SONG OF ALL SONGS
Long after the apocalypse, Earth has repeopled itself. Twice.
Despised by her mother’s people and demeaned by her absent father’s legacy, Meridia has one friend—Damon, an eccentric photologist. When Damon shows Meridia a stone he discovered in an old photo bag purchased from a vagrant peddler, she is transfixed. There’s a woman, she says, a dancing woman. And a song. Can a rock hold a song? Can a song contain worlds? Oblivious of mounting political turmoil, the two set out to find the old peddler, to find out what he knows about the stone, the woman, and the song. But marauding zealots attack and take Damon captive, leaving Meridia alone. Desolate. Terrified. Yet determined to carry on, to pursue the stone’s extraordinary song, even as it lures her into a journey that will transform her world.
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The old man picks his way through the darkened hallway of the columbarium. A scent of burnt wood stains the stale air as he listens for the chirps and hums and breathy purrs. The three stones in his pocket pulse warm against his hand, indicating that he’s drawing near to another of their kind. He passes his hand along the seal of the niche and opens it, smiling at the bright turquoise that winks at him from among the ashes inside the urn. He cradles the stone in his hand, relishing the notes it sends coursing through his body, the longing for home and family. But this isn’t the stone Abél is looking for. He puts it back into the urn and replaces the urn in its chamber. With a single syllable, he re-seals the niche.
Humming softly in harmony with some of the stones, in
counterpoint to others, Abél moves on. Day is coming and he knows he must get
well away from the temple grounds before the sun rises. He’s been accused of
theft before. He knows he’s not the thief. A sigh of regret sifts through his
head as he turns toward the space outlined in sepia light. The way out.
A sudden buzzing between his brows draws him up short. The
stones in his pocket quiver and squeal, directing his attention to a chamber
to his left. A purple glow emanates from within it. This one is newly sealed
and easy to open. The urn inside is particularly elaborate—unusual for these
austere days. Is that real gold outlining the figure on its lid? The figure
looks like a tree in flames.
Welcome to the blog! The first page
is perhaps one of the most important pages in the whole book. It’s what draws
the reader into the story. Why did you choose to begin your book this way?
I wanted to plunge my readers into the world of the story, but without overwhelming
them with facts or data. My goal was for readers to begin experiencing this
world in all its strangeness and to find it intriguing. Page one also introduces
one of the main characters (the protagonist’s father) and one of the thorny
problems that must be dealt with as the story moves forward—the question of someone
who is presumed dead but isn’t.
In the course of writing your book,
how many times would you say that first page changed and for what reasons?
When I began writing the book, it
started with what is now chapter two, which introduces the protagonist, Meridia.
But since Meridia is one of those difficult characters who is an unreliable
witness (not yet aware of exactly who she is and what she’s capable of), I
needed a deeper dive than she could give so that my readers would have an idea
of where the story was headed. Thus, I chose to start with the scene of her
father searching for...well, you’ll have to read the book to understand why he
was where he was. Once I settled on the opening scene, I rewrote that first
page several times and revised it a zillion times, always looking for exactly
the right words, arranged into exactly the right cadence of sentences.
Was there ever a time after the
book was published that you wished you had changed something on the first page?
Thankfully, no. I still really like
that first page and I like what it does in (hopefully) pulling readers into the
world and the story.
What advice can you give to
aspiring authors to stress how important the first page is?
The first page is your only chance to make a first impression on readers, especially on one of those Amazon “Look Inside” previews or when they pick up your book from a shelf somewhere. The reader needs to experience something that beckons them onward, wanting to know more. It’s also your chance to show what kind of writer you are. That first page should resonate not only with the voice of your character(s) but with your voice as an author. Read it aloud. Many times. Make sure it’s authentic to what the reader will find in the rest of the book.
When Donna Dechen Birdwell was about ten years old, she became obsessed with the idea that if she was thinking with her brain, she ought to be able to think how it works! She’s been trying to wrap her mind around reality (and how humans experience it) ever since. She made a career out of anthropology—that utterly boundless science of humankind and how we got here—and then sidestepped into Buddhist philosophy and then art and photography and writing stories that tend to fall somewhere in the neighborhood of speculative and/or science fiction. She’s a big fan of Ursula LeGuin and N.K. Jemisin.
In her EarthCycles series, Donna imagines a far, far future world in which pockets of survivors of a global apocalypse have evolved new ways of being human. “Not altogether new,” she says. “More like rearrangements of certain aspects of our inherent human potential.” The first volume of EarthCycles, Song of All Songs, received the 2020 silver medal from Self Publishing Review. The book introduces a mixed-race main character making her unique way through a deeply conflicted world. The second book in the series, Book of All Time, is set for release in August of 2021.
Donna’s first trilogy (Recall Chronicles) is set in a hauntingly familiar 22nd-century world in which nobody grows old, an achievement that turns out to be not nearly so utopian as one might expect. Each volume tells the story of a different character’s experience of that world, but the stories are intertwined and some of the same characters turn up in all the books.
A stand-alone contemporary fiction book, Not Knowing, explores intergenerational PTSD in the life of an archaeologist working in Belize. Donna worked as an ethnologist in Belize for many years, so there’s a lot of her heart in this one.
Before anthropology, Donna worked as a newspaper reporter, and beyond anthropology she studied Buddhist philosophy (and practice) and then became an artist and photographer. Her paintings are done in acrylics on handmade Nepali lokta paper. Her primary photographic interest is in Miksang contemplative photography.
Donna earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and previously taught at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.
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