Mabon Harvests, Literary and Literal

[dr_pretentious]

I just replied to the latest email from the agent. Yes, it will be my pleasure to send her the full manuscript of Hands of Beltresa.

(Yeah, the old working title was Crown and Crowd. Same book you've been hearing about for two years. Next week, the working title may be something completely different. Well, I worked on the dissertation for most of five years before I got it to tell me its true name, so I'm not terribly surprised that none of the names I've come up with for the current project satisfy me yet.)

Since I've heard the agent say that she likes reading first drafts from her current clients, I asked her whether she wanted the still somewhat rough version I can send out this month, or a version in which the second half of the ms is as polished as the first half, which I could send by the end of October. Either answer's a good one.

In other news, our Mabon celebration went beautifully tonight. We had to adapt our standard ritual form and harvest holiday customs to a few awkward requirements of the hall we hired (no alcohol except in the chalice, no candles, etc.), and it was Clover Coven's first time hosting an event with so many people in attendance (the last estimate I heard was about 50), but the results Felt Like Mabon, so it must have worked. (jeneralist, will you be posting on your chemistry prowess? Your candle alternative was widely admired.) Everybody looked to be having a good time, and the feast table groaned under the weight of the harvest offerings. Oh, but we are good cooks. No word yet on whether the contributions to the donation jar exceeded the cost of the hall, but we hope to have accumulated enough to donate for hurricane relief.

Enough and enough and enough to share.

Comments

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

If you still want to read it in draft, and Josh W. and Julia can't be persuaded to part with the hard copy chunks they've accumulated, I can send it to you as a gazillion Microsoft Word attachments, or snailmail you hard copy. I don't think I have current contact info for you, though. You can email it to me at avery at alum dot vassar dot edu.

About The Wheel of Time...

Back in my first year in grad school, while I was still figuring out how to live in New Brunswick, I went to check out the local comic book store. The shopfolk were passing around free promotional copies of half of the first volume of The Wheel of Time, an exciting new series, etc., etc. I flipped through the front matter, saw the list of the eleven titles for the rest of the volumes projected in the series, and knew immediately that if I began reading that first book, I would never, ever graduate. My decision not to start has been vindicated again and again by the pronouncements of various friends who know my reading taste well and have warned me away. The people who tell me that the story and its characters would give me hives have been right about that kind of thing many times before.

I promise you, I know how my series ends. I have seen the picnic in the park that concludes the denouement of the last volume. For the most part, I know who lives and who dies, and, in broad outline and sometimes fine, how and why. There will be closure. There are other interesting periods in Beltresin history that might bear a book, but the story these characters have to tell has a decisive, unmistakable terminus. Cue coronets, roll credits.

The organic rhythm of the story breaks down into five volumes. In the interest of adapting to current market constraints, I'm splitting the first volume into two, but the story isn't really bigger.

Mabon is a philological, mythological, and archeological muddle. He was a pre-Christian deity worshipped in the British Isles, but there's almost no evidence that can offer us details about his worship or specific significance. He was probably a harvest deity, and his name's associated with the autumnal equinox, which is why some Neo-Pagan denominations call the equinox that, regardless of whether they devote the day to Mabon himself. Some Pagan groups are persnickety about observing Mabon at the very moment of the Equinox, but we tend to observe it the weekend before or after, whichever allows the greatest number of us to attend.

Pragmatist that I am, I'm inclined to say that, regardless of whether Mabon was in ancient times a harvest deity whose holiday fell on the autumnal equinox, he is now. My fellow 150,000 tattooed Wiccan freaks have made him so. Deities adapt all the time. Evolution's everywhere. As above, so below.

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the offer! I shall have to ponder my next move on this score.

As for the Wheel of Time: I actually think he knows exactly how it's going to end. The problem is that it's just taking him a freakin' long time to get there. For instance, I have heard (not having read the book myself) that the last book was basically on the reaction of every character to a major event that happened at the end of the book before. And the book was like 1000 pages long!!

As for Mabon: No, that's not how I heard of the name. Not being a Wiccan myself (although at one point I was termed "pagan friendly"), I wouldn't have heard of this. I must have read it in some fantasy book somewhere.