Not My Novelette

The Imaginal, Way-finding, Feminine Wisdom, Service, Human Hubris

The appearance of an idea in the mind is a common miracle — and thank goodness for that, because a writer is helpless without something to say. Further evidence of this miracle are ordinary thoughts, themselves, though because they are considered “normal” we don’t see them that way. Instead, we view the process of writing as a series of commonplace steps. In truth all of it bears examining — from the gleaning of the initial idea through each successive supporting thought. How did we choose to write it that way, use those words, or take that approach? Where do the words arise from? How do they form in our minds?

This is a post about the mysterious manifestation of the six-part novelette, A Tale of Transformation, published in installments from mid June to mid September, 2025. A process that certainly transformed me!

When I sat down to write in April of 2025, I had run out of fresh ideas. What I did have, however, was a group of ancient mothers who had agreed to assist with me in various ways. Some of them had even asked me to tell their stories. In fact, in June of 2024 I did just that. In the course of an interview with Grandmother Lucretia she told me a great deal of her life story. Of course I had no idea if any of it was true but it didn’t really matter because even though there are a (very) few references to her actual existence, no one really knows her tale. So I was just able to have fun with it.

I was hoping, when I sat down to write in April, to receive more material through a similar process, At that point in time I was disturbed enough by troubling acts of supremacy in my country’s new administration that I chose to consult Mother Wild this time, based on the fact that a) I had already established a connection with her, and b) the bits of her life story that she had told me took place just prior to the witch-burning times. I wasn’t sure what kind of “times” our own country was heading toward, but it seemed like a similar darkness was fomenting in the atmosphere, involving, among a plethora of other things, the rejection of women in seats of power — from government to nuclear family. Where was this headed? In keeping with my interview format, here is the gist of what I wrote to Mother Wild:

Mother Wild, we are living in a difficult time, reminiscent of that in which you found yourself in your later years. While I don’t think “witches” will be burned, women could once again be persecuted, with or without the accusation of witchcraft, perhaps simply for challenging the backwardness of the beliefs and policies of men in authority — beliefs attesting that male faculties of reasoning are manifestly superior to women’s, for example. Using their “superior” reasoning capability, powerful men conclude that men should fill the outward-facing roles of job-holders and decision-makers, both in the family and in society at large, while women should remain in the home, cooking, cleaning, tending to the children, and serving their husbands.

I would like to share your wisdom with my readers regarding two matters related to these times. First, of course, what wisdom can you offer for negotiating this type of thing? And second, while I know witch burning didn’t begin until after your death, are you able, as an ancestor, to share with us how they ever came to be? Is there something we could do right now that would facilitate a reduction in the polarizing hostilities we are facing on so many fronts?

Here are the first two paragraphs of her response. I have not shared them before:

Here is the truth. You must keep yourself safe. No one else will do it for you. You are of more use to the people if you continue to live among them — to serve them in some way — than if you are imprisoned behind bars and forgotten, where you will do no one any good. Yes, serving some will be a test — even a risk. Yet I died of natural causes. I was never betrayed. Nor should I have been because, as I have already mentioned, I was no more a witch than the next person. We all made good use of talismans, simple spells, and the ancestral realms for help and protection. And the usage of healing herbs was the only medicine known. How could it, then, be witchcraft?

The reason, of course, was that the priests — using Bible verses and calling upon the power of their male God — were now the only ones authorized (by the church, naturally,) to heal. The rest of us — the women, especially — were expected to step down. We might even have done so had their healing worked. But knowing, as we did, the ways of healing, how could we let our townsfolk die as the result of the priests’ ineptitude? To add fuel to our fire, the priests couched their failure in claims of incurability due to sin — not the sin of the healer, mind you, but of the patient. They claimed his sins had made him unworthy of God’s help in the matter. This could not stand. In this way, we — the women who stepped in after the priest left the patient for dead, we who persisted — became entrenched in their minds as obstacles. We were a danger to the church because the survival of our patients proved their healing techniques — and their God — impotent. Like so many men of the human species throughout time, their response was violent. Rather than being outdone — or even curious — men seek to rid themselves of their so-called “enemies.” They cultivated and fed a loathsome belief in witchcraft. I’m so sorry to see that this cycle continues. Will humans never learn?

