Branches arced over Fabiom’s head and the branches of each tree grasped those of the next to form an unbroken canopy that went on - forever.  Wildwood.  That was the entire world.  Unbroken, unending, safe.

Here he was safe.

The last light of day gilded the leaves of autumns past so that he trod a golden path between the burnished trunks of ash and elm that supported the living canopy above him.

He was not going home.

Evening chorus rang out from amid the branches as the daytime birds of the wildwood prepared for the night, calling their final farewell to the sun and a warning to their neighbours that all territorial disputes were merely on hold and would be resumed at first light.

The boy tried to impersonate the chaffinch, as his Uncle Tarison had taught him, “chip chip chip, cherry-erry-erry.”  And the stream running alongside the path chuckled and gurgled as if in amusement at his efforts. 

The stream could laugh at him, he did not object to that.

As he got down on his knees to take a drink a shrill voice shattered the tranquillity of the woods, silencing the birds. 

“I see him!  I see him!”

Fabiom took one, startled, look, scrambled to his feet and ran as fast as he could, regardless of the briars that tore at his clothes and his skin or the nettles that burnt him as he hurried past.  He knew where he was going, where he would be really safe. 

SILVANA - prologue

The first draft of Silvana was some 34,000 words.  It began with the sixteen year old Fabiom’s decision to risk his life, or his sanity, by attempting to win a wife from among the Silvanii – the tree spirits that dwell in the wildwoods near his homeplace – and ended with his death, many years later; favourite of the Ruling Prince and father of Lesandor and Elzandria.  The final draft is 40,000 more than the original – and that’s only Part 1.  In proper fantasy style, Silvana is now a trilogy.  

Silvana grew slowly, over a number of years.  The better I got to know the characters and the world they inhabited, the more pieces of the story came to light.  However, the original story remained unchanged.  It feels like history, not fiction; I can’t change it, even if I wanted to.  About half-way through, Lesandor, whom I have watched grow up on the pages before me, is distraught: terrible things have befallen him.  I can’t read it without wanting to cry.  Every now and again I say, ‘I must save him from this, he doesn’t have to endure it,’ and then I stop myself at the last moment because what I have written, what I am reading is what really happened.  Having reached that stage I know the time had come to stop creating and let the story loose.

It wasn’t difficult to grow the story from novella to full-length trilogy.  There were incidents crying out for explanation or elaboration; there were characters who deserved more of their own stories to be told, there were places that needed to be explored.

There’s a prologue now that didn’t exist before – the story of how the four year old Fabiom found Casandrina’s tree for the first time.  That incident was referred to in the original but only in passing; so too the trip Fabiom and Prince Ravik made to Varlass where the prince meets his bride-to-be.  Fabiom’s favourite book, Tales of a Woodsman, no longer simply exists as a title but is quoted quite extensively (and writing a book to appear within a book is an interesting exercise in its own right.  It is essential that it has its own voice.)

I could have gone on . . .  and on.  Somewhere, somehow, you’ve got to call a halt.  The story spans a lifetime, 600 pages hardly begins to scratch the surface!