Tag: Germany

Tour a Fairy Kingdom???

fairylike brook in the forest
What does fairyland look like to you? Clear, rushing water and green leaves under the trees.
Near Kell, Rhineland Pfalz. Germany. ©Laurel Decher, 2020.

Yesterday, we walked for five or six hours and I got buckets of new ideas about the Fairy Kingdom.

I love the “Traumpfad” hiking trails that we’ve already been on. This one is special for its caves and variety! Here’s a virtual dream hike for you:

  • A hidden castle. Schweppenburg.
  • A fairy brook
  • More fairy brook
  • Springtime carpet
  • The cupids have been here! A kissing booth with mistletoe.
  • The road to the Fairy Kingdom?
  • Easter atmosphere.
  • Magical fairy caves.
  • A safe place for a Fairy Kingdom would be too high for people to climb up.
  • A Fairy Kingdom mountain with moat.
  • The magical fairy tree.
  • A magical frog tree root.
  • fairylike brook in the forest
    A brook for healing.
  • A coat of arms for a cupid.
  • A path should have a footbridge if it can.
  • A waterfall just like Niagara.
  • Hand-drawn geology diagram, with hikers.
  • Wind In The Willows atmosphere.
  • Can you see the bird on the road? A kleiber?
  • Roman spring with bench.
  • Roman carbonated spring.
  • The border to Fairy Kingdom.
  • Grenzpunkt. Border point.
A carpet of flowers. ©Laurel Decher, 2020.
Cartoon drawing of the Seven Kingdoms with locations on Rhine and Mosel Rivers marked by colored towers
Click the map to tour the Seven Kingdoms: Cochem, Marigold, Magenta, Indigo, Saffron, Rose, and Blackfly.

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Tour the Blackfly Kingdom: Pfalzgrafenstein Castle

How about a tour the Blackfly Kingdom? My favorite castle on the Rhine: “Pfalzgrafenstein” is kind of a mouthful, so people call it by the name of the nearest village, Kaub. ©Laurel Decher, 2020.

When we travel these days, we often drive or fly.

In earlier times, the rivers were the highways. Big and long rivers, like the Rhine River in Germany were important for delivering people and things.

[Is that why Amazon is named after a river in Brazil? I don’t know, do you?]

If you visit, you can stay at the nearby youth hostel or the YMCA hotel in another castle, high up in the village of Kaub. Down at the Rhine riverbank, you take a small ferry across to the island.

This castle is the perfect place for collecting tolls from ships bringing cargo up and down the Rhine River. If you’ve ever seen a modern tollbooth, you’ll agree that this is about the fanciest tollbooth ever!

Modern tollbooth for cars.
Source: Shutterstock Royalty-free stock vector ID: 683431282

The first tolls were collected almost 800 years ago in 1257. The castle changed hands several times and new parts were added and reinforced. The Prussians finally stopped charging ships tolls here in 1866. Since 1946, the castle belongs to the state of Rhineland Pfalz in Germany.

  • Reinforced castle wall
  • A dangerous road for barges
  • A castle like a ship
  • Nose to nose with the Blackfly Kingdom
  • A possible reindeer landing strip?
The Rhine River has strong currents and can be high and stormy. The Pfalzgrafenstein castle is built to stand up to the storms. It’s the inspiration for the Blackfly Kingdom in the Seven Kingdoms Fairy Tales. © Laurel Decher, 2020.
  • Keep dry when the water’s high
  • Queen Ash’s visitors aren’t voluntary
  • A courtyard for reindeer
  • Inner balconies of castle
  • Watch your step!
  • Long hallways
  • View from Queen Ash’s office
Inside the Blackfly castle.
The tall steps keep the castle dry when the Rhine River gets high from too much rain.
The castle has lots of staircases, open walkways for croquet or chase scenes.
Queen Ash’s office (the Kommandant used it first 🙂 gives her a good view of possible “customers”. She doesn’t want to miss a chance to collect a toll from a passing ship.

Tired of the view from your window? Take a mini-tour of an 800-year-old tollbooth. #SevenKingdomsFairyTales

  • Winch for chain to hold back ships until they pay
  • Where to go when you have to go
  • Don’t want to pay? It’s the Water Dungeon for you!
  • Water Dungeon Part 2: How long can you balance on this disc hanging from a rope?
Special Features of the Kaub castle.
A huge baking oven (sorry, my photo is too dark!),
A chain to block the river so ships had to pay their toll,
A privy, and
A water dungeon where you had to balance on round board hanging from a rope.
© Laurel Decher, 2020.
tablet phone ebook hardcover images of LOST WITH LEEKS

If you like the Blackfly Castle as much as I do, you might enjoy Prince Nero’s adventures in LOST WITH LEEKS

Click here for more about the book.

Cartoon drawing of the Seven Kingdoms with locations on Rhine and Mosel Rivers marked by colored towers
Click the map to tour the Seven Kingdoms: Cochem, Marigold, Magenta, Indigo, Saffron, Rose, and Blackfly.

