An early draft passage from the upcoming Sword of the Magnus, Book Two of the Paladin of Shadow Chronicles:

A tangle of tunnels twisted through the catacombs that once provided refuge to the earliest adherents of the Christian faith, those who fled the streets of Rome above from the horror of imperial pogroms. Many of those refugees scratched a brief word or two across the crudely hewn walls, their scratchings covering centuries of other, older communications left behind by fleeing slaves and black market gangs that operated through the Roman centuries in the darkness far outside the law. Yet amid all the primitive artwork, none chronicled the movements of the undead. But the moldering bones scattered through nooks and grottoes surely held those horrible secrets in their twisted repose. And those silent remains were not about to give up those secrets even to the keen glowing eyes of a familiar.

I recently posted on social media, “Lost in the catacombs beneath ancient Rome… I get to go some strange places when I write.”

And it is something of a truth for me. If you’ve read The Silver Horn Echoes: A Song of Roland, or even Annwyn’s Blood, Book One of the Paladin of Shadows Chronicles, then you know that one of the things I love about writing is the ability of the author to take the reader someplace they have never been before, whether it be an old monastery at Canterbury, a village burned out by pillaging bandits, or a musty old castle inhabited by the creeping dead. And that is the beauty of being a novelist.

You see, I am also a screenwriter and am currently in talks with a couple of production companies surrounding Song of Roland, the screenplay from which sprang The Silver Horn Echoes. Writing a screenplay is a very different, and collaborative exercise in storytelling. As a writer, I give the other collaborators enough guidance on the major actions in a scene, all flowing through a three act structure. Through my use of prose, I give them the bones of what will be a fully realized story once it enters development and brings on board a director, is shaped by other collaborators such as producers, actors and studios. These collaborators bring a vision for the story and the particular material that I as a writer may help them in realizing, or they will fully develop through rewrites to the script, selection of location, costuming, casting the actors, etc. However, as a novelist, or short story writer, I am free to more fully develop those worlds.

Roland receiving the horn at Roncevaux

That said, here is a balance that is important in the material. I want to give you enough information that you feel grounded in the world so that you begin to help paint a picture of the scene. Why? Because writing fiction allows me as an author to enlist many, many people I’ve never met before into a collaborative relationship for world building. You also get to help in casting, populating scenes with background characters and activities, imagining voices, imagining the caress of two lovers, feeling the dust of battle and the anguish of the wounded and dying. And you get to imagine the exhilaration of victory; and the redemption of a soul burdened by the darkness of his or her own choices. Once the novel leaves my hands, you become an active partner in the production because all this must play out in a way that taps your creativity as a reader. You become my production partner.

I know this isn’t very profound. Likely, it has been part of what makes reading so joyful to you. But as an author, I never get to see the worlds you create when you produce my work by reading.

And I hope one day you share that with me!