Nicholas Raven and the Wizards' Web (The Complete Epic Fantasy)
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21 The bodies of Dooley Kramer and Dell Hawks are located and removed from the swamp.
24 Nicholas receives an invitation to Megan and Leo’s wedding. Ned Adams offers Nicholas his old job back at the gristmill that is still being rebuilt.
Mid Summer
1st day of month Nicholas travels to Boros and visits Ivy at Aunt Castella’s house. Castella announces that she will move to Morrenwood in the autumn after Megan and Leo’s wedding. Nicholas and Ivy tell her they plan to marry next spring.
5 Nicholas and Ivy travel to Laurel Corners to spend some time with Ivy’s family, announcing their engagement.
New Autumn
3rd day of month Princess Megan and Leo Marsh are married in the Blue Citadel in Morrenwood.
6 Nicholas and Ivy leave Morrenwood and head for home after the wedding festivities.
9 Nicholas arrives in Kanesbury with Ivy who visits for a couple of weeks.
Mid Winter
2nd day of month Nicholas and Ivy walk along frozen Sage Bay when he visits her in Laurel Corners during winter. Ivy shows him a spot near a willow tree along shore where she wants to get married.
Year 744
Mid Spring
14th day of month Nicholas and Ivy are married along Sage Bay in Laurel Corners.
Old Spring
22nd day of month King Cedric of Drumaya hosts a gathering of public officials in Grantwick to discuss the state of affairs in the region.
Mid Summer
1st day of month Ivy’s sisters, Martha and Jane, arrive in Kanesbury to visit.
22 Nicholas receives a letter from Leo detailing their plans to accompany Hobin into the Dunn Hills in autumn.
New Autumn
6th day of month Nicholas and Ivy depart for Morrenwood.
9 Megan and Leo tell Nicholas and Ivy that they are expecting a child late in the spring.
11 Nicholas and Leo depart the Blue Citadel for Woodwater.
16 Nicholas and Leo arrive at Hobin’s home in Woodwater.
26 Nicholas, Leo and Hobin climb the middle peak of the Five Brothers mountain range.
Mid Autumn
19th day of month Nicholas and Ivy return to Kanesbury.
New Winter
10th day of month Ivy tells Nicholas she is expecting their first child.
Year 745
Old Summer
1st day of month Jack Frederick Raven, Nicholas and Ivy’s first child, is born.
Fox Moon and Bear Moon
To help give my story a more otherworldly feel, I decided to have two moons grace the skies above it, namely, the Fox Moon and the Bear Moon, the latter being the larger of the two lunar orbs. And as two rising full moons are supposed to be a sign of good fortune in this world, a concept first introduced with an engraving of the full moons on Princess Megan’s royal medallion, the full Fox and Bear rise above the mountains at the end of the story upon Vellan’s defeat.
In order to keep track of which phase of which moon was visible on a particular day if I made mention of it, I ended up devising a numbered shorthand for each moon phase in their respective cycles and jotted them down on one side of the yearly calendars I drew up to keep track of my characters and plotlines. After committing to this concept, I wanted the presentation to be as accurate as possible.
And to make things mathematically simple for me, I gave the Fox Moon a twenty-eight day orbit and the Bear Moon a thirty-two day orbit, which means that the two full moons would rise together every 224 days, or just about every eight months by this calendar. Though most people who read the book won’t give any of this a second thought, I strived for accurate calculations nonetheless, usually being a stickler for details. Any mistakes about this or anything else in the book are strictly mine.
What follows is an image of one of my calendars (Year 742) that I used to keep track of my storyline. The numbers in parentheses represent the chronological days of the story beginning in the first chapter, again, for my writing benefit. The second image is the moon chart I drew to follow the Fox and Bear in their orbits.
One of four calendars I constructed to help me keep track of the timeline of events in the novel. The numbers on the right margin indicate the weekly moon phases for the Fox and Bear.
A sketch I drew charting the Fox and Bear moons so I could track their phases when I made mention of them in the book.
A Brief Geneology
As the family members of King Justin of Arrondale are related to the Nibbs/Durant residents of Kanesbury, I constructed a partial family tree to illustrate those connections. I extended the family line as far back as needed to show this, though several people listed in earlier generations do not appear nor are mentioned in the book. The line begins with King Vincent and his sister, Elizabeth, who would be King Justin’s grandfather and great aunt, respectively.
