Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
It would be fascinating to hear more about your universe and the problems you’re exploring and wrestling with. These make for great conversation topics!
The necrofaeries: obviously I was thinking about necromancers as I was coming up with a term for fallen, evil faeries. I was thinking about how the angels of the Bible (Lucifer especially) fell from God’s presence and became devil’s, wreaking havoc on earth. But I had the further thought that while true faeries, sent from the presence of the Faerie King, have the privilege and responsibility of bodies, necrofaeries lose that. So being disembodied, they wander or ‘possess’ things. ‘Nekros’ is the Greek word for dead (you probably knew that); I thought it would be an appropriate description.
Does that explain?
Hello, @freedomwriter76!
Nice to meet you! Thank you for the welcome!!
I’ll have to do that! Thanks 🙂
Have to agree there! I’m already craving pumpkin spice lattes and dreaming of golden leaves… 🙂
Hello, @light-warrior-pen!
Favorite character: Prince Willibert, mostly because of his name. And because he puzzles me to no end.
Favorite ice-cream: espresso is really good, with vanilla and something chocolate.
Where would I go? Eh, I’ll say southern France. Just because that’s what I’ve been saying lately, and it sounds cool to visit farms and go foraging in that area. But there are so many places! You?
Thanks for the welcome!
Hey, @acancello! That’s so cool! What made you guys move to NC and get interested in farming? I’ll have to send you the link to our farm website once I finish updating it. We started the same way, with chickens and a garden 🙂
Well, it’s a pretty image anyway. I like it too.
Neat that you used to live in Minnesota! Yeah, we love our extreme temps over here. Boiling summers, freezing winters. On the whole, it’s lovely. The scenery never stays the same for long.
So with the faeries, I wanted to call back to traditional fairy tales, where you have these mystical beings who could be either good or evil, everybody has different takes on it, different stories– they seem to appear out of nowhere sometimes, and then other times they were part of the community for a long time with few people realizing who they were exactly. I wanted to keep that mystery there, the mixture of fear and wonder in the characters of the story.
But I also think there’s truth to the fairy tales in real life, that when people made up stories of faeries (or demigods, or witches or whatever you have around the world) there very well could be mysterious spiritual forces at work. Certainly of the evil kind, like when you hear about witch doctors in Africa, or Druids, or Aztec gods maybe. Just as Satan was once a perfect being, and chose to turn against God, so other angels followed suit (Tolkien’s Silmarillion is almost allegorical there!) It follows logically that if we can believe in demons, fallen angels interfering with human life, then most likely God’s angels are doing the same. Spiritual warfare, you know. There’s so much to think about when you look at mythologies and ancient cultures from that perspective, and then try to add in all the effects of Christ’s work on the cross, as Christianity turned the tide in all the spiritual warfare all over the world.
So the faeries (both true and Necrofaeries) in my story, I wouldn’t call them allegorical because I’m creating a whole imaginative universe based on my growing understanding of these things, but based on it loosely. We can understand a lot about angels and what’s going on behind the scenes, but we can’t know it all. So we create a tribute to the beautiful things we can grasp out of God’s plan, create it thoughtfully and reverently, create it for the purpose of telling the story He’s put it us to write.
That was a loaded question! 😉 A great question.
I was going to agree about the parables, though– Jesus’ use of them was definitely on my mind.
Hi, @esther-c! Thanks for the welcome. I’m currently a terrible volleyball player! And I’m glad to hear you enjoyed Peterson’s book!
Wow. Especially in light of God’s Word, I take great delight in all three elements of Story, seeing that God does too! But when it comes down to it, I might say characters. I think God pours the most love into his characters, and the way characters drive plot and their webs interweave with each other, is just mindboggling. Each character has endless possibility and, well, personalization. Plot is firm, but reveals itself gradually, and worldbuilding, while also endlessly interesting, doesn’t have the soul as its core! And again, the characters are what you pour love into more than anything.
I would be most comfortable, I think, hopping into Narnia. I would love to meet all the different people groups there, maybe join in the Midwinter Snowball Dance, and walk on the shore near Cair Paravel to hear the gulls calling. Of course, I would probably love visiting Middle Earth equally well. Both places have built themselves into my imagination! What about you?
As a linguistics-lover, I’d agree to caramel, but as a Minnesotan I am guilty of slurring the word into carmel… It’s a hot debate at our family bakery!!
Thanks for the questions!
Greetings, @keilah-h! Nice to get acquainted!
Interstellar has a great soundtrack, though anything by Hans Zimmer is stellar! But yeah, the story felt a bit nihilistic. But since I’m into regenerative agriculture/permaculture, and I also believe that God plans to establish His kingdom on earth after all is said and done, I really want to write a story with similar hypotheticals to Interstellar but with a different answer in mind! A more hopeful and beautiful answer, I think, than the movie gives. As to the fourth dimension thing, I know nothing about it! I could stand to be informed.
