Melee--Coming Soon

Tomorrow or the next day, I'll finish Melee, the third book in my Menagerie series. Menagerie wasn't supposed to be a series. It was one book--the idea a gift from my sister's students. I had a hard time writing the ending because I knew a character I love had to die. But I wasn't at peace with it. I wrestled with it. In the end, I came up with an ending that surprised me. I hope it will surprise others, as well.

Don't look for Melee too soon. I haven't even booked my editor yet. If you haven't started the Menagerie series, you can get Menagerie for FREE. GET YOURS HERE

 And to whet your appetite for Melee, here are the chapter headings:

It is during the wee hours when our most immense dreams come to us.

Jean Arp

Hold fast to dreams

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

Langston Hughes

‘To die, to sleep – to sleep – perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause.’

William Shakespeare

Thoughts being things, they may be planted like seeds in the mind of the child and completely dominate his mental content. Given the favorable soil of the will to believe, whether the seed-thoughts be sound or unsound, whether they be of pure superstition or of realizable truth, they take root and flourish, and make the man what he is mentally.”

― Walter Evans-Wentz

Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Language is the link of human relationships, and before they are anything else, fairy stories are the original family romances.

If fairies actually exist as invisible beings or intelligences, and our investigations lead us to the tentative hypothesis that they do, they are natural and not supernatural, for nothing which exists can be supernatural.

Walter Evans-Wentz

Those elements which we meet in all the tales are like the fragments of a shattered stone, scattered on the ground amid the flowers and grass: only the most piercing eye can discover them. Their meaning has long been lost, but it can still be felt, and that is what gives the tale its value.

Wilhelm Grimm

Fairyland exists as a supernormal state of consciousness into which me and women may enter temporarily in dreams, trances, or in various ecstatic conditions; or for an indefinite period at death.

Walter Evans-Wentz

The souls or spirits of the dead are identical with the psychic activity of the living; they merely continue it…the concentration and tension of psychic forces have something about them that always looks like magic.

Carl Jung

So long as the evil spirit is caught in the upper world, the princess cannot get down to earth either, and the hero remains lost in paradise.

Carl Jung

The magic wand is endowed with the gift of transforming the universe in a landscape populated by desired things. In fact, the real magic wand is the child’s mind.

Ortega y Gasset

In the Victorian fairy tale, the female’s role is merely passive. She is to sit and wait upon her tuffet, languish in a tower with nothing more taxing to do than grow her hair, or spin hay into gold—ever waiting upon her hero who will deliver her to her happily ever after.

The young man is charged with the duty of discerning the inner beauty of the princess hiding beneath rags and shrouded in soot. His task must be to break through the mystical forest or scale the tower in name of a true love he has never met but can only imagine.

To the north and south in the golden glow of a September twilight we saw the long line of the Outer Hebrides like the rocky backbone of some submerged continent. The scenes and colours on the land and ocean and in the sky seemed more like some magic vision, reflected from Faerie by the 'good people' for our delight, than a thing of our own world.

 Never was air clearer or sea calmer, nor could there be air sweeter than that in the mystic mountain-stillness holding the perfume of millions of tiny blossoms of purple and white heather; and as the last honey-bees were leaving the beautiful blossoms their humming came to our ears like low, strange music from Fairyland.”

― W.Y. Evans-Wentz

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‘real’ world

J.R.R. Tolkien

A safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds.

J.R.R. Tolkien