Yesterday morning I finished the first draft of a writing project I had been working on for some years. The reason it took so long was that I lost the WIP a number of times, due to the flash drive it was on being corrupted and having to be reformatted, which of course erases everything on it. But this time I was determined to finish it. It would also serve as my training table for NaNoWriMo, which starts 2 weeks from tomorrow. (See last week’s blog, “NaNoWriMo and Me”) I recorded the number of words I wrote on my calendar each day. One day I even managed to write an entire chapter, over 2400 words’ worth in one session. It was the trial of a kidnapper near the end of the book.
The story starts in Tintagel Cave, where Myrrddin, pronounced Meer-th(voiced th as in the)in (I used the Cymric version of his title), awakens after a sleep of over 16 centuries and moves to the Berkeley hills in California, where Emrys, his actual name, discovers how to become an American. I used two sources. One was the movie The Strange Case of Benjamin Button, and E.B.White’s materials about Merlin the Magician, in which he says that Merlin lived backwards and “remembered the future.” E.B. White may be better remembered as the source for the Disney movie The Sword in the Stone. I didn’t go into the more scholarly wranglings of the Merlin story because I wanted my story to be pure entertainment, not a scholarly treatise.
The young woman who awakens him goes through various adventures with him, including a trip back in time to the priestess sanctuary where she and the priestesses are chased by Saxons intent on rapine and destruction. At one point, they even encounter aliens who invite Earth to join the Galactic Federation, and take a honeymoon junket out among the stars. The household Talese lives in is a cooperative household in a made-over former fraternity house in the Berkeley hills off the UC Berkeley campus. Emrys helps them overcome their constant enemies, or should I call them the the household’s nemesis? The jesoids who seek to overcome them at every turn because they cannot tolerate a group which ascribes to either their side, or that of the jesoids’ supposed enemies, who are in reality their secret allies. Emrys destroys a group of 20 of them, who has been hacking Gryphon House’s computer LAN and server farm.
Because of the church’s constant harassment of them, a judgment is placed upon them, and the church loses not only cash money, but also their televangelism TV network, which is ceded onto Gryphon House. This is the fulfillment of a long held dream for several of the residents, and they work at the studio, producing content for the network and invite other Pagan and Wiccan groups in the Bay Area to produce programs for the network. A ward spell Emrys creates produces for the house and grounds of Gryphon House in the shape of turning all would be intruders into gold creates another revenue stream for Gryphon House. The amount of money this generates is so great that The residents cannot spend all of it themselves, and vote to create a Pagan dining hall and community center to help the homeless and other low income and disadvantaged people, of any faith in the Berkeley-Oakland area.
This center is a huge success and provides a model for other Pagan groups who, after judgments that accrue to them large amounts of cash, are motivated to create dining halls/community centers in their own cities. I admit fully that this story is a wish fulfillment fantasy. May it come true, with or without the presence of Myrrddin in our century.
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