Creating Sanctuary
by Shannon Bond
I suppose I’m writing this as a way to remember my creative process. As I continue to recover from brain surgery, I’ve noticed subtle differences in how my cognition and memory work. I’m still having good days, and then there are the other days. They are filled with brain fog, fatigue, and tangled memories. What I’m discovering is that writing, as it has done my entire life, is coming to my rescue. It is a way to slow down, to organize my perspective, and gather my scattered thoughts and visions. For me, that’s more important now than ever. So here I am, talking about my upcoming book, which has languished in a dark drawer for way too long.
The ideas that eventually converged to form Sanctuary lingered in the back of my mind for ages, triggered by an abandoned place or antique portrait, before I ever put a word to paper. Every time I drove by an abandoned place, I wondered about who lived there. What were their lives like? What were the buildings like before they had chipping paint and fading facades? What did the people think, do, and feel? And most importantly for the idea that would become the novel, what if there was a residue left behind when a place was abandoned? That’s how the Moirai were born. The instant someone takes a step across a threshold for the last time, new life, tethered to the place, springs into existence. The places we inhabit affect us on so many levels. To add to this idea, I love historical fiction, so what better way to weave the stories of Adelia, our main character, and her friends than to root them in reality?
Every writing session, I would stare at antique photos of people and families pinned to my wall. I picked these up in dusty bins on thrift-store floors or tucked away in dark corners of labyrinthine antique malls. A sepia-toned portrait of a sister and two brothers, staring at us through the ages. What were their lives like? What happened after the camera shutter snapped? Isn’t the heart of storytelling to ask, what happens next? The images we see are a snapshot in a second, but what did they feel during their lives? What did they do and think? Connections with each other, failures, and successes. Ups and downs, anguish and joy. Life. And what would happen if all that raw energy gathered in the places we inhabit were released as a creative force when a place is abandoned?
It would create a hidden world inhabited by beings living their own stories, driven by the emotions of those who came before. As I dove deeper into that logic hole, I realized that each Moirai would be different, dominated by a different emotional residue. Trauma would be strong with a lot of these characters, sure, but other driving emotions would shape them, too. Joy, anger, sadness, the entire gamut of the human experience would spawn the Moirai. Don’t call them fae, they don’t like that (but what if that’s what spawned the fae mythology?). And while they may be dominated by a single emotional residue, such as rage infused by a violent event, it’s up to them to decide whether they can take charge of their own lives and forge their own paths, regardless of what they are born with. Isn’t that what we all have to face? Nobody can pick their circumstances, only what they do with what they have. And wouldn’t the particular emotion that forged them affect their physical appearance, too? But I wasn’t finished, from there I wanted to take a little mythology and local history, maybe the Civil War, WWII, some Native American folklore, and some gods, and twist it all together. That’s Sanctuary.
While discussing this recently, I was asked why anyone would choose to write stories, especially novels, in such a crowded market filled with human and now AI creations. That’s a great question. After toddling through the late 70s and growing up in the 80s and 90s, we didn’t exactly experience content scarcity, but nothing could have prepared us for the content tsunami we live in now. And while I think Sanctuary is a novel take on fairy and fae mythology, there are plenty of other novel takes out there…on everything. My simple hope is to connect with the people who will appreciate the characters’ struggle and story.
As far as writing and creating go, my love lies in the craft. The process and pain. G.K. Chesterton said something to the effect that when one gets the impulse to write a novel, one should lie down in a dark, quiet room until the urge passes. That was way before the internet. I wonder what he’d say now? Other authors, like Vonnegut, advise us to genuinely care about our subjects, while other writers warn us not to add to the pile of rubbish already in the world, and others still advise us to push through and write the rubbish; that’s the only way we get better. So, the takeaway, for me, is that the path is yours to create, in all things professional and personal. Not dissimilar to the Moirai’s challenge to take charge of their own fates regardless of their circumstances. Create what you love, results be damned.
Regarding the changing creative landscape, I, like all other creators, understand that AI is everywhere, which can make the act of creating feel even more futile. But that is only true under a specific condition. Let me explain. I’ll admit, for the first, you know, two years of the AI boom, I was in a deep depression, mourning the loss of my writing, visual design craft, communications, and well, any other human endeavor. But after I clawed my way out of that dark hole, there was an even stronger compulsion to create. I respond to the question of “why write?” and the broader question of “why create?” with “because we are here.”
