I am happy to have on the blog today, author Kim Headlee, who
is here to tell us about her book, Dawnflight.
What I did after my summer vacation
Or, “Why the Second Edition?”
This year marks the release—14 years after its original publication
by Sonnet Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster—of what I officially
term the second edition of
Dawnflight.
In this age of instant gratification and DIY publishing, fans wonder
why I took the trouble to make such substantial changes to what was
already an award-winning, critically acclaimed novel to warrant labeling
it a new edition. The answer lies rooted in the maze of my psyche.
I am, and always have been, a chronic overachiever.
There. The secret is out! I feel much better now. Thanks for letting me share it with you.
Oh… you want to know why. Quite right; I did promise you the why.
A late addition to
Dawnflight’s first edition featured “Pictish”
language terms I invented, based upon Scottish Gaelic, to convey key
concepts of my characters’ world. So far, so good. But keep in mind I
was performing that research in the late 1990s, before the Internet
became the repository for everything under the sun and beyond, and I had
bumped up against the deadline for submitting the final draft for
publication. For the Pictish terms requiring a plural form, I simply
slapped on an “s.” Bzzzt—wrong! Thank you for playing. That’s an
Anglo-Saxon construct, not a Gaelic one.
No one else seemed to notice…but I never forgot.
Flash-forward to the summer of 2012, when I made the decision to
self-publish
Dawnflight’s sequels. While waiting for professional
editorial input on the first sequel,
Morning’s Journey, I decided to
dive back into Scottish Gaelic to figure out how to generate the correct
plural forms of my terms. The deeper I dove, the more immersed I
became; I began to see linguistic patterns that I could mine to create
new endearments and epithets for my characters to use toward each other.
As summer blazed into autumn, these patterns led me to study Irish
Gaelic, Old Welsh, and Old English, where I discovered to my chronic
overachieving delight that I could invent entire sets of idiomatic
terminology for my characters of the various races to describe
themselves and each other. Even their pantheons gained new deities from
this trove of linguistic knowledge I had acquired.
I like to believe that J. R. R. Tolkien—the second “R” of which I
employ for the name of a minor character in homage to Professor
Tolkien’s academic contributions to the English literary landscape—would
have been proud.
Ah yes, before I forget…I ramped up the sex, too.
Read, dream, and enjoy!