Then, she continued: Regarding the end of totalitarian (her word) control, let me tell you a story.

“Let me tell you a story,” she said. To which I, the presumed writer, raised an eyebrow and responded in alarm, “But I don’t know a story!” followed quickly by, “Hmmm. This is going to get interesting.” An ancient mother, who may or may not ever have existed, is now going to tell me a story that I don’t know. I’m potentially in the presence, here, of about three strong layers of magic.

But Mother Wild did not disappoint. The story started coming through loud and clear and my only job was to render it capably to the page, all along having no idea where the story was going. It reminded me a little bit of modern day “streaming.” On a screen you will usually see, under a video or song, a timeline that depicts the length of the program on the right end while a lightly shaded line, representing percentage-already-streamed, grows gradually longer from the left end. A more darkly shaded line is superimposed over that one, representing the listener’s real-time location on the timeline, always further to the left than the portion streamed. Similarly I would, in the course of “downloading” Mother Wild’s story, get a sense of where the bit I was writing was headed (i.e. already streamed), but unlike the streaming analogy, I had no idea how much of the remaining story lay ahead of me — no idea of its entirety. And so I could do no more than to blindly write and write and write, until I found myself deep in a very complex tale that surprised me at every turn..

Tying this phenomenon to the tale itself, I didn’t know, for instance, until Secretary Perri interviewed the servant to the ruling council that his next interview would even be necessary. And at the time I started writing about that one, all I knew (all that had been streamed to me) was that a mine was somehow involved. The entirety of that story just came spilling out on its own.

Madame Majelice, herself, makes a fine example. So much of what she so elegantly teaches was a revelation to me as I wrote it — for example, in her defense of a sharing / service-based economy vs. a currency-based economy (in Lesson 2): “‘Currency,’ [the Lovahtans] say, ‘is the shortest path to hoarding and greed.’ Hoarding and greed by their very nature, they believe, sets the stage for scarcity and despair. Wealth, therefore, is a worthless thing. In the lands where it is valued, the people are told it will bring fulfillment. Well, if fulfillment means convenience and comfort for some at the expense of the many, then perhaps its proponents are right. Service and sharing, however, are the most reliable roads to the heart’s fulfillment — for all folk — while at the same time being very difficult to hoard.” Whoa! Where did that come from? In further lessons, she goes on to speak with the same richness (in Lesson 4, for example, when she talks about the difference between primary and secondary questions). In the very beginning, in fact, Matriarch Lareesie says about Madam Majelice, “I will summon and train a wise woman I’ve long admired … She will serve Laforey well as Matriarch. Long have I wished that her natural inclinations could be put to some great use. It will be my honor to tutor her.” … Well, she certainly lives up to her reputation!

Should I go ahead and release each chapter as soon as I finish it, I wondered? Even as the first lesson progressed, however, I developed questions as to how certain things fit together. Clarity arrived as Mother Wild led me into yet another story strand. After this further elucidation I realized that an assumption I had formerly made was not, indeed, the case. That realization meant correcting an earlier passage to reflect this new information. In so doing it became clear that until the entire story had been revealed, I wasn’t going to be able to release any portion of it. The questioning process continued as I wrote. By the time I approached the middle, for instance, I’d come to realize that there still remained to be told the stories of a lover and a villain that I hadn’t even met yet. Or had I? And toward the end, my favorite story of all materialized out of nowhere — the tale of the Wildlings. I love everything about that story.

By now, though, I was nervously wondering if this mysterious narrator could be trusted to bring all of her story’s many strands to a satisfactory conclusion. Were she not up to the task, I certainly doubted my own ability to do so! I had by then invested so much time and energy into the writing of it that I was afraid I might have made a mistake in taking on the task. Perhaps in the end, I’d have wasted six weeks of my summer in a story that breaks down somewhere in the middle, leaving me with no idea what to do with it. But I was entranced and compelled to see the story to the end. I wanted to know if Mother Wild could pull it off.

