It is my great pleasure to have
Val Griswold-Ford on Welcome to My Worlds this week to share about her new book release:
Winter's Secrets! I have had the pleasure of knowing Val for a little over a year and have been moved, inspired and completely entertained by her work. I am sure you all will be as well :)
Hi, C.E., and thank you for inviting me over to talk about
my new book,
Winter's Secrets, a cozy fantasy that nonetheless has quite
a bit of sci-fi (and a little bit of horror, although not as much as some of
the later stories in the series) in it. In particular, the thing that makes
Carter's Cove unique is that it is a CrossRoads Town, with not one, but two
Gates that allow people to move from Realm to Realm.
While I originally went very much towards the fantasy side
of things, I realized that I didn't want to just hand wave and say "Oh,
it's magic," in terms of the Gates and the Roads that connect them.
Instead, I wanted to have them be both magic and technology, since I fully
agree with Arthur C. Clarke that "sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic." So the Roads are magical, but the Gates
that connect them are both magic and technology.
I do admit that it was a little easier to do since I've set
Carter's Cove in the present, so there's a lot of technology around. Drew has a
tablet he uses to find a rogue Road in one chapter, and there are phones and
cars and snowmobiles. I think one of the challenges in doing a story like this
is to make the technology and the magic seem seamless, because that's the
wonder of it – how can these two seemingly opposite processes work together?
The Gates were a lot of fun to figure out, because I
envisioned it as a kind of magical subway system. I knew I needed some
personnel – a Station Manager, who runs the place; two Gate engineers, who you
really don't meet in this book, but will play a bigger role in later stories;
and three Gate technicians, who do the actual work of running the Gate and
fixing things. (Funny sidebit: I originally was going to call the Gate Stations
Transfer Stations, until it was pointed out to me that at least in New England,
a Transfer Station is the dump. So yeah, the name changed.) It's the techs you
see most of in this book, but in later books, you'll see more of the Station
itself, and more of the personnel.
For the Gates, I realized that I needed to understand how
the technology worked with the magic of the Roads. Here's where I got a little
metaphysical, and went looking at quantum physics and string theory. For those
who may not know, string theory postulates that everything in the universe is
tied together with strings of energy. I took that (thank you, Mr. Young, for
the Physicist as Humanist class you taught that got me interested in this!) and
posited a series of interconnected realms, some more magical, some more
technical, that are connected by strings that are currently called Roads. The
Roads exist in a subspace dimension that runs throughout the entire multiverse,
and sentient creatures have created Gates to bring those Roads into the Realm
they live in. In the beginning, the Gates were magical arches that forced the
Road into that particular Realm. Then the humans started working with
technology, and created the Gates that are used by most of the Realms now.
These Gates work by converting the magical strings into computer algorithms
that the technicians and engineers can manipulate. Sometimes, though, the
computers break down, and they have to do it the old-fashioned way: magic.
Every Gate technician is sensitive to the Roads, which allows them to find the
Roads if they have wandered (which happens). Gate engineers can actually create
Gates – they have additional training in building the arches that house the
energies needed to force the Roads into the physical realm.
There's not a lot of this in the first book, as it doesn't
deal as much with the Roads as some of the other ones do. But in the next book
(which doesn't have a name yet, but will be out next year), you'll see a lot
more of this, as there is a lot of Road traveling. You'll also see the Sea
Roads for the first time – because Roads don't just go along the ground, but
they can be sailed upon as well.
Winter's Secrets is out TODAY! It's available on
Amazon in trade paperback, and will be out in ebook soon. You can check out the
next stories on my blog at vg-ford.com, and follow me at Patreon for other
stories that blend technology and magic.