Favorite Marvel character: I am very fond of all the Avengers, and the best part is how the story explores their relationships to each other, but if I had to choose I’d probably stick by Captain America. He’s just got solid character. Curious to hear your dad’s reasoning! (Should we be worried that he knows something the rest of us don’t?!!)
Greetings, @thearcaneaxiom! Thank you. We are rejoicing in God’s healing hand! He is good (even if she had been paralysed, as could easily have been the case).
Lovely questions!
Probably hard; I enjoy whimsical storytelling, and have indulged in it. Off-the-cuff, in the moment stories. But when it’s something I really care about, I have to organize the ideas, compare them to my fundamental beliefs, figure out how they correspond to God’s way of thinking… I admire Tolkien quite a bit, even if I don’t plan to worldbuild to the extent he did!
Hm. Something that I’ve been confronted with unexpectedly in writing Quest of the Boy, is my Biblical understanding of angels and the role they play. I wanted to take my ‘faeries’ to another level, using the Faerie King as the metaphor character for God, and the faeries as that bridge between the worlds, if that makes sense; and so I had to understand whether I could legitimately compare my ‘faeries’ to the angels of the Bible. So in the years I’ve been worldbuilding and considering these things, it’s been fascinating to tune in more closely to my study of Scripture to inform my own worldbuilding! I guess you could say my greatest discovery lies in how essential it is to understand God as a story-teller when you aspire to that undertaking, and to revel in God’s Word when trying to grasp huge concepts in worldbuilding. It’s been amazing to have that understanding of God slowly dawning over the way I think.
Allegories: I used to be skeptical. Actually, I did my whole senior year paper on Tolkien and Lewis (specifically how they used mythologies to their advantage in storytelling) 🙂 But: I think Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, is great for what it is. It does an excellent job of what it sets out to do. Checkmark. But I still prefer the lusher landscape in a more subtle way of storytelling, and I think there’s a reason the stories of the Bible are so real, gritty, and unpredictable! Allegories, parables, they get the point across in an artistic way. But stories, fairy-tales, fantasy, are another level of richness, something you can roll around in your mind for the rest of your life and not get tired of.
Thanks for the questions! The riddle is cool 🙂 Certainly they all want material gain!
Greetings, @hybridlore! I’m guessing your profile picture is your art, like mine– I will have to check out the art forum at some point!
I checked out Natalie Sideserf, and my five-year-old sister thought the video we watched was enormously funny! Since I live in a fairly small town, people generally want your boring buttercream sheet cakes, so I’m not into anything that crazy. But it’s still super rewarding when you can draw something in frosting, like unicorns or Milwaukee power tools, that makes somebody or their mother smile. It’s the little stuff, ain’t it 🙂
Glad to meet you! Thanks!
Hello @highscribeofaetherium! Nice to meet you! Also so refreshing to run across another Megan Whalen Turner and Andrew Peterson geek!
Um… I am not the go-to joke person in my family. But, since it was a question: do you know Where a general keeps his armies?
Sad to say, I live in the upper midwest and any states I’ve visited are in that area. I think I woul enjoy traveling further if given the chance. Maybe southern France or any of the British Isles. Or any place Mediterranean. You?
If a sandwich is two pieces of bread with meat (etc.) between, then yes. Though you run into a difficulty in defining a hotdog bun– if the bun isn’t sliced through, then can it truly be a sandwich? Maybe it’s like the debate of whether jello is in the salad family.
Hello, @acancello! Wow, we have a lot of shared interests 🙂 I do love the subject of food!! We love to experiment in the kitchen in our family.
Favorite book series is a tough question: most recent is the Queen’s Theif series, but longest-standing is Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain or Lewis’ Narnia.
Um, closest thing to a sport might be square-dancing? We aren’t very sporty, but farm life keeps us pretty active.
I’m here partly because I’m not actually a disciplined writer, and tend to write in spurts or when I’m feeling inspired. So at this point, I don’t have much of a writing habit, but I’m working to establish one.
Hello, @mackenzie! Definitely relate on the sunset love and reading choices! (My sister breeds dogs, but my passion for them is very tame.)
Favorite writing music: definitely soundtracks. But whatever I’m listening to, I always do it with an ear to finding songs for my WIP Spotify playlists– and the song titles have to be appropriate to my story 🙂 You?
Yes, my main WIP having the theme of growing up, romance and courtship definitely plays into it! I’m really passionate about God’s way of cultivating sound relationships between guys and gals, especially in an age where romance is usually gutted of genuine love, and the social frameworks for single guys and gals are usually misplaced or messed up.
Hm… maybe Quest of the Boy, partly because I know it better at this point, and also it’s more in the classic fairy-tale realm, which is where my imagination tends to run!
