King's Warrior Read-Along: Chapter 15
Happy Tuesday! Only 9 days until Christmas, are you ready? I’m not, but I’m getting there. We only have 1 more week of read-along posts to go! The time is just flying by. I'm posting a little early today, to make up for posting late the other day.
Can you tell that the story is creeping up to its conclusion? We’re about to meet our final main character. Yeah, yeah, I have a lot of characters. I can’t seem to help it. Even my short stories end up with altogether far too many characters, but there just always seem to be a lot of people necessary for a story to come together. I think my Beauty and the Beast retelling (which I need to edit and submit!!!) has the least number of characters I’ve ever used in a story, and I still have 4 main characters as well as a handful of secondary/tertiary appearances. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
Anyway, Leila. Now we have met all four of Scelwhyn’s daughters. I think Leila is my favorite. Dylanna is awesome, don’t get me wrong, but Leila is the one I’d want to hang out with. She’s the one who would be climbing up trees, falling into rivers “accidentally on purpose,” and ready to climb up on a roof just to watch the sunrise.
Kamarie - a dragon ward? I know you all want to know the answer to this... and are hoping beyond hope that she turns out to be one. Well... I’m not telling!
The Harshlands. A few days before I wrote the arrival into the Harshlands, my family and I went out to Lake Michigan to visit a house that my dad had just finished building. It was one of those randomly cool days in the middle of summer, and it was incredibly windy. I was the only one in the family wearing shorts (because I’m a weirdo who enjoys cool weather). After we went and saw the house, we decided to walk down along the beach. Well... let me tell you, that was NOT super fun in shorts. The wind blew the sand at my legs and it really, really hurt! My family totally laughed at me, and would not believe that I was in real pain as we walked along the beach, the wind driving its tiny missiles at my unprotected extremities.
It wasn’t pleasant, but it did inspire me to write the Harshlands differently than I had planned. And I think they turned out better for the bits of truth and personal experience woven through them. No, the sand didn’t hurt badly enough to be dangerous, but it made me think about what it would be like if that breeze had been a lot stronger, if the sand particles were just a bit bigger or sharper... don’t laugh. Go for a walk on the beach on an extremely windy day in shorts... I dare you!
Brant’s slip-up. I believe that when Brant mentions “Llycaelon” that is the only time he sort of “slips up” and accidentally gives away more than he means to. I love that he is very human in this regard...
Kiernan Kane and Yole continue to make their way to Leila’s house and we learn a bit more about this intriguing minstrel. And it is here that perhaps we get to see the truest voice of the author. I set out to write a story about Kamarie, Oraeyn, and Yole. I succeeded in writing a story about Brant and Kiernan Kane.
Q&A
Jack wants to know: Did you get Kiernan Kane’s looks (his lankiness) from Puddleglum?
I hadn’t even thought about Puddleglum when it came to Kiernan Kane - though now that you mention it I definitely can see a few similarities. I sort of loosely based Kiernan’s looks and antics off my younger brother, Evan, at the time, though Kiernan definitely became his own person later.
Abbey wants to know: I was wondering if you’ve read Eragon and if it had any impact on your dragon-wards? The communing with animals and bonding for life is very similar in both your world and Eragon’s world.
I have read Eragon. But no, my dragon wards were not influenced by that particular story. I did not read Eragon until I had completed the first three books and was hard at work on book #4 - Eragon was released in 2005, and I wrote my first three books in the summers of ’01-’04. I was teaching at the time and my students urged me to read it... and, unfortunately, I think they over-hyped it rather a lot. I was kind of disappointed... and one of my students gave me a huge plot spoiler when I was in the middle of reading it... so the entire experience of the book was a little ruined for me. I may have to go back and re-read it at some point.
I’m sure that my dragon wards were based off of ideas from several different books/movies, but I honestly cannot remember which ones off the top of my head. There was a short story by Anne McCaffrey that I read once that had a similar idea, and I was so incredibly disappointed that it was only a short story (it was in an anthology, but nowhere on the cover or inside the book was there any indication that it was a collection of stories, and not one novel) that I never read anything by her ever again. (I tend to hold grudges when books disappoint me - silly of me, really). I’d say I was more influenced by Jane Yolen’s “The Pit Dragon Chronicles” and Patricia C. Wrede’s “Dealing With Dragons” as well as Lawrence Yep’s “Dragon of the Lost Sea” stories than anything else when it came to things to do with dragons in my stories.
Discussion Questions:
- Now that you’ve met all four wizardesses, which one is your favorite?
- Were the Harshlands different from what you expected? How so?
- Kiernan Kane tells Yole at the end of this chapter that it was incredibly lucky that they happened to be traveling the same road at the same time. Do you think it was truly luck? (Okay, ha ha, it wasn’t, because that’s the way the author wrote it... but seriously, do you think this was a chance encounter, or was someone (besides the author) planning it all out?)
- What do you think of Kiernan’s confession of love for Leila?