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[lanceschaubert]

I’m writing this post for those of you that have followed me from the beginning. I mean the very beginning. As a beta reader myself for a handful of authors — and as someone well familiar with the slow output of many epic writers — I know it can take forever for an author’s career first to get off the ground and then to sustain some sort of regular publishing pace. Because of that, I wanted to give a gift to those of you that have read full novels in the background (I just finished numbers five and six last year and am starting number seven) and for those of you that have started to notice how my stories connect with magic systems and science and weird forces: it’s all a part of what I call The Vale.

I started this thing when I was seventeen with a guy named Seth Cadell and a world named Gergia:

Trust me, that map DID NOT start out like that. It started out with a messy ink drawing on the front cover of my binder for a freshman class in which I probably should have been taking notes, but wasn’t. Instead, the tiny seed of an idea that Seth had given germinated into a full-blown world. The world was connected to Earth in a weird way — similar to something like Narnia or Hogwarts but also similar to something like Stargates. In theory, you could get to the world either through worldhopping or through a fast spaceship and both required certain skillsets. Certain technology and magic works on Gergia in ways it does not work on Earth.

Or the Venus of the future. Or a couple of rogue planets I had in mind. But I didn’t really have a way to connect them or their timeline.

I became friends with Dr. T. A. Giltner near the end of that stay at my alma mater and the relationship was just as providential: it was Alex who pushed me to become the writer, thinker, and reader that I am today and over the years he developed an interesting interplay between his own worlds that my universe did not have. I envied that connectivity, my magic systems and maps be damned. Well he and another friend of his (who became my friend) is named Dr. Anthony Cirilla, and Anthony and Alex basically both rebuked me recently for not taking seriously the western canon. I started reading them with friends and I and my neighbors had our first meeting over the Epic of Gilgamesh. Tara and I recorded the first episode of Western Canonball with my neighbors, which will air in the next two weeks, hopefully sooner rather than later.

But in this process of reading Gilgamesh…

…I had just finished taking upwards of three-hundred long hand notes on my first reading of Lewis’ Discarded Image which immediately made me revisit Burkhardt’s Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul, read ahead of the book club to Hesiod’s Theogony and Homer’s Illiad, and helped me revisit both Frazer and recontact the old John Granger Hogpro crowd in order to talk myths and astrology in Harry Potter.

This plus a deep dive into historic archeology and the way it parallels medieval cosmology helped me figure out a way to try and reconcile the old model of the universe with the new model of the universe in a sort of story metaphor that fits everything I’d built so far: magic, maps, myths, deep space missions, and story metaphors. Fantasy, Reality, Science Fiction, and Metaphysics — merged. It works. In fact it works beautifully. Here’s The Vale, clean:

I’m going to go ahead and drop the gallery, with and without labels below. You can click on either photo to bring it up in gallery mode and then commentary will be below the gallery on how this fits with my stories:

without labels

with labels

For starters, I’ve always wanted to be able to incorporate Earth into my larger Scifi/Fantasy universe so that when I wrote and sold literary fiction, all of that literary fiction connects to a larger metaphysic and metaphor. I think the idea of “literary fiction” or “mainstream fiction” is actually a sickness that our society is waking from and I’ve wanted to help bring people along by drawing them into a larger story, even while selling literary stories. Every literary story that I’ve sold takes place on the earth of The Vale: they fit inside my science fiction and fantasy universe. That includes the story that sold to the New Haven Review, The Misty Review, etc. But it also includes all of the nonfiction — the bit I sold to Poker Pro’s World Series Edition, the writing stuff.

Technically speaking, this entire website is a part of The Vale.

