Westrian wanderings

For the past month I’ve been doing my best to immerse myself in the Bronze Age, but lferion came to town for CostumeCon, and since she is one of the most enduring and dedicated of Westria fans, talk naturally turned in that direction. In fact she came up with a character who will undoubtedly appear in the sequel to The Golden Hills of Westria, which I really must get started on one of these days.

Did I mention, by the way, that the remaindered hard copies of The Golden Hills of Westria did arrive? They are available for $20 (includes postage). I’d be happy to send you one (really happy, the boxes are still stacked in our front hall because I can’t figure out where else to put them). Send me a response with your address and I’ll let you know where to send the money.

I also finally got the CD’s for The Wandersong printed up, which is worth the $15 for the cover alone, featuring donsimpson as Silverhair with Mt. Tamalpais in the background. Those are also available, same deal as the book. Margaret and Kristoph are almost done with the sequel Jewel Songs (songs from the four Jewel books, featuring the College of Bards Choir). They just sent me MP3s of some of the songs, and this one will be even better. Margaret has the perfect voice for some of the more lyrical pieces, and Kristoph sounds like Silverhair. I am working on putting the sheet music up on the Westria website.

Speaking of which, the other thing that lferion did was to ask if we could go to the Kingdom of the West‘s Coronation Tournament to see Elis step up as Queen. Given that Westria is where I turned my energies when I realized it wasn’t fair to use real people in the SCA as my artistic medium (I had this odd idea that my characters would be easier to manage), and given that one of the premises for Westria is that a lot of SCA people would have survived the cataclysm and contributed to the resulting culture, going to a tournament is rather like visiting Westria, especially when it is in Mendocino, one of my favorite parts of California.

The site was gorgeous, the weather was gorgeous, the people were gorgeous, and I had a wonderful time. A lot of old friends came out of the woodwork to honor Elis, so it was something of a reunion as well. I took some pictures there (and on Hwy. 1, which we took north), and was sufficiently inspired to actually process them and get them up on the Westria website. In fact I got so inspired that I went through all my photos for the past two years and added quite a number to the galleries for Seagate and Las Costas. Have a look and see for yourself!

In the course of digging I got to the shots from a roadtrip with our houseguests for this year’s Pantheacon across the southern borders of the Royal Domain to the sea and found this, which may be the best photo I have ever taken.Enjoy!