Inspiring Words
While working on this book, I began to post monthly updates on my website starting in April 2011 that presented various aspects of writing this novel, some delving into the background of the story while others were more nuts and bolts in nature about my page progress. One, printed below, details how I was inspired to begin this project a few years after reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in 1975 when I was twelve years old.
Update #17 - August 24, 2012
I'm particularly happy to be writing this update today for two reasons. One, it's not the last day of the month, which too many times I found myself nearly breaking my rule to post one update per month. Two, and more importantly, I'm delighted to report that I completed Chapter 96 a few days ago and finished editing it on Wednesday. This chapter, along with Chapters 92 - 95, are what the storyline has been building to and where many plot points are finally resolved. These five chapters together run 215 pages, more than I first anticipated, but it was well worth the effort to reshape my original ideas over the last few months and produce a better story than I once imagined in my teens and twenties. The total page number right now stands at just a bit over 2300, not including what I've already completed for Chapter 97 which I started writing three days ago. Now just six chapters to go!
I feel as if I have climbed over a high wall to get to this point in my book, with only a few minor hurdles left to complete. So I thought I'd write about how and why I decided to take on this enormous literary effort. In my first post (April 17, 2011), I mentioned how in the spring of 1975 when I was twelve years old I had read J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and then later The Hobbit, which inspired me to write my own epic fantasy novel.
In that post I had written: Besides the interesting characters and events in Tolkien's story, I was greatly impressed by the grand narrative sweep of the work, so much so that I reread it several times in my youth (along with The Hobbit) and a few more times since. After reading the three volumes the first time, I felt as if I had taken the journey myself, often thinking back to particular sections of the book and consulting his maps as if they represented a real place. It wasn't long after my first couple of readings [in the fall of 1978] that I began to imagine snippets of my own narrative, some more developed than others, and many not even connected to one another in a proper storyline. But I knew then that I wanted to write my own grand narrative someday. And nearly thirty-three years later, I'm almost there.
Let's now make that thirty-four years later. And when I think about how I first stumbled upon Tolkien's works in 1975, it was, like Bilbo Baggins finding the One Ring of power, just a matter of chance.
While in sixth grade, the textbook series that I was using in my reading class contained some stories that were chapters from various novels, though no mention of the novels themselves was provided as I recall. One of the stories was titled Riddles in the Dark, which Tolkien fans know is Chapter Five from The Hobbit, a key chapter where Bilbo Baggins finds the One Ring. I remember reading that story in April of 1975, not realizing it was an excerpt from a novel, and then plowing through the rest of the volume since I liked
to read ahead even before the stories were assigned as homework.
One afternoon shortly afterward, during a free period where students were allowed to work on their own and talk quietly, I was seated at my desk doing some homework when a classmate in the next row to my right began telling another student about a book he had read. I couldn't help but overhear the conversation about someone named Frodo who inherited a magic ring and had to drop it in the Cracks of Doom to destroy it. I didn't know who this Frodo character was or where exactly the Cracks of Doom were located, but I had heard something about a magic ring and quickly realized that my classmate was referring to the One Ring mentioned in Riddles in the Dark.
As my interest was piqued, I later asked him about what book he had been discussing. He told me that the story we had read was a chapter lifted from a novel called The Hobbit. I was further intrigued when he mentioned there was a three-part sequel called The Lord of the Rings which recounted the journey to destroy the One Ring. I was immediately hooked by his description, and so after school that day, we went to the public library just down the block to find the book. Unfortunately, when we got there, the book had already been checked out. And worse, there was a waiting list.
It seems around that time, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were quite popular, being the Harry Potter of its time. And that was before the Internet and 24-hour news. So I put my name on the waiting list, disappointed that I couldn't take the book home. But my classmate suggested that I check out the first volume of The Lord of the Rings instead since I had already read the key chapter about the ring in The Hobbit. So I did, eager to get on with this literary adventure. But after reading the first few pages of Chapter One of The Fellowship of the Ring, I set the book aside and remember it sitting on the second shelf of the small desk my brother and I shared in our bedroom.
