Lots of chore-like things going on over here. I’ve gotten feedback from a few readers already on the Mind The Slice beta. One of them from a young woman who is like 12, and already an author herself. If you’re still reading along, keep going. This is not a race. I’m not going to touch revisions for a while, I’m too busy with other projects. Please send in your thoughts and ideas. All of it is helpful.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Book 2 for the Mind The Slice trilogy has been started. It’s going at a good pace right now. Don’t know how long that will last. Before I started it I finished up another story I had dug deep into and stopped. The story was like 2/3 done. It didn’t have a clear ending, but I really liked the main character. Little Miss Free Market. She is very punky. So while I was finishing up MTS I had a few ideas. Going back to that story turned out to be easy, and suddenly I knew how to bring it home. It’s still not quite done. I need to give it to a few people to read over. There are things that I’m not sure about yet, but all the parts are there.

Then this morning I looked at another story of mine, called Burning the Forest and decided it was ready to send. So off it went to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. We’ll see what they say.

Part of why I like Burning The Forest comes from scratching a long itch. I’d been trying to envision what the First Nations would have been like without the disastrous effects of colonialism. I’m not comfortable writing a modern day First Nations story as I really don’t know anything about the First People, except in a very casual way. I mean I’ve read some histories, but I am not of those people. The same holds for a history about them as well. Again, not my culture. However, if you were to take all of the people from today, and cast them far into future, with a culture that is much more sensitive to nature, now that I could take swing at. Thus were born the Kalata with their twin gods Raven and Ou-Ha.

But there’s more to it that that. I started this story right when a very large fire began burning through a part of the state I am fond of. I had grown up in those hills, learned to race sailboats on those lakes, backpacked on many of the same trails, tore my ACL skiing on the nearby slopes. In a very real sense I had a connection to that land, and it was burning.

For like a week my facebook feed was photo after photo of the damage as friends from back home described the destruction. I grieved along with them. Their loss felt like mine. There was this great swelling of collective grief, and I didn’t know what do to with it.

Except, I did know. I am a writer, and what I do is write. So I took those same forests that played such a large part of my growing up, and I envisioned them managed by a people who were such bad-asses when to came to fire that not a single tree would be harmed unless they allowed it.

Thus Raven became a fire god, and the people, the Kalata became fierce protectors of the forest. But also fierce burners. The Katala purify everything with fire. They keep their forest healthy because they routinely burn it. And not just the forest, the Kalata burn everything.

So I had a bunch of fire starters, and I had a bunch of communal grief. Now all I needed was someone to experience it. Thus was born, Brin, a young man who is an outsider and an orphan, and is right on the cusp of manhood. But most importantly, he is an artist. I brought Brin right up to the edge of understanding himself, but not quite. Then I pushed him over.

This is his opening:

There are four faces you will wear when you enter the house of the dead.

First you will put on disbelief. This is the face of searching for your loved ones and not finding them. Those who have been to the house of the dead will look on with sad acceptance, but you will not have that face. You will search with false belief, long after it is time to give up.

The second face you will put on is anger. When your loved one cannot be found you will feel cheated, something of yours has been taken. Wearing this face you will lash out at others, at anything that might have kept you from your love. This is not a pleasant face, but the people around you will take comfort in knowing that the things which burn fierce, burn short.

The third face you will put on is the face of the merchant. You will weigh all your possessions and attempt to exchange them for the return of your love. We all know the path to death goes in only one direction, still we attempt to trade the better parts of our life for theirs. Please, we beg, I will give all my trophies, my fine furs, my house made to burn with the others, all for one moment with them in my arms again. Always this will fail.

The forth face you will put on is hopelessness. This is the face of the fire that cannot be started, the spark that cannot grow. All that you have done to return your love will have failed. Your hope for their return will slowly fade until it drops to a tiny spark, and finally by Raven’s mercy, it will be sucked down to darkness, stillborn and cold. This is the the last step on the path of grief; the thin stream of smoke that comes from an ember after it has died.

From this point forward you will wear your own face, but it is also the face of sad acceptance. You will have fought, and screamed, and demanded, and cried, until finally there is no other face for you to wear. It is your own face, but now it is lined with sadness, like the wrinkles around the eyes of an elder.

This is how we age. Our faces collect the scars of those we have loved and have passed from us, until finally our faces have no more room for scars. Then Ou-Ha in her mercy pulls us down from the fires of this world, and into the stream of forgetfulness. There in her memoryless waters we will twist and turn deeper and deeper until we come back again to the spring called rebirth, and are born once more, our faces unlined and round.

This is why we forget the fire and the pain of our birth, for we are still wet with forgetfulness, and why each birth lines the face of every mother with the knowledge of their child’s coming death. We are born from sadness to sadness, for this is the path of fire, the path of Raven. It is the foreknowledge that Raven will consume everything with his hot breath except for the grey ash of regret.

From the funeral rites at the Ou-Ha temple in Kalata.