Now you’ll notice there’s four main categories for these massive corporeal objects in deep space: light, tor, mound, and permanent thresholds. Basically what I did was take an old medieval concept of our world and apply it universally. See they thought that the world was ordered like this:

Uninhabitable cold

Habitable north

Uninhabitable heat

Habitable south

Uninhabitable cold

Which is true, of course. The earth has desert like a belt around its middle and ice at the cap and footstool. I’ve taken that same idea of habitable zones and applied it to seven systems that all work in a very ordered, alchemical, chakra-oriented, and architectural form. Each system is:

Uninhabitable permanent threshold

Habitable Tor (major planet)

Uninhabitable Star

Habitable Mound (minor planet)

Uninhabitable permanent threshold

If you’ve read my books as a beta reader or basically any of the fantasy stories you know that thresholds are very, very important. They’re the connective tissue of the worlds and some are stable, some are unstable, and some people have the capacity to create very temporary and unstable thresholds at whim. The most stable ones, though uninhabitable, exist in a hierarchical structure. Ranked from lowest to highest, they are:

Arcade

Transept

Choir

Ambulatory

You can only travel these thresholds in a clockwise fashion. So if you want to get to No’ad from Earth through the north arcade, that’s well and good, but you can’t take the same way back home. If you’ve read my story Wombrovers, you already know that many of the peoples of No’ad already invented a way back to Earth.

You could always fly from one planet to another, of course, but some are too far for any technology — actual or hypothetical — to get to them. So there is no way and there never will be a way for someone from Earth to get to The Blazing World by means of a spaceship. Same is true of the rogue kintsugi planet Murrugloa: no one by any technological means could get to that planet from Gehlhwewgloa (and yes, there are shortened forms for these names that will show up in the stories). By the way, when I say “rogue kinsugi planet” I mean the planet, which is mostly made obsidian and black onyx and black marble, literally broke orbit, was punished for breaking rank with a massive meteor strike that shattered it into a million pieces and was reforged and made new by the collaboration of the two planets on its opposite pole. Together those planets brought the black rocks back together with gold. You know, Kintsugi:

Other things you should know:

The Venus of “The Blimps of Venus” is the Venus of our system, but our system is very unstable and planets switch allegiances and therefore habitability often. Mars was once habitable, isn’t any longer, and will be again, for instance — I have used a modified terraforming globe blended together with its current global map as a headnod to SpaceX.

The Gergia globe is the map made spherical. Emily Munro was over at our house for Western Canonball last night and she stayed up late with me and Tara helping me figure out how first to get grass and ocean where they belonged on the map and then proper shading to represent all that’s going on with Gergia. As you’ll notice, it’s sort of the crux world: it has no sun, no threshold, no mound because it is its own sun and threshold and mound. If Gergia falls, bad, bad things happen.

Like really, really freaking bad.

Several of the characters steady readers know already come from other worlds. The Dust Cloaked Weaver lives on Gergia but he’s from another planet. Stede Bonnet of The Trylet and Carry Cannons By Our Side lives on Gergia but his parentage goes back to the Blazing World — yes, the archipelago on Gergia, but those are inhabited by folk from the planet of the same name.

The Tors at the top of the map all belong inside Lewkgalos’ ambulatory and share common thresholds with nothing to separate them. Their names are unknown. Their lands are untraveled by anyone in living memory. There are six pictured, but the seventh is the universe itself, the Tor of Tors, the Primum Mobile, the largest conceivable corporeal object — largest conceivable by any mind in any age, observed or unobserved.

Last note:

Sometimes it might seem self-centered for me to monogram everything and those who have followed for awhile know that it’s more than a brand for me. It’s an outline of this universe and the overall plot. Every time I get down from a rejection letter, every time I get distracted with some cat video, every time I get anxious I’m going to muck up a minor success, I look down to my signet ring or the wax seal in my office and I remember the point of this: that my identity is irrelevant, that having my name remembered doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is playing a beautiful game, a good story well-told, the truth spoken in ways that provoke wonder. Let my name fade, but let me be able to offer some fishes and loaves in this story and let those feed the multitude by the grace of God.

But it’s hard to show you that no, really, this is an outline without a visual representation.

So I finally have one to show you:

That giant swoop with the dot outside of The Vale represents the Primum Mobile.

Anyways, all of that to say my debut novel is coming. It’s currently submitted to about four dozen different agents. If none of them pick it up, you have my word I’ll self publish it. I’m tired of waiting for the publishing industry’s permission. One way or another, it’s time. Thanks for hanging with me and I hope this little easter egg delights those of you that have been here the longest.

To unlock the high res desktop wallpaper of The Vale, click here.

As always, more to come.

— Llot

Introducing The Vale : The Universe in which I Write I'm writing this post for those of you that have followed me from the beginning. I mean the…

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