Virtual FantasyCon Participant Guest Post by Author Mary Woldering
The Story of Me -- and the novels in Children of Stone
By Mary Woldering
One of the things I’m often asked by readers is “Where did you get your ideas?” I’ve always been a bit hesitant, because the answer is “Far out”.
Let me begin my answer by asking another question: “Do you believe in psychic phenomenon?” Some of you will answer yes, more will answer maybe, and on the other end of the Bell curve there will be “no” answers.
Because I am in the “yes, I believe” category, I know I should explain. I believe in something external to things the five senses can grasp. I don’t know what it is. In fact, I am what you would call a skeptic. I do know that I’ve had enough strange experiences that chalking them up to coincidence is getting harder.
The next part of the answer, is MY answer. My ideas come from dreams, meditations and visions. My series Children of Stone is based on these. So are my novellas and spinoffs. My short story “Ana’s Dream of Flying” (soon to be published in Dreamtime Dragons Anthology) is based on stories my best friend from college told me about some of her own dreams.
I was always a dreamer. The first dreams I remembered were about strong wind and tornadoes. Unable to write, I drew them. When I entered school, I began to read voraciously.
This was many years ago. In those pre-feminist days, the library had gender separate books. Girls were to read stories about animals and being a babysitter or a nurse. I wanted to read Moby Dick or the Odyssey or other adventure stories. Eventually, I turned to Classics Illustrated Comic Books for my reading material, but snuck into the forbidden boy’s section from time to time.
I always loved history – not the facts of the Constitution or the Magna Carta or the battles that were fought, but the history of the people. I wanted to know what they ate, what they wore and what their daily life was like. This led me to the study of Archaeology and Anthropology.
In the meantime, I realized the local libraries were running out of things I wanted to read. I wasn’t yet 18 so librarians ushered me away from the “adult” section every time I strayed there.
At about that time, I decided I would write stories.
If I was running out of things I wanted to read, I thought other readers might be at a loss for a good story too.
About that time, the quality of my dreams changed. I later learned it was called “Lucid Dreaming” My definition was that I could begin a dream as if I was creating a movie. If I woke or drifted, I could go back to the place where the dream had paused and continue it. In addition, the dreams were always in color and they were so very real that I felt as if I was walking into another world.
Right after the first dream, I wrote the story of some young people who took the ship that had been constructed for the movie “Mutiny on the Bounty” They sailed off on adventures but the ship sank in a hurricane. They found their way into the Amazon River but at that point the story tanked and I moved on to other ideas. This was in 1964. Far out story, but in 2012 it happened.
After that I wrote a series of novels about Regency and Dickensian England and Early America. They began as standard historical novels, but soon I took a turn into the paranormal by having a character fall in love with a platinum-haired, silver-eyed beauty who turned out to be something other than human.
I had seen this race of people in dreams. They entered and left our world via a cave. For people who regularly read fantasy or about high elves you can see where I’m going. In 1965, I thought elves were like Tinker Bell or that they hung out with shoemakers. Later that year I began to read Tolkien and wondered if I had been dreaming about High Elves.
I would later carry that race of beings into another story set in a remote place near Johnson City, Tennessee. To find it, and to come up with a name, I put my finger on a map and saw the town name. I began to write about a mysterious group of people that could travel between dimensions and if they died, they were buried in a special coffin that teleported them to other worlds. In the late 1970’s my parents moved to a remote place near Johnson City, TN and built a house there. I had never told them I knew about the town and had written a story located there.
In 1970 everything changed. As I did more research on my peculiar dreams, I stumbled upon writings about astral projection and shortly thereafter began to learn about reincarnation and techniques of past-life regression. I was in college by that time and had found like-minded friends with similar interests.
We regressed each other and took notes. To my surprise, I discovered some of the lucid dreams might have been past-life memories. In my Regency story, I had written about a womanizing rake in the 1830’s who ended up emotionally broken and froze to death in a drunken stupor. That was almost the first “life” I discovered. Imagine my shock. Then my friend and I discussed “flying dreams”. We also realized we could both see and talk to ghosts, but that other people couldn’t.
