Iron Joe
Seven Thunders
To be more accurate, Iron Joe comes from a prequel short story to Seven Thunders, which when I wrote it became one of the major impetuses to finally write the book itself. The story is all about the origins of Carrie Arosen, the third lead of Seven Thunders after Robert Drummond (who you met on D Day) and Lance Nolan (who you'll meet on N Day). Carrie was the toughest character for me to crack in the whole book, not because she's female and I'm, well, not. I write a lot of lead female characters in my stories. It's just something I do. Yet I knew from the start where Drummond and Nolan fit into the narrative. Carrie existed initially mostly because it's nice to have a female character in a story. It wasn't until I read about her surnamesake in a a book called The Unredeemed Captive that I started to realize who she was. In fact, much of the short story where Iron Joe appears is based on this inspiration. She turned into a surrogate Native American. I'm of the mind that Native Americans are deeply owed an apology for the rotten cards they've been dealt over the last few centuries. The character of Tekamthi in The Cloak of Shrouded Men was my first attempt to reconcile my feelings in fiction. Carrie is another. I figure I've got another story in me, one I've started in the past about a character named Wounded Knee. Who's Iron Joe? The Danab she's accused of assassinating, and the only person in her life who ever seemed to grasp who she was. Appropriate in all the wrong ways...
Ireland
Yoshimi and the Assassins Guild
Yoshimi Trilogy Volume 2
Ireland is where the second volume ends, mostly because Ronan Quinn is Irish and that's where he is ultimately found. Sometimes the most obvious destinations are the ones we postpone the longest. It's our subject today mostly because it's the setting for the sequence I'm most proud of in this story, which I've previously talked about on F Day, when I explained how the book 2666 inspired an earlier sequence. The way things end in Ireland are an integral moment in the entire story. As a writer, one of my favorite things to write is the cumulative moment, where everything that's come before it reaches the point where something big has to happen. I'm not talking big as in a big fight or a big change, but the emotional resonance that reverberates from what the story has been saying to that point. As I've said, this is the least young adult fiction-type section of the whole story. There was just no way that I could write that sequence like that. So anyway, Ireland for me is hugely important to the warrior orphan's story, not because that's where she lands at the end of the whirlwind tour around the world in the second volume, but because of what happens there. And yes, there's a visit to a pub.
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Red Sox lost tonight. Reports of one of the commenters on this blog actively supporting their competition in this game have not been corroborated.
The A's beat the Angels yesterday. Mike Trout is now 9 and 32, at .280. Albert Pujols is now 5 and 22, at .227. As always, I will simply say it's still early.
The Cardinals won yesterday. This did mean that Bronson Arroyo got a loss for the Reds. The Cardinals won today, too, 10-0, and this time I have no sympathy for the Reds.
2 comments:
Regarding Native Americans, I love the fact that through writing, we're able to have our voice heard, through themes or direct messages, far louder than if we were just screaming on a street corner
Absolutely. I don't trust writers who have nothing to say. It's your platform. It's great to use it just to write a story, but if you've got nothing to so, you're just another drop in the bucket.
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