| Home | The Books | The World | The Music | Extras | Forum | Photo Gallery | The Author |

(75-pt Knights Templar, WG: "How Westria Came to Be" or "Origins" if space will not permit)

(replace h2 with 30-pt WG AJ, h3 w/18-pt WG AJ)

Origins

Or, How Westria Came to Be...

I always wanted to be a writer. This ambition was temporarily squashed by the professor from whom I took a Creative Writing course in college, as his idea of writing was Literary Fiction. The stories I wrote in that class bored me, and I couldn't imagine anyone else wanting to read them either, so I gave up on the idea and put my creative energies into founding the Society for Creative Anachronism (the SCA) and starting a family.

By 1971 several things had changed. As the SCA grew, it was becoming clear that it wasn't fair for me to use other people as my creative medium. I had also realized that my children were responsible for their own development, and I should not expect them to be the creative achievement I had promised myself to complete by the time I reached thirty. But most important, I had married into the family of Marion Zimmer Bradley, gotten to know her, and realized that real people wrote books that I enjoyed. And I was employed as a secretary at the YMCA, a job that I could get done in two-thirds of the day, with an electronic typewriter (this was only 1971).

So one late afternoon in January of that year, I decided that the time had come to finish a novel. Now, like many would-be authors, I had a drawer-full of chapters and outlines stashed away, so I figured that the only way to keep myself interested would be to start writing without knowing how the story ended. The usual advice to new authors is to "Write what you know", and what I knew was California topography and medieval technology. The only kind of fantasy being published at that time was for Young Adults, so I started with two kids from Berkeley who go hiking on Mount Tamalpais, get lost in the fog, half buried by a landslide, and spend the night there. When they wake up in the morning, there's a castle where Sausalito ought to be, and the girl, Helen, reaches into her pocket and discovers that she has found a glowing jewel.

I then asked myself "What could possibly happen next?" At this point, two local kids appeared and took my protagonists home with them to their sister's wedding. In the course of the wedding, a mysterious harper walked in and played a rather ominous song, followed by an attack by a (at that time) equally mysterious sorcerer). One thing led to another, and eventually the harper explained, in two paragraphs, How Things Got Into This Mess.

By the end of the year I had finished the book, which I called The Jewel of Fire. I was embarrassed to tell my husband, who was already a published author, what I was doing until the book was actually done, but I confessed to my sister-in-law, Tracy, and used to read her each new chapter as we gave the children their baths. The resulting work suffered from a new writer's tendency to cram everything in, but among the debris were a number of scenes in which something powerful had come through. I took a deep breath and asked Marion (Zimmer Bradley) if she would read it.

Marion read and critiqued it. When I stopped crying, I revised it. Several times. Then I started sending it out to publishers. I got a lot of very nice rejection letters, but the story in that form was too complex for the Young Adult market. By this time I had realized that since there were four magic jewels, I was missing an opportunity by dealing with only one. So I tore the original material apart and re-plotted the story for four volumes, one for each Jewel. I wrote the first versions of The Earthstone and The Sea Star and started sending them out. I got another collection of very nice rejection letters.

By this time I had been writing for several years, and had actually sold two short stories. It was clearly time for another revision, but I realized that before I did it, I needed a better understanding of the background. The two paragraphs of backstory that Silverhair had provided in the original version became the plotline for Lady of Light and Darkness.

Unfortunately, the result had so many points of view and was so complex even my friends couldn't get through it. The other problem was lack of motivation-- I knew what the characters had done, but neither the reader nor I really understood why. I was now faced with a decision which I think every serious writer must make in order to succeed. This was an adult book, and I had to stop worrying about what people would think of me when they read a scene of sex or violence, and commit to telling the full story.

So back to the typewriter I went, cutting the number of point of view characters and doing my best to reveal who they were and how they got that way. It quickly became clear that Caolin, who had started out as your stock Evil Sorcerer, was a very complex character, and that the source of his problems was his frustrated love for the King. In due course the other characters also began to reveal their secrets.

This version of the story worked, and by this time there was a market for Adult Fantasy. Dave Hartwell at Timescape had just bought Marion's occult novel, Web of Light, (published in two volumes as Web of Light and Web of Darkness, and later reissued in one book as The Fall of Atlantis) so I thought it was worth trying him. I also realized that the standard length for fantasy novels was around 80-90,000 words. Fortunately,the action for my book could be split neatly into two volumes, and that was the way I submitted it.

There ensued a lengthy courtship. Timescape was interested, but not able to buy anything just then. Could I revise it on spec. ["on speculation," work done without a contract in hope of receiving one -- lwood]? You bet I could. In the meantime, everyone I knew was buttonholing Dave Hartwell at conventions and asking if he was going to buy the book. And eventually, he did.

The first volume came out in 1981, ten years after I had started writing. Unfortunately by the time the second book was supposed to appear Pocket Books had decided to discontinue the Timescape line. Lady of Darkness did get published, in a tiny edition, but my idea for a series seemed doomed.

Fortunately, by this time I had sold a contemporary fantasy, Brisingamen, to another publisher. And then I got a letter from Dave Hartwell. He was now working for Tor Books, and he seemed to remember that I had some more ideas for Westria....

Did I ever!

Tor gave me a five-book contract, and the series was truly underway. It took another ten years to tell the whole story, and some of the material from the very first version was not used until the end of The Jewel of Fire. But the story arc was completed at last.

In the course of writing the books, I explored the physical world of Westria (Northern California) and the spiritual world behind it, converting myself to paganism in the process.  And inevitably I discovered that there were more stories waiting to be told.  But by then I was also deeply involved in writing historical fantasy, so Westria went onto the back burner for another ten years.

But the pressure has been growing, so last year I brushed off and rewrote the proposal for a new book, and I'll be working with Dave Hartwell at Tor once more. I'll try to keep some kind of a writing journal going on the Author page to let you know how it goes.....

Diana L. Paxson

	| Home | The Books | The World | The Music | Extras | Forum | Photo Gallery | The Author |

This page was last modified on Wednesday, 04 December, 2002 at 13:42:30
This site and all documents copyright © 1980-2008 Lorrie Wood and Diana L. Paxson, except where otherwise stated. All rights reserved.