People of the land and sea.

I've always been fascinated by my Grandfather's stories of the "old country," that being Breskens in Zeeland, the south of Holland. While most of his stories concern his experiences during WWII as a young boy under Nazi Occupation (all of which are brilliant in their own right), I've always wanted to go much further back to the older stories people told about their relationship to the land and sea. While stories of war occupy his memory, there are glimpses in these two photographs from the post-war period in which the Bressianders seemed genuinely proud to resume their relationship with the land and sea once more. The photographs are from the magazine Op Bresjes, 5 August 2006. I would love if someone could post a translation under what I call the Neeltje photograph.

Self-aware mythology: Rick's welcome.

I’d like to welcome everyone visiting this site for the first time, I hope you’ll come back from time to time, share your ideas, perhaps we could exchange work, and explore new ground in fantasy writing. While this blog will convey Renee’s art for my narrative, I’d like to make this a space where others are welcomed and encouraged to share their own creativity. I frequently peruse Renee’s other blog and I know there are quite a few creative minds converging over there. I also know from the Terry Brook’s forum I frequent that there are a great number of creative writers. So perhaps this could be a convergence of written and visual artists with a love contemporary fantasy.

This is a new venture for Renee and I, in which we focus through creative writing and visual collaboration on a single storyline, the Skywheel Galaxy. My idea for this project is still being nurtured, so I don’t feel too comfortable revealing the storyline, as I’m in the ‘pre-10’ chapter first draft stage. However, I promised Renee that when I finish Chapter 10 that I will make available a working prologue on this blog.

One the things I also intend to do on occasion is interview other authors and people who subscribe to this blog, as a means of expanding the dialogue, as well as, for pure entertainment. I’ve already confirmed one interview that I hope to do next month.

In terms of the story, as I explained to a friend last night, I am attempting to write a fantasy narrative that walks backward in mythology. One of the things I frequently see in fantasy writing is a vague acknowledgment to predecessor mythogologies without ever raising the bar by truly inhabiting myth. Skywheel won’t necessarily inhabit old mythologies, but I intend to write this as a fantasy that embodies particular mythic characteristics that appear over and over. For instance, the first 6 or 7 chapters I’ve written are a flood narrative. This particular narrative nods to various world mythologies. At the same time, Skywheel is entirely autonomous from the stories that influence me.

Finally, and this is what I find most difficult yet most rewarding, the mythos meta-narrative I am writing in Skywheel has a self-awareness to the story that happens in the human world.