The good folks of Planet Earth are presently being granted a sneak peak at Chapters Seven and Eight of SILVER BROWN through something they tell me is called Twitter, at a rate of one page a day. These two chapters are roughly equal in length, and constitute the first part of a distinct four-chapter story arc. The second part will come later in the year.
This particular story arc is one of few in the entire book that actually has its own title. Since it’s a depiction of the first genuine test of Florys MacNab’s mettle as a cyberwitch, it is (somewhat aptly) entitled The Final Exam.
Hey, it’s a new decade. Thank the Dagda. The Weenie Teenies (which I personally think is a catchier and more befitting name than the Two Thousand and Tens, so I’m just going to go with that) will probably go down in history as the worst decade humanity has seen since the 1940s. So I’m glad that’s all over with. Sure, it was a decade that saw vinyl LPs come back from the dead. That was the shit! But then there was a shitload of other shit that was as shitty as all shit. Hopefully this new decade will bring more shit that’s cool, like the aforementioned second coming of the long-playing record. May these Twenties be twenty percent as roaring as the last ones, so they don’t end as badly.
If this reminds you of someone, you’re officially not going crazy.
In this spirit of dispensing with the old and embracing the new, I’ve decided to prune a couple of characters out of SILVER BROWN entirely. There was a scene in one of the early drafts where my main character wakes up in the offices of one of the most powerful cyberwarlocks in Sector India. There, the witch Florys MacNab is approached by this warlock’s man Friday – an eight-year-old boy known only as The Kid.
The Kid grew from an intellectual seed that was planted in my brain by an Ojibwe elder from an ancient land we now call Minnesota, by way of a book he wrote I once burrowed from the library. He would tell me of a forgotten yesteryear well before there was any such thing as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, when the Ojibwe did not bestow names upon their children at birth. In those days, it was an ingrained part of the culture and tradition that a name be thought of as something one had to earn. Many kids didn’t earn those names until they were eight or nine years old. Some not even until puberty, or later. But finally doing something to earn a name was one of the most important rites of passage in a child’s life.
A few of the customs observed by the Society of Wheel Turners in SILVER BROWN invoke this bygone Ojibwe tradition to a certain extent. In the early drafts, young Wheel Turners in training were literally nameless. Hence, the reason why The Kid was just The Kid, and nothing else. I eventually had to dispense with The Kid entirely, because his sole function in the story was to reveal exhibition that had already been revealed. But the tradition he embodied lives on, albeit in a modified form. In the current draft, children born into the Society receive a totem from their council of directors when they pass a strenuous series of cybermagickal aptitude tests. The warlock of Sector India I mentioned earlier is known solely by his totem. His legal name is the one registered with SAAZMOL, which is why he doesn’t use it. He is instead addressed by his contemporaries as Lord Pukerabbit. There’s a whole explanation of the hidden meaning behind that appellation, but I won’t get into that here and now.
There was another character I had to get rid of when he ultimately proved superfluous. A utility program called Dunsmure the Bird, inspired by watching too many videos on YouTube like this:
I initially threw Dunsmure the Bird in the story to serve as a sidekick for Elmýr Garfield. In later drafts, Elmýr Garfield would gain the ability to shapeshift, his new powers reducing Dunsmure the Bird to a Jar Jar Binks – an unnecessary character that could easily be removed from the story without the story suffering any, and in fact should be removed. The bird’s jarjarbinksiness wasn’t the only reason I got rid of him, though. There’s already a character in the story who’s a talking ferret; I figured throwing in a talking bird on top of that would be laying it on a tad too thick.
A merrie solstice and happy new year to you and yours. The days will get longer from today until midsummer; here’s hoping they get brighter too. In the spirit of the season, I gift you a little something to help bring about the brightening of those days. Available for download now is a brand-spankin’ new edition of the SILVER BROWN e-book – an edition that encompasses the novel’s entire first act. Compared to the previous edition, this new issue includes two freshly-minted chapters, and several additional graphical enhancements.
My original idea for SILVER BROWN was that it would be a trilogy. I later scrapped that idea, though. Trilogies are great when they’re done well, but not all trilogies are created equal. Some of them kick things off the right way with a strong first installment, but then lose their way and decline in quality with the second and third installments. The Matrix or Ally Condie’s Matched come to mind. So instead of committing to the daunting task of writing a trilogy, I decided instead to compose SILVER BROWN as a single volume in three acts – a narrative structure somewhat comparable to the one George Orwell used in Nineteen Eighty-Four. This first act has an identifiable climatic moment with a falling action serving as a lead-in to the second act. At the same time, not enough loose ends are tied up by the end of it to make it a complete novel in and of itself.
This is probably the last version of the e-book I will publish for at least a year. The narrative starts to take on a noticeably different tone after Chapter Eighteen, delving into topics like the deeper mythology of the Environment, the complicated relationship between the Union and SAAZMOL and the current status of Florys’ father. These are aspects of the story I don’t want to elaborate on publicly just yet. But I think there’s enough here in the first act to get people’s appetites whetted, so I’ll just leave it at that. Oh, and did I mention it’s free? Yeah, I’m letting people download and read this at no charge, ’cause I rock like that.
Click or tap on the book cover below to be taken to the download page. When you get to the download page there’s another book cover there you have to tapclick on to download the actual book. Think of it as the three gates you have to pass through to get to the Southern Oracle. Except there’s only two, and there’s no risk of bodily injury involved in passing through either of those gates. At least I bloody well hope not.
