Lydia wrote:
: I'm still at a loss to understand your titles, Mike. :)
Tarot cards. I love Tarot cards. Can't do a reading to save my life, just love the different themes brought out in different decks, the interpretations of the old archetypes strained through a hundred different cultures, all the lovely myth and metaphor bound up in the pictures themselves, etc. When I was thinking about the Saga, ages back, I went on vacation up to Woodstock NY with my wife. Found an exquisite deck of Tarot cards, based on the traditional Rider-White sequence, but with all the images and meaning drawn from the Arthurian muthos. Thumbed through the deck many times as I was coming up with the UberPlot for the saga, letting the images and ideas build up sort of on their own, more or less at random. By the time I had the story of the dead-fire weapons worked out, I had seven cards that seemed to represent their history. The cool thing is, as you guys uncover more and more of that lost tale, you're sort of retracing the steps of the story, half a century later. The interplay between what-I-know and what-you-discover is actually creating some amazing dualisms/parallels between what-is-now and what-was-then.
Wish I could tell you about it all, but then I'd have to kill you.
So anyway, Tarot cards. All will become clear, in time. ;)
-m.