Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Naming the Five Seasons

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Marianne has decided that since her last Dragonstairs Press project was (for her) pricey and issued in an extremely limited edition of twenty, she should immediately atone by putting out out one of her underpriced chapbooks in a gargantuan edition of one hundred. So now she is hard at work on Five Seasons, which will contain five closely related flash fictions (or, possibly, one story narrated in five vignettes) that I wrote some time ago to go in a set of five connected picture frames.

Our son Sean was appalled when I told him that the seasons are not a natural phenomenon but an artificially-created social construct. But it's true. You could as easily have two -- Burgeoning and Withering. Or three -- Growth, Decline, and Fallow.

One of the pleasures of being a writer is getting to name things that otherwise would go without. Dividing the year into five wasn't easy, but it was fun. The names I coined were lush and ornamental, in part because I was writing a fantasy and in part because the stories were rather darker than my usual stuff and needed at least that small taste of romance.

They were:

Winterthaw

Greengrowth

Summerdeep

Autumnbright

Darkwinter


You'll note that the names give you a sense of which of our seasons they were carved from. I was rather pleased with that.


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1 comment:

Sandy said...

Yes, Michael, there's a nice fantasy story ring to those names. "It was winterthaw and the dragons were waking from their hibernation and were hungry." Good stuff!