Music in Chasing Fire
Two musical traditions appear in Chasing Fire: the Minstrelsy of Cassile and the songs of the Sages. The song form used most often by the Minstrels is something I've called a "sonnetine," which is modeled roughly on the Petrarchan sonnet. See this sample from chapter 8:
My lady, fair and lovely and unkind,
your gentle coyness wounds me to the heart.
Each distant smile and glance does draw my blood;
I tremble, sigh, and languish by your art.
No—offer not your leeches, balms or salve,
no Healer’s hand can mend the wounds I have.
Yet do you owe me recompense:
a wound in kind from my own chosen dart,
and from you thus receive amends,
to pierce you deep in this, your fairest part.
Think Cavalier poetry; think Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." The Manderan aristocrats who make up the minstrels' patronage want lush, flowery, racy stuff. Structurally, my sonnetines have ten lines, subdivided into two groups: six lines and four lines. (The Petrarchan sonnet had a octave - the first group of eight lines - which presented a topic, and a sestet - the second group of six lines - which presented its conclusion or solution.) You can see a slight shift in tone at line 7 of the sonnetine. There is also a change in meter and rhyme pattern in the second half. The first six lines are in iambic pentameter (five pairs of syllables, with the accent on the second of each pair), and are rhymed a-c-b-c-d-d. The second section of the poem, the last four lines, alternate between iambic tetrameter (four of those two-syllable groups) and pentameter, and have a rhyme scheme of e-c-f-c.
For more on the sonnet form, which provided the basis for all this, see this link from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet. It's a decent article, even though Wikipedia tends to overdo the links to distraction; it does link to a helpful discussion of iambic pentamenter.
Another Minstreline poetry form I cite is the tenson, which we see in chapter 13 as a sort of competitive duet between Fehl Connaut and Serah. I've borrowed the tenson from the medieval troubadours of southern France, and it was there as it is in Chasing Fire a form of improvised, oral entertainment between two or more accomplished poets. In medieval France, the typical topic was courtly behavior and love; Manderans would have enjoyed interchanges of charm and seduction.
A wonderful book that I've used as a source for tensons is The Women Troubadours by Meg Bogin. It specifically targets a corner of the troubadour world not normally seen, and offers glimpses into the life of the medieval woman. I had a devil of a time trying to find any good references to tensons online; sorry I can't direct you to anything.
The Sage song that appears in bits througout Chasing Fire is simpler in its format, having rotating stanzas of only three lines, a loose metric structure, and no rhyme scheme to speak of. However, in writing the song as a whole, I was careful to keep a circular format (in keeping with the Sages' circular view of time and life). No, the whole song does not appear in the book, but here it is:
We have crossed the river wide
rolling to the sea
we have left our lives there
Carried off into the sea
we have lost our lives there
we have crossed the current
We have lost ourselves to the sea
crossed the river far away
rolling out to the sea
We have crossed the wide land
far out to the sea
our lives are lost in memory
Far away the river rolls
we have lost our lives there
drowning us in the water
We have left our lives behind
washed into the river
rolling to the sea
We have crossed out from this world
from the sea of time
we have left our lives
Rolling out into the sea
all our lives are gone
the river cuts us from them
We have lost our lives there
stolen by the river
burning in the wide sea
In the first stanza, the first line talks about the river, the second about the sea, and the third about being lost or leaving something behind. The second stanza offsets this pattern by one: sea, loss, river. The third shifts down one more: loss, river, sea. The fourth is back to river (or land in this case, which has a river in it), sea, loss. And so on, with a few variations.
I actually wrote music for this:
I did sneak in some characters who have lives elsewhere. Serah, for example, is the main character in a manuscript entitled Dancing the Slaves, which I wrote just after I finished writing Confidence Game but before I sold it. Since Serah's story takes place before Confidence Game, and the publisher wanted a forward-moving series, I have yet to sell Dancing the Slaves. I hope to get it out there some day, though.
Cal's Ikindan friends, Ar'alan and Mister Runes, originated in a short story I wrote years and years ago. (I plan to post that original story on the blog; keep an eye out!) I always felt that story needed expanding, and a few years later I took a stab at turning it into a novel -- it was the first full-length book manuscript I wrote. It was also crap; it now lives at the bottom of my closet. However, when I was developing the background for Ikinda, I saw how those two characters could fit into it. One of these days when I have a lot more time, I'll sit down and write a novel about Ikinda and the adventures of Ar'alan and Mister Runes therein.
What else can you tell us about this book?
Not many questions about this one have come in yet, so if you have a question, ask me! You can also ask a question on my blog.
Frequently Asked Questions
Some of the minor characters seem to have lives of their own. What's going on with them?