Welcome to THE STAR SHARD WEEK!

Put on your party hats and blow your party horns — it’s STAR SHARD WEEK! Credit for this idea goes to Emily Fiegenschuh, the artist who illustrated “The Star Shard” in its original form in Cricket Magazine. This week on her blog, Emily is celebrating the book’s release with reminiscences, pictures, and never-before-seen-by-the-public sketches of the characters, monsters, architecture, settings, and objects that make up the story’s world. One particularly fascinating aspect is how the concepts emerged as the vision took shape. So stop in throughout this week at Emily’s blog: http://fabledearth.blogspot.com/. (And don’t forget Emily’s main web site, either, at www.e-figart.com, where you can find out all about her work and see all the original illustrations for “The Star Shard” that appeared in Cricket. Also remember that, here on my web site, on the page devoted to The Star Shard, there are links to the archived discussions Emily and I had with young readers, writers, and artists during the year of the story’s serialization; and there are links to the fan art that readers sent in to Cricket.)

Here on my blog, I also intend to celebrate STAR SHARD WEEK with daily posts on various aspects of the story and book. If there are particular topics you’d like me to address, please let me know!

Today — Sunday, Day One — the topic is the Thunder Rake. Just as the town of Harvest Moon is in many ways the real “star” of my novel Dragonfly, the Thunder Rake lies at the heart of this story. It is the environment that has shaped the main character Cymbril in her formative years; it is her prison, her playground, and the only home she has known.

The Thunder Rake is a wooden city on wheels. A ship of the land . . . a rolling fortress . . . it is a defense against robbers and wild beasts, and it is the bringer of goods both mundane and exotic to the people of the far-scattered towns and cities. For slaves like Cymbril, there is no escape from the Rake: even if one could get past the guards and through one of the massive, shut gates or hatches, the wilderness is full of peril, and the Rake’s Master has friends in every community.

Yet for all its confinement and drudgery, the Rake also harbors endless mystery. Its dim corridors call out to Cymbril, begging to be explored. There are dangling crank baskets and stairways; there are crawl spaces, secret chambers, fading inscriptions, and a limitless supply of intriguing paraphernalia, some of it apparently forgotten. Along the darkest stretches, torchmoss casts its pallid glow over the fading outlines of the past. No one knows precisely how many decks the Rake has, for its ongoing construction has jammed buildings into courtyards and bridged gulfs with new balconies. Ceilings on the topmost level can be drawn back on summer nights to let in the breeze and starlight. In this rumbling warren, the passages have names like streets.

Where did the idea of the Thunder Rake come from? From many places, I’m sure. But probably chief among them is the barn in which I spent countless happy hours as a kid:

The barn behind my childhood home

The barn didn’t roll from place to place (except when we kids wanted it to, in our imaginations). But the feeling to it, and the way we explored it — yes, that’s where the Thunder Rake came from. There was the same haphazard architecture, new walls, new doors, new stalls added by different farmers with different minds over the years. There were secret hatches, long-lost tools and other treasures, mysteries, bizarre creatures both of the scaly and winged variety, and cats and dogs. There was danger, the ever-present possibility of real injury. And there were portals grown over and sealed shut by vines, too sacred in their living fetters to be forced open.

I remember that when we started out, Cricket’s Editor-in-Chief Marianne Carus asked me if I could give the artist something to go on, a sketch that might help in the design (because in the story, I really don’t say much about the Rake’s external appearance; there’s a bit more in the book, I think, than in the original shorter story). I produced this:

Prow of the Thunder Rake, preliminary sketch

As you can see, when Emily rendered this into actual paintings, she was painstakingly faithful to my design. She made everything look much better, but she clearly studied my sketch and included everything she could identify. (Some of my squiggles are open to interpretation!)

The Thunder Rake, Fred's sketch

I remember that in my first version of this sketch, I drew the front wheels in a way that showed very obviously that they couldn’t be turned left or right. That would mean that the Rake itself could never be steered! Erase, erase, redraw, redraw . . .

Now here’s an artifact for you: my cover letter when I first submitted the story to Cricket in June, 2004:

Cover letter accompanying first submission of "The Star Shard" to CRICKET

Be sure to tune in again tomorrow for Day Two of STAR SHARD WEEK! (And don’t forget to visit Emily’s blog!)

 

14 Responses to Welcome to THE STAR SHARD WEEK!

  1. Preacher says:

    Well, Fred, I had a little celebration of my own. Today is my birthday, and my family very kindly got me gifts to commemorate the day and lessen the blow of getting ever closer to 50. It is a tradition in our household to save the best gift for last. That is, whatever the person wanted the most or the gift we think he’ll enjoy the most, we say, “Open that one last.” So, my wife put one gift aside and said to open all the rest. There were clothes and DVDs and a gift card and a Nerf dart gun (gotta love gifts from 9-year-old boys), and then finally the last one. My wife was particularly excited to give it to me. When I opened it, I could see why. She was right, it was indeed the best gift of the bunch. A brand spanking new copy of The Star Shard! Fred, you are now officially part of “most valued gifts” in our family. (And my wife also told me that she got the book at Barnes & Noble–with the cover displayed outward and about 6 copies on the shelf! That’s pretty big exposure around here!) So thanks for being the most valuable gift at my birthday, Fred! And congratulations again on The Star Shard.

    • fsdthreshold says:

      What a wonderful story, Preacher! Thank you so much for telling it! I am deeply honored — and I like the part about the Nerf dart gun, too! I’m really excited that the book was such a big part of your birthday. It’s fantastic that your wife knew you would like it that much! (Will you have to fight your nine-year-old for the chance to read it first?)

      And, wow, I want to come to your town! I want to see six (or five) copies of The Star Shard on a bookstore shelf! (None so far in Pittsburgh — but I’m working on it!)

      Happy Birthday!

    • Shieldmaiden says:

      Yes, I wanted to know how it is doing as well. Is there a site people can look up how a book is doing? I know there is a top 100 bestsellers, but can you look up a particular title?

    • fsdthreshold says:

      Hi, Joe! As for the ARC, please see the end of the previous post (“Pittsburgh’s Own Pan”)! There’s still a way for someone to win it.

      I don’t know yet how well the book is doing. Thanks for asking!

  2. Morwenna says:

    It’s really interesting to read about one of the key inspirations for the Thunder Rake. I love the stories behind stories!

  3. Ahh the old barn! How many hours did we spend playing there? Chris, as a neighbor, was there more often. It was a magical place for our imaginations, although I still find it hard to believe we would jump from the second floot loft to the ground (what were we thinking, or were we even thinking?)

    • fsdthreshold says:

      I’m not sure what the charm of that was. Do you remember how we’d stack the haybales into labyrinthine forts? There was one way through. They were pitch-black inside, very hot (summer), scratchy, and aromatic. Often we’d find long, papery snake skins woven into the bales.

  4. Buurenaar says:

    It all sounded wonderful up until the snake skins. There are few things in this world that make me freak out. Of course, I also kill them while having my spazz attack. It basically boils down to “anything that has a deathly poisonous species–aside from frogs and the majority of lizards.”

    • fsdthreshold says:

      Well, in the upper Midwest, snakes aren’t so bad, unless you’re in the deep timber (timber rattlers) or in a creek (water moccasins). Graham snakes and the like are startling, and I don’t like them, either. But their empty skins are part of the haybale world.

  5. Buurenaar says:

    I’d have to be packing either a derringer or a gigantic combat knife before I’d be comfortable climbing around through that. I can handle a hedgehog, even one with a horrendous temper, but not a snake. Isn’t that right, Kalikir? (hedgehog huffles at me in the background)

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