TCOTNK what the hell is that?

Here are some of the reasons you would want to know….

Why would anyone try and get a hundred thousand words in the right order? And then expect people to willingly follow those lines until the very last word?

Righters

We follow other peoples lines. I often do so before knowing where they will take me. ‘Righters’ have tricks to make you come along. Word by word. Gliding through the paragraphs they make you hang from ledges, climb up vistas. While making and breaking promises they lure you in, to meet characters that sound real but are not. And you will love the paper people because they look like you imagine them, have voices that tickle your belly in just the right spot. You feel their pain and grief and joy and fear and drives. Their loss becomes yours. Their struggles and their accomplishments creep under your skin. Their quest aligns with your seeking. You need to know what comes next. Stories could be slot machines, where you have to put in a coin to get to the next page. Some books would push you to sell your home, just to get to the next volume.

Once in a blood-red moon

Some books are able to make you love, some inspire hate, some ignite a deep longing. Once in a blood-red moon a fire is lit. Stories start wars. Tellings forge peace. Often the pages offer arguments, invoke new ways, discover paths. Places not yet visited are explored without hurting a single fly. Fiction is a painting so life-like and convincing you can walk right in. The scene comes alive. You are hypnotised, enchanted, lulled to sleep and pulled into nightmares and winged wonderlands of pleasure and wishing wells so deep they can’t ever be retold.

When established the spell is not easily broken. Whatever is in there enters you, becomes part of you and influences your hows one by one. The waking dream transforms how you experience the world, how you see, how you respond, how you can keep going. The narrative has expanded your how without you even noticing.

Maybe, that’s why we read, to gather hows. So yes, why the hell would anyone waste time creating that?

Art gets us through the impossible.

That’s nothing less than mysterious. And art may even be several inches deeper than you expect. Closer than you would like it to be. And it may be a lot more important than is accepted. Maybe art is not at all what you thought it was. Maybe - just maybe - a story that slowly unveils a strength, right in time to counter the bulldozers of progress, to extinguish the fires of too much, to silence the poisonous lies, is precisely what ignited this book. The force that restores the soul will bring us to the last page of the book. Maybe it is time the circle is broken.

Bookpeople

Books are beautiful in many ways. Symbolically you start at the cover and work your way in. Sheet after sheet your descent deeper into a parallel world and come out the other end. It is shamanic travelling. You could see it as a journey. From meadow to meadow, over hills and valleys, meeting the peoples inhabiting the pages. Yes, that’s good but clichéd imagery. The old Shamans, the Druids and the Egyptian scribes also warned against the book, and it seems to me Jesus wasn’t too fond of the book-people. A book is bound. The stack of pages are kept in order by sewing and glueing them together. A great method. The inventor of that never got any credit and died nameless. Imagine Harry Potter wanding his way through Hogwarts on a roll. The deadweight scroll would need its own trailer complete with gears and a lever and a goblin or two to wind it. Or the ring of the lords. The box edition. Thousands of one sided loose pages that any dude could wipe their... well, things would become a mess, the earths middle would be lost so easily.

Unruly pictures

But a box of cards? They would make sense if things weren’t thought to be served by such strict order. If you allowed a less rigid form. If you secretly believed the pictures to be at least as good as the abstract signs. Words are a strange kind of magic. Little lined up soldiers. Armies of repetition. A few simpletons doing all the work. Pictures are different. Unruly. They are hardly contained by the frame. We do call it imagination after all. Or should I say did? Cause we have moved away from the image.

We lean to non-fiction. Move in a direction of factual recording, of data harvesting. The pictures in there are ‘real’ or just decorative, or are abstract diagrams in their own way. Symbols of an even more peculiar style to spell. A yes or no way pushed to the very edge. Strange and dark to my eyes. Powerful so it seems. Also capable of disappearing without a trace in an instant. It is here until it is gone. No fabric, no substance. No weight. No body. It needs to be copied frantically or it evaporates. I thought we had learned what endless copying does to the recordings.

I guess not.

Recordings

Speaking of recordings. A book is not the only way. The record can have any shape or form. The book is already dethroned in the big game. A huge fight is roaring on the number one spot. To sit on the seat of the gods is to write ‘the book’. That’s what they seem to think. How mistaken they are. How blind to the actual book.

Remember. What a word that is. What a practice. Remembering. Not just to be, yes or no, but how, that is the emerging quest. How in gods name do we hold the unnameable? How do we tell our children what we have learned? Is there one answer? Or do we need a treasure chest of hows? And where could we find such a chest? Who or what can tell us how?

Maybe we need a book that leads away from the book. A book that points at a how-to-remember that isn’t caught on the parchment, on the pulp. Maybe that is what books are for in the first place. Remember?

It takes a few pages to do that. And a great flash-boom-moment to trigger that. A five year journey to find all the pieces and bind them into a narrative. It was all there. In me, and I did my very best to step out of the way and get this out on paper. I tried. Here it is. In its full flawed nakedness. No longer pretending to understand.

As slow as you can handle

Not all of it at once. Gently it starts. Slow. As slow as you can handle. First we get to know Charlotte and how she gathers the others. We follow the many threads weaving the fabric, sewing together an elaborate hand-stitched dress....

Do we have time to sit and listen to a story while the world is going up in flames? Is there any reason to celebrate imagined tomorrows and yesterdays?

The answer is yes.

It will be quite the adventure to find the way home. It will need more than one book. More than one record to hold this song. Shall we start the first chapter?

TCOTNK

See you at the other end.

TCOTNK Chapter 1 Circle Breaker

Here is the INDEX with links to all chapters

Or go paid, and download the first seasons as an e-book