Ghosts. I said it. I’ve seen them and even experienced them as if they were almost ordinary people.
Around that time, we met through some mutual friends, an entity they said had been trapped in an old haunted house for about 50 years. It seems an old woman who once lived there, a “Mrs. Adams” had been a witch. She was long dead, but the spirit remained, living the existence of a genie and trapped in a stairwell. If someone went up the stairs, he would physically lift them and send them flying back down. They were known as “Ra-Ma-Kai’s stairs”
One early morning the house burned down in three fires laid out in a pyramid pattern. The fire was set by a homeless pyromaniac who was picked up gibbering that a ghost told him to do it.
We assumed the spirit went free and “crossed over” as contemporary ghost whisperers say.
I also met “Ma-Maw” my friends’ grandmother’s ghost and saw her rocking chair move on its own many times.
Then I saw him. At first, I saw a black wolf-dog that was not quite as big as a Doberman but very muscular and imposing. He had green eyes and longer than usual fangs. A red rose highlight or aura surrounded him. He was standing in a corner of another friend’s apartment.
She was teaching me more spiritualism and recognized him instantly from her own visits to the old house. It was Ra-Ma-Kai. Baffled, she said he must have had a karmic connection to my friends and I, that he would be staying so close. The next time we saw him, he appeared as a well-dressed Egyptian man. Still other times he was more of a wolf-man or even resembled Anubis.
Now, all this time my friend and I kept meditating and doing regressions. We also drew pictures and once indulged in automatic writing.
One fall afternoon during a session we decided to “tape record” the regression of a young store clerk. We were “taking him down” and asking standard questions about what he was wearing or what he saw when a dis-embodied but sharp sounding and deep voice called out:
“A Nubian? I like the Nubian strain.” We all knew no one had spoken, because there were no other people in the house, no radio or TV, no noises on the street and none of us were ventriloquists. No one was drunk or high either. We also knew it was very likely the Egyptian and that he was talking about my friend, who is black. We re-wound and it was on the tape.
Ecstatic, we took it to a Halloween gathering that night but someone pushed the “record” button and by the time we discovered it the recording was gone.
My friends and I talked about other things: Greek Gods and the possibility that they might have been ordinary people who were gifted in some way. I stuck my hand up and said “Aliens” because I had read parts of “Chariots of the Gods” and some of the works of Zechariah Sitchin.
More drawings were created and finally I began to write stories based on these images and our adventures through inner space.
The oddest thing was, I could never get a cohesive idea going about Ancient Greece or Crete – just fragments. I was dancing with a young and rock star-ish Dionysus, and sheltering people in a cave while a great explosion destroyed the island where I lived. Despite what most people think of it, I knew it was what became known as Atlantis. I talked about it but never wrote about it until recently as part of a team novella called “Healings” soon to be published.
Something always kept pushing me further back in time to invading aliens and then forward to Egypt.
After college and after our group of amateur psychic researchers all went their separate ways, I began writing Children of Stone. The original title had been The Avatar. I’m certain you understand why I changed it. I submitted the 800-page typewritten tome and had it sent back a few times. Frustrated that I wasn’t even getting a decent read, I shelved it and the 3 x 5 diskettes and raised my family, often telling my kids bits of the story.
Once the children were in school I began to do more research on ancient Egypt. I needed names for my characters that sounded right. The ones in my head were strange but, I thought, couldn’t have been real. There was Marai, Jera, Starr, and three women Heka or Hagor, Arianna, and Nomi. There was Horsapet, Kafuser and Ra-Ma-Kai.
The more I read, the more I realized my made-up names might not have been that far off. I found female names like Deka, Ariennu, and Naibe.
The biggest shock was yet to come.
In 2010 after another lengthy break, my daughter called me and said, “Are you ever going to publish that book you wrote when I was a kid?” I couldn’t see why I shouldn’t, so I began a lengthy re-write again.
