A Few Curious Inspirations

 

The World

The fantastic lands and skies of Curious Origins of a Restless World began to take form as far back as my childhood imagination, a little boy wandering in a field, building with bricks and tinker toys, escaping into the order and disorder of another world.

Curious Inspirations

Greek Ruins photo credit: Greg Robbins via photopin cc

Greek and Egyptian mythology had a part.  So did my interest in astronomy and plate tectonics, in cities and their buildings ancient and modern, in lands and cultures and strange creatures on far-off landscapes.

And Christian theology motivated the arch of the story.

The First Book:  Curious Origins of a Restless World

The first story, “Unraveling Eternity,” was inspired by questions of what moment would be pivotal to a fallen species on their own planet and what would that choice entail as time wore on.  As an adult, I put my own struggles with temptations into the hero’s experience.  It’s a universal pull.

It’s obvious the third story, “Deliver,” was sparked by Jacob’s experience with Leah and Rachel in the Old Testament and questionable identity tales.  But more than those, I thought of how even the ‘insignificant’ individual can have more influence than any acknowledge.

The life of Hosea gave impetus to the fourth story, “A Farther Heritage,” though the names are a bit worked upon.  This was a difficult story to write until I decided to build twelve sections alternating between two characters.

Images in the Stories

Simple images propelled a few stories:

•A princess trudging up a spiral staircase in the second story of “Siege’s Spoil.”

Curious Inspirations

Spiral Stairs photo credit: cjewell via photopin cc

•A liquid’s trickle over tiles in the opening of the eighth story, found in Book 2, of “The Apprenticeship of Heroes.”

•The focus on a knife used in human sacrifice seen in the tenth story, also in Book 2, of “Death Wind.”

Working Backwards

The novel really began decades ago as the story of a fisherman named Mantvor., a character we don’t meet until Book 3:  Winged Mortals on a Restless World.  Soon his back story wanted to be told.

Curious Inspirations

Fishing Nets photo credit: .ben* via photopin cc

I left the fisherman on the beach tending his nets and dolphin reins and wrote “The Stead,” now re-titled “Blood Cover.”  Then I realized I needed to reach even further back, and so I took up the task of writing stories one through four.  I toyed with putting the story of the “Death Wind” directly after “Blood Cover,” but that was too much of a jump.  I needed more between the two.  That took me into the longest stories – seven, eight, and nine – and into the making of Book 2:  Reluctant Heroes for a Restless World.

At last it was time to revisit the fisherman.  But I found he wasn’t on the beach any longer but in his boat and with his wife.  And I found myself again, not that I am a fisherman, but as a man with a beloved wife.  And it came about that my thoughts after my own wife’s death – the finality and loneliness of that event – directly inspired the last section of the last story.