Death Revisited

I am paying a visit to my good old friend: Death.

Death to the Old
No, I'm not a near-suicidal artist or deep gothic writer, I'm talking about the character Death... warmed over. You see, I don't want to rehash the same old, same old with Ælemental. I want it to be fresh, innovative and exciting to a new generation. But I'm also tackling fairy tales. Yeah, you know, the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen. And that's just in the first book. So you see my dilemma: how to dress up the old in a new coat.

The New Fairy Tales
By now you may have caught on to the Sisters Grimm series or one of the fairy tale TV shows (Grimm or Once Upon A Time). And yes, the shows are just as creative as their titles suggest. Kinda blah. The Sisters Grimm novels are actually quite entertaining, but are rather light in approach. I'm trying to rewrite fairy tales in the way Tolkien would have done: with grandeur and prolific gravitas. But I also want it to be weird. Alien weird. Guillermo del Toro or Clive Barker weird. I want the characters to have history, but also an otherworldly feel and strangeness to it, that is offsetting at first, but totally logical when you dig deeper.

Meet Death
Death really is just a minor character, but there are fairy tales that deal with the Grim Reaper in all of his glory. I wanted to incorporate a fair amount of real danger to Ælemental and have Simon, Sally, Alix, Karl and Maya truly deal with deadly threats - both real and fantastic. Gone is the robe and scythe, in with the black suit, fedora and morphing face. Add some SFX like screams erupting from the folds of his jacket and a permanent black fog upon which he glides and you're starting to get where I'm going.

The Practical Aspects
So I stopped redrafting Chapter 16 back in November 2011, leaving Simon, Alix and Sesame stranded inside Death's offices, while searching for the magical artifact that will give them bargaining leverage towards rescuing Sally from her kidnappers. But Death would not be useful if he didn't have a few trinkets I wanted to use. Like the glass of water in which his image reflects when you hold it above a dying person. But I cannot possibly let you on to what happens with that glass of water other than that I changed it into a glass key. The glass key is useful for foreshadowing upon who befalls some awful fate later in the book. Death himself turns out to be very interesting and not all is as it seems at first. Aw, read the book if you want to know how or what. :)

Back to writing...

The Wheels Are Turning Once Again

I finally wrapped up the 'Map Project' (see previous blog) last night around midnight. It took me way longer than I thought it would take, seeing that I already had a 'draft' prototype, which I used to keep Alex busy on our X-mas trip to Shanghai last year. Instead of a few days it took me a few weeks, at which Simon & Sally were whittling sticks besides the road (so to speak). Even the 'final touches' took me hours instead of minutes. There's a lesson on life somewhere in there, but I can't put my finger on it. Maybe because my fingers are too eager to get back to writing.

So this morning I started fresh. I cleaned off my working space, moving design magazines, comic books, previous map models and prototypes, pencils, erasers, rulers and tape. I basically placed it onto the floor (as it usually ends up on). Then some heavy scrubbing of my desk, mouse and keyboard for that extra clean feeling (somewhere I heard those gather more bacteria than a toilet seat) and finally a laying out of plot source materials and random bits and pieces of notes and previous drafted documents that hold Simon's world together. On with The Tree of Life (now tentatively renamed: Lifebringer).

So where did I leave off? A month (or two? I can't remember) ago Simon had cast upon him a death sentence by the Fairy Tale Court in the Black Forest in Germany. That is, unless he can fulfill three quests in typical fairy tale tradition, but they range from slaying a dragon to defeating death. I've restructured some of the events that take place in this fairy tale domain on the printed plot document already, mainly because I'm aiming to cut back the number of words and non-related events. Still I have to spend time (and words) establishing a decent dialog between characters and filling out the 'In the Meantime...' chapters that will hopefully give the book that 'pageturning' quality.

Three relatively unrelated events including characters I will now be fusing together, making the next few chapters a little bit more connected (and flow easier) at which I also hope to cut out some of the 'filler'. The fun part is that I get to establish any kind of connection and background to existing fairy tale characters. At one point I'll have to look into possible copyright infringement and other such rights, but I think I'm safe. After all, there is a ton of material out there that reinvents fairy tales. Fables by Vertigo Comics, the Grimm Fairy Tails comic and the Sisters Grimm by Michael Buckley and more. For now I'm more interested in just telling a good story. The less than fun part is that I have to sift through hundreds of sentences to make sure I don't throw out essential story revelations or moments.

With that in mind I'm now less interested in maintaining a perfect balance of the monomyth and even consistently inserting extra chapters to keep the story perspective changing between characters. It has already taken me too long to plot, write and now redraft the book. If I can just concentrate on a smooth storytelling and decent realistic characters that grow then I'll rest in confidence that I took care of fleshing out the world's mythology and 'cool' aspects of the world in the first writing. After all: 1st draft = for me, rewrite = for other readers. Besides, Nancy and the publisher's editor will no doubt handle a well sharpened axe.

World Wide Ideas

I wrote a couple of entries ago about how I revived written material from an idea about Olympian gods and a young kid who discovers he's related to them. If this concept seems familiar, it's because it is: Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Yesterday walking through the Kinokuniya bookstore in Bangkok waiting for Despicable Me to start at the cinema so I could take Alex there I discovered something nifty. Now, mind you, this happens on a regular base, so it shouldn't be anything special, but it is. Browsing through the latest releases (and some obscure low-print ones) of young adult novels I found (yet another) book about fairy tales. It was called the Grimm Legacy. I read the back and found it to be a crossing between a modern tip-of-the-hat to the Grimm fairy tales and a young teen romance.

