Over the course of Sunday August 21 and Friday August 26, I published the second episode of A Goblet of Bone in three parts to Wattpad.

It’s currently #42 in FantasyCreatures … yay!!

Please indulge me - I find joy in small things :)

This chapter is a walkabout to describe the setting and define terms.

My goals for this chapter were to lay down a couple of complex ideas once so I don’t necessarily need to repeat them in the future.

1. The general geography of the region.

2. Brigantia’s geography and layout (Lowtown, Midtown, Hightown).

3. The Houses and their political factions.

As my stories about Bartram are about broader themes concerning human suffering, I tried to illustrate at least two layers of suffering that are the target of this book.

1. Poverty and homelessness.

2. The suffering of women under patriarchy by contrasting with Brigantia’s matriarchial rule.

I needed to relate the setting and explain why Brigantia’s a different place, a “Jewel of Gaelwyn” I call it in the prose. I think most readers would recognize Brigantia as a classic wedding cake. It has three tiers: a small rich top, a delicious mid-sized middle, and a common round lower section for “common” people to enjoy. I’ll be adding more substrates to the cake as we go on and giving more depth to these layers, but Brigantia gives me a way to talk about classism, poverty, and power.

Conceptually, Brigantia is supposed to flip contemporary ideas about fantasy settings on their head, and I elude to this in chapter 3 with dead upside-down trees in a garden. Brigantia is an inverted comparison to what we normally read in fantasy.

• This isn’t a “kingdom” and there’s no “king”; there’s no absolute ruler, but there is a monarch, and it’s a woman who is mostly a figurehead;

• Men don’t have rights, women retain all rights to property and wealth, and men are side-lined; the only serfs are disenfranchised men (reminding me of women in the real world who’ve been divorced, “single mom’d”, or cast away at a spouse’s leisure), most everyone else lives comfortably and can pursue their goals (particularly women);

• Brigantia doesn’t have a unilateral dictator. It has a politically-charged group of 12 families jockeying for power;

• Women aren’t just pretty supporting characters for my male lead. I feel that Bartram is more of a spectator in that sense and must work around and within such powerful people;

• That even though Brigantia is run by women and “different”, it still suffers from human qualities like greed, selfishness, power, and hate - there are upsides but it’s no utopia.

Further, I deliberately try to insert women who are in power that are old. Another theme about Bartram is aging and retirement, the roles we assume when we age, and I deliberately wanted to show dangerous, beautiful, powerful women as vibrant political and military animals, rather than spindly old crones with black cowls trying to get you to eat an apple. The young, the future, greatly want power, and this story talks about that transition where the young take power, or are gifted power, from the preceding generation.

It was a conscious choice to include women of different races, shapes, and sizes. One of my leads is what I’d call “classicly voluptuous” - curvy, maybe “obese” by today’s standards - and another woman with sagging, wrinkling skin. They are “imperfect” but strive for idealism, just as men do. They’re not permanently an appendage (or property) to men.

I also think fantasy readers would expect me to explain why so many different races and genetic characteristics are present in a limited breeding pool like Gaelwyn’s aristocracy, but I’m not going to :). I don’t care. There are many people of different racial backgrounds and it doesn’t matter.

There’s a little bit of foreshadowing in the work where I talk about goliath tigerfish, falconry, Dwarves, and Goblins. Keep your eyes peeled! There’s a lot more of that to come, not only in this work but in future works that I’ve planned.

Talk to you soon and thanks for reading …

R