid description of the ancient site. An issue with that came to light when I met my heart-mate and wife. She had been to Stonehenge and she had carefully informed me that I had got it wrong, not all wrong but wrong enough that anyone who had ever been there would realize that I hadn't... been there that is.

Hmm! Food for thought...

Studying books and, nowadays, doing online research, can provide a lot but experience is still the best teacher. Having been to a location is the best resource for accurately describing somewhere to others. A subsequent trip to England and Wales was an adventure of not only discovering and learning of my ancestral roots; it was also a research project. Being at the Standing Stones, cresting the top of Glastonbury Tor and exploring the ruins of the castles of Welsh Princes in the mountains of Snowdon provided both food and fuel for parts of Richard's story.

My love for my father's homeland of Wales grew exponentially and I learned that Richard needed to explore the land as well. Years, before I had used Richard as what is known as an NPC, a non-player character, in a role-playing game called Dungeons and Dragons which I ran. He had helped and motivated the characters my friends had created as their avatars within the game. I had initially set them in Robert E Howard's setting of Hyboria, the lands and time of the pulp fiction character most of as know as Conan the Barbarian.

Quickly, I realized that as a Dungeon Master, I was a story teller too and just as I had grown from telling fan fiction in my childhood to new stories of my own, I decided I wanted to do the same with my gaming. Thus a new world was born and nations evolved into existence in my imagination. This world became the world of Richard Challenger.... worlds even. The gaming campaign and Richard's slowly growing tale began to merge in the way of deeds and those he interacted with.

Richard Challenger's tale grew and became other tales of other characters. It also became the history of the Dominion of Cymri; sort of an alternative history of Wales in many ways but one in which it became an even more influential nation than on Earth. Other nations were birthed in my imagination, born of diasporas of other peoples to this world I had created, all influencing and helping develop a rich history of a new world but originating from Earth at some point in history.

The gaming influenced more than just geography. It influenced communication... it influenced dialogue.

Dialogue in writing is always tricky. Characters have to sound different, they need different voices and different personality traits. Otherwise there is little distinction between the players. As a writer, it isn't always an easy thing to make each character stand out from another. The developing personalities of some of them that were played by my friends began to help with that. They applied some of their own character traits to these new lives they had made and sometimes let their own creativity blossom and intuitively give original characteristics to these creations that I never have thought of on my own.

Returning to Challenger's story after publishing my first novel, Portrait of a Rivalry, I again used my own experiences to help colour Richard's. Recently, I began to learn a little about the ancient craft of blacksmithing. This might have had one of my most recent influences on Richard's tale. Early on, Richard experiences the elemental skills a man must master to work with metal in a coal-fueled forge just as I experienced them myself not so many seasons ago.

There have been many more influences upon this work; some I have forgotten the origins of, some I might not have even realized have occurred. All have helped shape the story I have written and in so doing, have shaped me as well.

More can be learned about Richard and me on my web-site, including how to get a copy of either of my novels. Both can be ordered from there as well

http://www.gomerrobinson.ca/

The Story of a Story
What's in a Name?
To truly find the roots of A Strand of Grey, one must travel back with me to my childhood and the earliest origins of my storytelling days. It began in a near idyllic setting, on a farm in a lush green land somewhere between the city and the wilderness. It began with solitude but not one that was resented; one, instead, that was embraced.
A small child gifted with an unusual name, a high level of natural empathy and no siblings close enough in age to provide real peer companionship, I spent much time by myself. My first real friend lived a ways away across fields and down country roads. Play dates, they weren't called such in those days, were few and far between. My imagination was my closest companion from an early age and reliving the stories that my father and my brother, Al, would tell me at night made the time pass each day.
I was weaned on the classic pulp fiction of the early twentieth century and in my dreams, I swung through the trees of the African Rainforest with Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan and with John Carter on the planet of Barsoom which we here on Earth call Mars. I fought wizards with Conan the Barbarian and slew Dragons in the company of Dwarves and Hobbits. I stood against alien invaders from a nearby planet and the Morlocks of the far future with the help of H.G. Wells tales and I shot laser guns at the side of Flash Gordon on Mongo. I flew in airships wih the original Buck Rogers against the Huns and I leapt tall buildings with Superman and struggled against omnipotent cosmic world devourers with the Fantastic Four. My genes gave me mutant abilities as I aided the X-Men against Magneto and I saw an android cry with the Avengers.

In the woods and meadows around the farm, I began to think up my own trials and adventures as I heroically slew the imaginary monsters around the area. When school took me into the field of creative writing, I began to write new stories and performed new deeds for my heroes.

It was in that time that the protagonist of A Strand of Grey was born. His story has changed drastically over the years but the name has stayed. He is the ultimate hero of my imagination; not omnipotent but holding the potential for great power; not omniscient, all knowing, but always learning always growing, usually from his mistakes and mine. The man he has become and continues to grow into is the culmination of our combined life lessons; influenced by the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful we have met headlong in our tumble through existence, physical and existential.

He started as a name drawn from a history assignment given to myself and a classmate in Grade Seven. We were studying colonial times and the War of 1812 and we were asked to write a story through the eyes of a settler in Upper Canada. If I have to give credit where it is due, I believe the name was coined by my partner, Phil German, who has since become a High School English teacher, having, as a footnote, later serendipitiously taught my first wife for a semester when she was in school.

Jake Challenger, Jacob Richard Challenger, that was his first incarnation. He was a settler and a family man having fought both French and American soldiers to defend his home. He faced the trials of harsh winters in his attempt to make a home for himself in the New World.

His name did not end there although that story did. The man named Challenger refused to die. Jacob Richard Challenger became merely Richard Challenger and with Phil's permission to use the name, he became my protagonist for further adventures. In Grade 8 English, Richard Challenger became a private eye with a penchant for fast Italian cars of the exotic kind manufactured by Ferarri and Lambourghini and big handguns like Dirty Harry's .44. calibre. Magnum P.I. had nothing on this guy and there is no doubt Tom Selleck heavily influenced this character. Richard even had the requisite moustache but was a blond at the time.

High School arrived and the fast driving two-dimensional detective died, to be reborn as a long dark-haired rock star who loved Led Zeppelin and Steppenwolf. My love for Celtic history and the legends of the British Isles surfaced. A story by a favourite author that prefaced the idea of Standing Stones as portals to elsewhere inspired the beginnings of the tale that is now A Strand of Grey. To this day, that very first scene I wrote has survived in one form or another to become the Prologue of this novel. Maybe a couple dozen of the words I put down on paper back then have survived to make their way into this final version of the manuscript but the story I foresaw has finally come to be.

At fifteen, I let my mother read the earliest chapters of the novel and for nearly forty years she has waited, mostly patiently, to hear the whole story. Unfortunately, Richard Challenger's tale is not complete but the first book in the series that is his tale is complete and soon to be released. I placed a finished proof in her hands not long ago.

There have been other influences and inspirations for this story, or rather, stories. As with the pulp stories that these grew from, readers should stay tuned, for this Story of a Story is to be continued...

And, as always, a reminder that more samples of my writing on my web-site and both my novels can be ordered off the main page or in the books section which can be accessed from the menu.

Gomerrobinson.ca