Now there seems to be nothing new under the sun. In fact there seems to be a veritable avalanche of Grimm Brothers fairy tale adaptations out there lately. It may have started with Shrek and Hoodwinked (or even the Princess Bride and Labyrinth before that) and crystallized into the written word with the Sisters Grimm, Vertigo's Fables and the excellent FableHaven. But as I found myself staring off into the distance still holding the Grimm Legacy I thought of the Stepsister Scheme that I have been reading lately and the copy of the graphic novel Grimm Fairy Tales by Ralph Tedesco lying on top of my nightstand. Does everyone have the same idea or is it that the Grimm Brothers' material is just too tempting (and obvious) to leave untouched? The same thing recently happened with a wave of Alice in Wonderland stories. A movie and TV-mini series, several written adaptations and tons of quotes in TV-shows and articles.


Is it just my inflated imagination or is the world not only connected through the Internet. but also starting to show signs of creative interconnectedness? It's almost like one idea is found in more place than one and is published in one form or another at almost the same time. Now this is all good news for me, because this concept ties into the actual storyline of Simon & Sally, so if I'm not the only one noticing this then this concept of a World Wide Web of Ideas and Inspiration might resonate with the readers. The idea that we as a human race are becoming more connected on some deeper level that transcends culture, nationality and mythology is interesting to explore. Luckily with all this exposure no one has yet published a novel series about the actual connections between fairy tales and other mythologies. Sure, magic and vampires have been done to death and there is a fair smattering of famous characters Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. Even ancient pantheons have been explored. But to create a meta-mythology that spans all of these is my territory.


Ironically you will see by the time I get published even this idea might have two or three explorations on its resume. But that only feeds into the strength of the idea itself: that we live in a world of ideas, too large to belong to any one person, institution or region.

The Death of Nationality

Two things happened recently, which made me aware of something I'm trying to address with my young adult novel 'Simon & Sally' (working title). The first is the World Cup in South Africa where the Netherlands has consistently been winning matches on, what I think is, sheer luck. Although I am Dutch I find myself routing for the other team, whomever Holland may be playing against. The second was 4th of July. My wife, being American, bought tickets to the Independence Day celebration here in Bangkok, and I found myself being very resistant to going, feeling the event was hypocritical and past the line of indoctrination. Although you would think that the common factor in both these events was my resistance to patriotism and nationality and although this is true, the underlying reason is far more profound. I believe in people, in the collection of skillful, positive traits that supersedes the destructive, negative traits.

When I plotted Simon a long time ago, I found myself tired of reading about heroes and heroines being British and their adventures always taking place in and around London. Although good stories in themselves (Harry Potter, Un Lun Dun, Bartimaeus Trilogy etc.) something irked me about them being so limited to the British Isles. Artemis Fowl and His Dark Materials were already better, traveling across the world, but even they and the slew of American-based novels (Sisters Grimm, Twilight, FabelHaven, Percy Jackson etc.) never failed to root the hero in one culture or the other. I felt Simon and Sally needed to be more global. They would start off in Brookfield and Saxton, two places that could be in either the UK or USA, leaving them nicely nationally ambiguous. Soon they would be swept off into adventures making it irrelevant where they came from. With the lack of commitment towards slang in dialog and usage of either the metric or imperial system of measurements I would not tie myself down to any form of origin country.

But here too, my motivations were not strictly to deny nationality. You can't just be against something, there has to be a reason and then an alternative. Well, the reason was simple. I am a third culture kid originally, so my allegiance to any given country is counter intuitive. I also consider myself intelligent enough to realize that nationality is a man-made way to control individuality and free thinking, just like religion and culture - the reason why I don't integrate these two concepts either in my series. I am amused whenever people state that they sacrifice in name of their country, god or cultural roots, because then I just think: do you even know what they are? And is that relationship mutual? Does your country help you when in need? Or your church?

The more I started traveling the broader my perspective became to include similarities between people across nations, religions and cultures and see the artificiality (and ignorance) of the man-made institutions they claimed to adhere to. Kids understand this. When you ask my kid where he's from he'll just blurt out where he is living at the moment. But his passion and commitment is not to Thailand, or Sri Lanka, or Ireland or Holland. Yes, we lived in all of these places, but who he loves to be is a person made up of positive reinforced values that are rewarded with attention from those around him, not some institution. We all work like that until we raise the flag so much we can only feel good when we see red, white and blue. Or until the only connections we can make is in our local church, mosque and temple. Or until we shop, drink and eat on our holidays and festivals mistaking direct sensory pleasure for a love of culture.

When we grow up and stay inside the same institutional pillars of control, we become extremists. We will defend the values we get bombarded with every day until we are willing to die for them. There is an anti-dote: traveling. Meet new people, new experiences and soften the paradigms we grew up with. And then you see the true factors that unite us: we all dream the same dreams, we all want to be safe, healthy and happy, we want to love and be loved. These are the positive meaningful traits that we all share. The negative destructive traits like greed, hatred, apathy, envy and pride are always self-defeating. They seem strong because they are fanned by the flames of nationality, religion and culture - to serve those who stand to gain from it.

That is why Simon and Sally will battle these forces, in the shapes of Vampyrs, Werwulfs, Djinns, Monsters and Demons. That is why ultimately it matters not if the heroes are from England, America or any other country, we are all guilty in what drives us to be zealots, but we also share the stronger notions of love, friendship, cooperation and hope. I am no longer a Dutch guy living in a Thai culture as a Buddhist. Those are just labels. Like Simon, Sally, Nancy and Alex. Like you and everyone else I am a loving person of planet Earth, one of many, who strives to be compassionate, wise and happy.