Creativity is a cornerstone of human existence. We express ourselves through creation. In the United States, about 350,000 books are published each month (about 4 million each year). That number is staggering. Does that make each of us a whisper in a hurricane? No. I say, if you have a story to tell, it’s always worth it, no matter the result. Stoic philosophy tells us to focus on the process, not the outcome. We can’t control the outcome. So if you create for the love of creation, it is not futile.
But if the only goal is to sell or become famous, there will be suffering. While we obviously want to reach an audience and put effort into doing that, we can’t control the outcome. But if we create because we must feed the fire inside, we are fulfilled. We revel in the process and the pain, but also the joy of creating for the sake of expression. And when it is finished and released into the world, we turn to the next soul fire that must be fed. That is creating for the sake of creation. That’s where Sanctuary comes from.
And as I dwell on this subject, my final thought on AI is that it is a tool. And like any good creator, I will use that tool within the ethical boundaries I create. For me, that means it is more useful as a writing partner than a creator if my byline is going to be on the work. It helps me frame and work out ideas. All the tools at our disposal, from spell checkers to AI, are helpful. Didn’t the mathematicians panic when the calculator was created? But lo and behold, we still have mathematicians. That’s not to say we aren’t living in unprecedented times, witnessing fundamental shifts in our existence as automation and AI bore deeper into the fabric of our society; we certainly are. But I have another novel planned, and I’m going to write it myself. My first love was fiction. I cut my teeth on high fantasy with Margaret Weis and Tracey Hickman’s Dragonlance Chronicles and Gary Gygax’s Greyhawk. I still remember being swept away into those worlds and others just like it.
Before that, Julie of the Wolves was the first novel I ever read completely by myself, and I’ll never forget my inability as a child to separate fiction from real life. I remember crying at the end of that book, and I was determined to set out for the northern wilderness. I even named my Siberian Husky, Kapu, years later. I connected to White Fang and other similar books after that, before discovering science fiction and fantasy. Reading so much at a young age is still kind of a mystery to me. My family didn’t read, and I don’t remember anyone ever reading to me outside of school, but catching my dyslexia at a young age and dropping me into special education classes are what probably sparked the love. While I wasn’t able to comprehend complex nonfiction sentences, fiction opened a world to me. I didn’t have to understand every word or know all the rules; I simply had to feel the story as my eyes skimmed the whole sentence. My imagination would take over, and off I went, soaring on the back of a blue dragon.
That love evolved into a desire to be a storyteller, and I landed in the communications field. I’ve worked for agencies and organizations for years as a photojournalist, writer, editor, and communications operations leader. Building narratives with words and visuals is a superpower. But fiction brings a special kind of magic when we connect to characters in another world. I started my first novel attempt sometime in the third grade. It was a handwritten affair about crazy dreams and waking up in strange places around the house. I no doubt lifted the idea from whatever I was watching or reading at the time.
While I’ve written plenty of fiction since that first attempt, I haven’t published much. I’m trying to remedy that now. So here I am sitting on my second novel. It’s a seat that’s become too comfortable because I finished the work several years ago. It’s been nagging at me from the bottom of the deep, dark drawer to be published. I suppose brain surgery and a career transition are finally nudging me to turn it loose into the world. Sanctuary is a novel about searching for place, self, and the journeys we take. It’s about regret and serving others and the idea that we’re okay just the way we are, even if we do sometimes create our own misery, our own prisons.
Human emotion is complex, and while the world is made of stories, those stories are driven by emotion. I asked the question, what would happen if our emotional residue spawned new life when we took our final steps from a place? What would those creatures and that hidden world look like? I imagine it as all the emotions of all the people over the years gathering into a pool of water behind a dam until a place is abandoned, and then the dam breaks, spawning new life. That’s Sanctuary. As I write this, I wonder, what if that’s true on a larger scale? What if everything we do and feel is spawning another universe right now? Countless worlds out of reach. You never know, maybe there is another story to tell.
