This week, starting Thursday 11/9 and running through Monday 11/13, Book 2, The Girl from Ipanema (TGFI), will be free for your e-reader. Last week we gave away Sun Valley Moon Mountains (SVMM), Book 1 of The Ur Legend, as a FREE ebook. We will do a paper giveaway for both books on Goodreads in a month or so.
Okay, enough of the advertisements.
Not a Hero’s Journey
Last week I talked about SVMM and how it followed from the paradigm for A Hero’s Journey—although I only found out afterward that is what I had done. My publisher tried to convince me that TGFI was also a Hero’s Journey. But it really isn’t. Not in the formal sense. So what is TGFI and why did I write it?
Well, I’d left open the possibility of a sequel in SVMM. Bildad Proud had been pretty well destroyed in his battle with Ur. But ‘pretty well’ doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘completely’. And Bildad represents an evil within all of us that can probably never be completely destroyed.
We also left Tiamat, Mattie, as an infant to be raised by Jaq and Kate. What happened to her? I felt her story needed to be told. So I let those two characters tickle my brain for awhile and then I read this article in Scientific American.
The Dryas Event—Abrupt Climate Change
It concerned an event in Earth’s geologic past known as the ‘Dryas’; a short period of extreme cooling brought about by a huge volume of melted fresh water from a lake called Agaziz in western Canada dumping into the Gulf Stream, reducing its salinity and therefore its density, and shutting it down.
So I thought, what if the Arctic ice sheet melted and the fresh water flowed into the Atlantic and shut down the Gulf Stream and its warm water flow sometime in the not too distant future? Well, I had to make a few changes since the Arctic ice cap had pretty well melted by the time I was ready to publish! But I figured that out and, Bingo, I had an idea for TGFI. And, boy, what a difference a frigid Northern Hemisphere could make in the ecology and politics of the planet!
A Young Lady Emerges
But the idea was secondary to my real reason for writing the book. Books actually. As you all know by now, Linda and I lost our daughter, Katherine, to a birth accident. so I wished to give her a life which she had never known. It’s been fun fashioning her, especially as a young lady in TGFI. In fact, I don’t really believe I shaped her as much as I let her character emerge out of the story in which she lived her life. But, come to think of it, isn’t that what we all do?