On and on I wrote until I began to have some glimmers about the way certain strands might fit together. But what was most magical of all was when something I’d written earlier took on new meaning as the story progressed. Things I never could have seen coming, like seeds that had been planted and didn’t bloom until later in the story. You can even see this foreshadowing in the intro, when Patriarch Rossmuir is described as never offering unsolicited advice. (This tidbit does not get unpacked until the very last chapter.) You can also see it in the first lesson, during which Secretary Perri feels that it probably isn’t even necessary to convince the ruling counsel to accept a Matriarch because “the whole thing felt previously ordained” (this is addressed in the fifth lesson), and, also in the first lesson, when Secretary Perri reveals that he’d been warned “not to wander the countryside (around Tarnello) as disease was more prominent there” (this comment becomes significant in the second lesson), and when, in the third lesson, Secretary Perri suddenly develops doubts about his stay in Tarnello: “Had I been duped by the Tarnellons in some way?” (This question foreshadows much of the rest of the story.) I could go on and on.

Neither would I have thought to include an element of repetition, but toward the end there appears a line that is repeated three times throughout the remainder of the story: first by Anta, then by the innkeeper, and finally by Matriarch-To-Be Majelice, herself. I love that feature, too — as well as the line itself in the context it is used.

Though the story was told to me, the presentation of it was, of course, my responsibility. I might be shown what Secretary Perri saw on his way to visit a farmer during the “epidemic” but I had to use my writing ability to describe it. There were scenes with a great deal of emotional intensity. How was I to present that in my writing so that the reader feels it too? (All common writerly challenges, no matter where one believes the story originated.) There were also times when, like in a dream, the sequencing of things was problematic — it all seemed to happen at once but I certainly couldn’t write it that way. There was a great deal of subtlety to capture as well — stories that are told by the postures of the body, the look in someone’s eyes, the words a lover speaks, or the depth of feelings involved in a lengthy transformation process. While my mind saw it all unfold, I had, like all writers, to convey it through the use of words, alone.

This is probably where I should mention that I haven’t written any fiction since about 5th grade, when I used to start novels (but never finish them). It’s been that long since I wrote dialogue as well. I thoroughly enjoyed it, actually. But as you can see, this six-part story, the reading of which you as my subscriber, may or may not have managed to complete, is so much more (to me, at least) than just an unexpected foray into fiction. It was a kind of journey through a land of wonders.

In the end, I needn’t have worried about my muse. As the story of each strand continued, the full tale came together effortlessly, in ways I couldn’t fully have conceived. I have no experience building suspense or writing climaxes, but it was all laid out for me. I DID, of course, find it challenging to do justice to the story in those critical areas and hope I was able to pull it off. The whole thing was, honestly, way beyond my grade. I would never have set out to write such an ambitious story. Mother Wild didn’t even hand me an outline. She just patiently lured me deeper and deeper into the tale like Dorothy following the yellow brick road. (Interestingly, the totem I use to represent myself on my altar is none other that Dorothy herself.) Dorothy, originally from ordinary old Kansas, found herself enmeshed in a rollicking world of magic. I can certainly relate!

In order to lay out my analysis, above, of the many ways this story was not conceived by me, I printed and reread the entire tale, which OF COURSE means I re-edited it (thank Heavens because it really needed it). I replaced one of the images with a better one and added another. It feels like a good sign that in my rereading, even I (the scribe herself) got swept up in excitement toward the end as the suspense started to build toward the climax. I had no idea that writers / scribes could get caught up in their own tales.

I’ve been wanting to write this post since the final installment was posted on September 15th. Between then and now, however, I’ve noticed the topic of Creativity trending — at least in my feeds. For a fun exploration of it, check out Season 2 of The Telepathy Tapes, Episode 3.

By now, having reread and edited this tale, I’m more excited about it than ever. But I suspect that it was one of the least-read of my Substack posts. Maybe it was because of the two-week gaps between installments. Maybe because it was fictional and that wasn’t what you signed up for. Maybe everyone’s just busy and it seemed like too much. Whatever the reason, it’s not too late to rectify that! The recently re-edited and upgraded Tale of Transformation awaits you. You don’t even have to wait between installments. Please do read it and do me the favor of commenting. How did it strike you? Does it resolve satisfactorily? Does it address my original questions to Mother Wild? Should I write more of this kind of thing or would you rather I stuck to my personal narrative?

I’m so very, very curious.