As I recall the stretch of weather at the time being warm and sunny, I can only guess that I was more drawn to play outdoors than flip through the pages of a book, though I was a voracious reader during those years. But each time I walked past my desk, I always noticed the book and felt a tinge of guilt for not reading it because of all the help offered from my classmate. So as the book's May due date drew closer and closer, I again picked it up and started from the beginning, only this time I never put the book down and flew through the pages. Soon I was back in the library to check out The Two Towers, and later, The Return of the King. I was enthralled with the story, feeling as if I had gone on that journey myself.
Then one sunny day in August, I received a telephone call from the library informing me that The Hobbit had been returned and that I was next on the list to check it out. In a flash, I walked down to the library (or possibly ran, I can't remember), signed out the book and hurried home. I do remember how excited I was to finally be able to read this novel and recall pouring myself a tall glass of iced tea, grabbing a lawn chair and unfolding it in the backyard and then plopping down and losing myself in its pages. And though I can't remember the book cover illustration for the volumes of The Lord of the Rings that I first read (even an online search didn't jog my memory), I clearly recall the tan cloth hardcover edition of The Hobbit that I read containing a small, red, bowing hobbit impression on the upper right hand side.
I guess why I remember these minor details with such clarity is because they are important to me and helped formed who I am in part as a writer. I think it's important that everyone have a passion of one sort or another. Mine is writing, and more specifically, writing this current book. And whether one's passion is grand or simple, or provides you with a living or not, hopefully it will give you joy and sustain you through life's ups and downs, inspire you and possibly others, and ultimately make you a better person.
As you can see, this has been one of my longest posts, so why stop now? I'll leave you with one more interesting nugget (to me, anyway) about my first encounter with The Hobbit. When first thinking about writing this post several months ago, I suddenly remembered that reading the Riddles in the Dark chapter was not the first time I had heard about The Hobbit. I had actually seen the book many times before but never knew anything about it.
In the grade school I attended, the fifth through eighth grades were located on the second floor and shared a small, one-room library at the end of the hallway. I remember often scanning the wall on the left side of the room after entering the library to find a book to read, and while doing so, one book spine always caught my attention. Perhaps it was the bold blue, green, black and white colors that jumped out at me, since being colorblind, the stark color contrasts probably appealed to me more than subtler shades. Or maybe the unusual title The Hobbit intrigued me as well. What was a hobbit, I probably asked myself.
But what surprises me most in retrospect is that, one, I don't specifically recall noting the titles of any of the other books on that shelf, only The Hobbit, and two, not once did I ever pull the book down to take a look at it. Go figure! I guess the creative writer part of me would like to think that whenever my eye caught sight of that book and for some reason never took it off the shelf, it was a sign of some sort, as if the book were quietly telling me that it would be an important part of my writing life, but not just yet. I'd still have to wait a while longer before I should read it.
But the funny thing I only realized a short time ago when thinking about writing this post was that it never occurred to me to check out this edition of The Hobbit when my classmate and I went to the public library to find the book. Events in life though, whether large or small, happen as they do. And if I had read The Hobbit earlier, I would have missed out waiting for that telephone call all summer, racing to the library to see the return date stamped inside as I checked out the book, and then enjoying a cold, iced tea in my backyard on a warm August afternoon while I savored each page.
So I guess it was worth the wait. And for those of you waiting for me to finish this book as well, I hope it's worth it for you too. Back in September.
To those of you who have read
all three volumes and made it this far,
my sincere thanks and appreciation.
~ Books by Thomas J. Prestopnik ~
Missing Tweets no. 4
for adults & older teens
The Griffin Ghostley Adventure Series
for readers ages 10 to 13
Search for the Silver Swamp Monster #1
Prisoner of the Giant Boona Bird #2
Nicholas Raven and the Wizards’ Web
an epic fantasy in three volumes for adults & older teens
A Christmas Castle
a novella for adults & older teens
The Endora Trilogy
a fantasy-adventure series for pre-teens & adults
The Timedoor - Book I
The Sword and the Crown - Book II
The Saving Light - Book III
Gabriel’s Journey
an adventure novel for pre-teens & adults
Visit Thomas J. Prestopnik’s official website
www.TomPresto.com