I was standing in the Cleveland Museum of Art in the Egyptian Exhibit, looking for inspiration when I sensed a thought “Look over here and read about me.” There was a small white head of a pharaoh, enclosed in glass. The inscription read: King Weserkaf or Userkaf, first king of the 5th dynasty. Something about that struck me. His face looked astonishingly like one of my characters: a young priest named Kafuser or Kazuser. Ancient Egyptian names were often read and used in two directions. My character had been named Kaf-user. Read another way the name was User-kaf. Horsapet sounded like another name of the era 4th into 5th dynasty. So Horsapet became Hordjedtef. He was a prince who discovered the magician Djedi (Yes, it is pronounced like Jedi of Star Wars fame) but mysteriously never became a king because of a last-minute decision in favor of his brother. He lived the rest of his life as a scholar, writer of philosophy and teacher. (Look up Teaching if Hordjedtef)
Studying these historical figures, I came across more legends of gods that walked as men and secrets buried in forgotten chambers. I read legends of madness and curses too.
It was a perfect fit for my aliens and superheroes.
And that Anubis figure Ra-Ma-Kai? I heard from him right before I published my first novel Voices in Crystal. I kept hearing the name Maatkare in my thoughts, but knew that a name like that would have been given to a woman by the time Queen Hatshepsut ruled. (It was one of her names)
A voice in my thoughts whispered “Not earlier. Look deeper.” I knew in our own era that male names like Beverly, Leslie, Courtney, have often “crossed over” to become female names.
My eyes fell on the name Raemkai. The name means the name means “the sun is my life force”. This Raemkai was a 5th dynasty prince, likely named for an unknown ancestor of the same name.
Was he real? Perhaps. At least, I choose to think so. I didn’t think I would see him again, but after the publication of the first book I did. I was sitting in my “Pink Lotus” Office and words of a poem began to flow.
The dreams were, in part, back. I wrote the words down as they were recited and found a sad story of impossible love between the gods. It became the poem “Howl” and part of it appears on the back of Book 3 Opener of the Sky
HOWL
I am One
In the City of the Dead - you will find me
Staring green fire-eyes back at you from the dark pit of my empty soul
Staring at those outside these silent walls
HOWL
All has been taken from me ... It always has been...
Abandoned by me ... as useless
Or deserted
All self is empty.
HOWL
I had grown fierce and hard
Thrilled by death, torture, blood
The madness of it when I tasted it's warm saltiness
A warrior god.
Goddess you matched my rage and my passion
Your taste for blood outmatched my own.
It burned
But I could not love you
I could only know lust and conquest... which is my nature
In my wrath and anguish
You could not save me any more than I could save you
So you returned to dance in God's eye,
becalmed by the wine of our acts
I await you faithfully (Like the dog that I am)
In this City of Decay
A prince, never a king... a way shower, a guide ...
HOWL
My man-face grows tired
I ache for your redemption
That may never come....
Leave me picking at the bones of the damned
In this place of Decay
HOWL
I hope this rambling and disjointed piece which I wrote largely “stream of consciousness” has given you some insight into the magic and madness behind the series
Children of Stone – and me -- Mary R. Woldering
Here are my links for chats and further information.
The Mystery of Ancient Egypt wrapped in a speculative and fantastic ride through history, mythology and magic. Experience:
CHILDREN OF STONE
1) Voices in Crystal 2) Going Forth by Day 3) Opener of the Sky 4) Early 2018 – Heart of the Lotus
Like ancient superheroes, those touched by the Children o
f Stone wander through the reality of ancient legends, RESHAPING myth and history.
Unforgettable people and their stories of mysticism, magic and never-ending love.
Walk with those who once became gods.
About the Author
Years ago, when I began to study mythology, it occurred to me that the gods and goddesses never seemed divine. They acted like super-talented people full of very human passions and shortcomings, appearing in different legends like threads woven into the tapestry of time and various cultures. This idea fascinated me and began a journey of recording and relating these stories.
Mary R. Woldering is an author, artisan, and art historian, devoted wife to Dr. Jackie F. Woldering, mother of Ruth and Thom and grandmother of three. She lives in Euclid, Ohio.
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