Roland Yeomans (and a Tart Begging Mercy)

So Wednesday while Roland was so kindly hosting me, I was supposed to be hosting him, too. Totally my fault. I just didn't have the trade in my head. He'd sent me the blog but had included information about me being a guest and somehow I only processed part of it.

So PLEASE forgive me, Roland!!! Roland is such an incredibly nice man, and it is just somehow what I do... I try to be nice most of the time, but when I screw up, it is with the people I feel the absolute worst about... He also has an AMAZING imagination, something that, as a writer, I am a bit insecure about... I tend to think of myself as more a puzzlemaster, noticing things and mixing them up in an original way. Roland, though, is incredibly creative.

Wee bit of other business... [I posted my intended Girls Just Want to Have Fun Blogfest overnight, if you stopped in as part of THAT, but I really need to make right on this other...]

I am ALSO visiting Talli Roland today: http://talliroland.blogspot.com/

Anyway, I am HONORED to have Roland here with me today!

Thanks, Hart, for inviting me to your cozy cyber home.  You write mysteries, and I write myths.  Yet, we both dream, both try to answer the eternal questions.


T.S. Eliot wrote that happiness did not consist of goals obtained or griefs lost but consisted of  different visions discovered.


{All the following illustrations are in END OF DAYS and are by Leonora Roy}



MY DIFFERENT VISION

MYTH, MAGIC, AND OTHERWORLD BEAUTY:




What draws us to write?
It is a solitary sojourn. Most of us will never receive world acclaim ...

nor do we expect it.
What then propels us on this journey?


What swept you up when you first started to read for yourself? How often do you find a book which conjures that same spirit within you now?
Not often I would wager.

I believe we write to create that world which spellbound us into reading in the first place. What voices called out to us then?


For me the voices were :
Magic, horror, and otherworld beauty
These three sirens dominated my solitary reading of choice during my high school years. And their voices can be heard in the background of all that I write. Like the three fates, they weave the tapestry of my unconscious muse.

As a young child, I wandered alone into Edith Hamilton's MYTHOLOGY.

In junior high, I joined the League of Five and group reading with BEAU GESTE and DR. FU MANCHU.

In high school, I was alone again in my reading, open to any influence that caught my fancy.
The authors of those years were my unknowing mentors in how to write well. Oddly enough it was an artist who led me in the land where they all dwelt :

Frank Frazetta. And he painted the first road sign on my path to becoming a writer :
1) OTHERWORLD BEAUTY WILL HAUNT YOU, BRINGING YOU BACK TO THE BEGINNING.



EERIE #23 : THE EGYPTIAN PRINCESS
When I spotted the cover to EERIE#23 with Frazetta's "Egyptian Princess" in a used book store, I was spellbound. Yes, she was clothing-challenged. But it were her eyes that ensnared me.


From that moment on, I noticed eyes : weary ones , dull ones, evaluating ones, and those who were black windows into the nothingness that lived in the souls of those who possessed them. 


The books with Frazetta's covers taught me my 2nd lesson: 


2) HISTORY IS NOT WHAT WE THINK -

THERE IS MYSTERY AND MAGIC UNDER THE TOMBSTONES.
UNDER THE PYRAMIDS by H.P. Lovecraft (with Harry Houdini)

My hands went into warp speed when I saw the Frazetta cover emblazoned with that title. Frazetta. Harry Houdini. Wow.

I didn't know this Lovecraft fellow, but I had to see what kind of supernatural trouble Houdini had gotten into in his Egyptian travels.
And I wasn't disappointed :
The first sentence : "Mystery attracts mystery."
I was hooked.


Then, came the terrible imprisonment within an ancient, dark pyramid. The clever escape and the final glimpse of horror.


From Frazetta, Burroughs, Howard, and Lovecraft ... I learned how history can be made alive and alluring ... and supernatural. It is a lesson that stays with me still.

3) ROGER ZELAZNY'S LORD OF LIGHT :

Perched in the used bookstore shelf right next to a Frazetta cover of a Conan novel was the book that was to teach me that prose could be beautiful and evocative without being stale and stiff. I picked up LORD OF LIGHT and read the first paragraph :

Mystery. Evocative imagry. I was hooked.

I became his student -- through his books, his essays, and his poetry.
Some of his words :
"No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words."
"For you see, the headwaters of Shit Creek are a cruel and treacherous expanse."
"Occasionally as an author, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which.
You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the firstplace.
Trust your demon."

What were the voices that beckoned you to write?