by Kara Dalkey
Water was rather like writing a movie script, in that it required the oversight of many interested parties. The editors, both at 17th Street and Harper, were very involved every step of the way. They reviewed each outline and first draft of each book I produced to make sure the project fulfilled the publishers’ vision.
This is not to say that I had no creative input into the work. It turned out, for example, that the outline I was working from didn’t have quite as many events as would be needed to fill three books. It was up to me to restructure the second and third book in such a way that the story would be long enough, and full of enough adventure and excitement, to please the readers. The characters changed, too, as I discovered the best “voice” each character would have.
Given that there were three outlines and three rough drafts, all of which needed revision and review, it was amazing that we managed to finish this project in less than a year. Because speed was required, most of my research on such things as Arthurian legend, Welsh history, and the marine life of the North Atlantic, was done on the Internet. While one has to be cautious about information offered on the Web, I found it to be very useful for my purposes.
Writing a book about an undersea city filled with people who live their lives entirely in a water environment posed some interesting challenges. I had to think about their everyday activities — how they breathed, how they talked, how and what they would eat, how they would sleep. I could take nothing for granted. It would be silly, for example, to drink a beverage out of an open glass, since it would just mix with sea water. So I came up with the idea of a special kind of kelp that grows big water-tight sacks or gourds that can be used to hold drinks.
Then there was the matter of the culture of Atlantis. Given the presence of the alien Farworlders, and the different structure of government, I had to think about how that affected the everyday lives of the mermyds as well. Particularly how the mermyds of different clans and classes, noble and non-noble, treated each other. And, of course, the contests of the Trials themselves I had to create in accordance with what would be important to an undersea people, as well as a people who could do some forms of magic. (I confess I did borrow somewhat from our tradition of the Olympic games. Given that the Olympics were developed in ancient Greece, whose culture the Atlanteans would have been familiar with, I didn’t think this was too big of a stretch.)
The editors were straightforward in wanting me to create a form of magic, clear in its limits and the abilities it gave its users, that the readers would understand. In a way, I tried to use a scientific approach, implying that the knowledge of the Farworlders regarding energy and space/time were what permitted “magic” to exist.
Even though the Water trilogy, like every writing project I do, presented its own unique challenges, I’m very happy with the results. I hope these books will be as exciting and fun for the reader to read as they were for this writer to write.
— Kara Dalkey
Enjoy all three books in the Trilogy:
#1 Ascension
#2 Reunion
#3 Transformation
Credits
Cover art © 2002 by Dan Craig
Cover design © 2002 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
About the Publisher
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
ASCENSION. Copyright © 2002 by 17th Street Productions, an Alloy, Inc. company. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition. January 2002 ISBN 9780061757488
First Avon edition, 2002
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