_______________

If you’d like to stay in touch, sign up for my Reader’s List. Once a month, I share a new book recommendation for readers ages 9 to 12, story-related freebies, and/or related blog posts. If it’s not your thing, you can unsubscribe at any time.

Marc Chagall’s stunning gift of reconciliation

"Your Word is Lamp unto My Feet." Stained glass window in shades of blues with flying angel and candelabra by Marc Chagall/ Charles Marq. Pfarrkirche St. Stephan, Mainz, Germany, 2016.
“Your Word is Lamp unto My Feet.” Stained glass window by Marc Chagall/ Charles Marq. Pfarrkirche St. Stephan, Mainz, Germany, 2016.

St. Stephan’s church in Mainz, Germany has stunning stained glass windows. The church burned on February 27, 1945 and Marc Chagall designed most of the current windows in the late 1970’s.

The windows show love stories of all kinds: Colorful people and angels float in a sea of blue glass. In light of the Holocaust, I was especially touched by the window of Abraham pleading with three angels to spare Sodom and Gomorrah.

“The windows in the church of St. Stephen were intended by the artist as a token of friendship between France and Germany, a pledge of international understanding and of the peace which we all need so badly.”

–Klaus Mayer [Genoveva Nitz, translator]. St. Stephan in Mainz, 8th rev. English edition. Regensburg, Germany: Verlag Schnell & Steiner GmbH Regensburg, 2015.

Marc Chagall was 91 years old when he designed the first windows. But when he was 98, he created several more and gave them to the church as a gift. He died a few months later. That’s a life full of art and faith, generosity and forgiveness.

An awe-inspiring role model. I don’t think I would be strong enough to be this generous after the destruction and the grief of World War II. I hope this for us all: that we find many ways to reach out in friendship, while it’s still easy.

Have you used your skills or talents to bring people together in friendship? Was it a special cake or meal? A painting or an ice sculpture? A story or poem? A replacement water pump? I’d love to hear about it.

If you’d like to stay in touch, sign up for my Reader’s List. Once a month, I share new middle grade fiction, story-related freebies, and/or related blog posts. If it’s not your thing, you can unsubscribe at any time.

Noblesse oblige, libraries, trees, and cyberbullying prevention

Castle with towers and moat and red and white patterned shutters. Burg Satzvey, Germany.
What can you do with your heritage? Noblesse oblige for the modern age. Burg Satzvey, Germany. © Laurel Decher, 2016.

Yesterday, I visited a nearby village and strolled through the public part of the castle grounds of the lovely Burg Satzvey. It was built in the early 1300’s and now hosts jousting and other medieval-sounding shows for the entertainment of the populace. Half-timbered houses cluster around the castle and a large church stands just up the hill.

How do you decide what to do with a castle, if you inherit one? In medieval times, the castle protected the village folk and probably provided a secure marketplace for trading. The size of the modern parking lot and the shops (now closed for the winter) inside the castle say that some things don’t change. Using your inheritance in this way probably has pros and cons. We also saw a bench securely chained down in front of a village house. The tourists around here must be eager for souvenirs.

But the noble family could have made a different choice: they could have left the castle to fall down into a romantic ruin. For example, the abandoned vineyards on the Mosel are called “Brazils” because so many vintners left the area for warmer climes.

One person’s decision can influence a whole village.

My own experience is that people move around much more in the United States. Many people volunteer and serve their communities in all kinds of ways. Some give to their communities in large-scale ways. Andrew Carnegie gave us libraries. I just found a new book I want to read about him.

Wangari Maathai of Kenya planted a tree, and another and another, and eventually won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. Read about her story in the picture book PLANTING THE TREES OF KENYA.

Or what about teen Trisha Prabhu’s app to prevent cyberbullying? Listen to her TED talk here.

We’re sometimes quick to dismiss our own experiences and education. Burg Satzvey gave me two questions for myself that I pass on to you:

  1. What is our heritage and how will we choose to build on it?
  2. What moves us enough to take a first small step?

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5 New Publishing Tools from the 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair

Presenter Dai Qin of Douban Read at the 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair International Self-Publishing and Author Programme. ©Laurel Decher, 2015.
Presenter Dai Qin of Douban Read at the 2015 Frankfurt Book Fair International Self-Publishing and Author Programme. ©Laurel Decher, 2015.

The International Self-Publishing and Author Programme at the Frankfurt Book Fair was on Saturday, October 17th. Here are five new tools I discovered:

(1) BookTrack is a tool that lets you add a soundtrack to your story or novel. Here’s a YouTube overview of how it works and a brief sample of what it feels like to read a book with a soundtrack. BookTrack takes a 30% royalty on the text and a 70% royalty on the soundtrack.

As a reader, I’m not sure I like the pacing arrow traveling the right margin, but it’s an interesting tool to check your pacing as a writer. What do you think? Useful or annoying?

(2) Soovle is a free tool for identifying search terms and categories to help readers find your work. You type words in the search box and get popular search terms and categories from Google, Amazon, YouTube, Wikipedia, Bing, Answers.com, and Yahoo. It has a selection of other search engines you can choose from including Barnes & Noble. I don’t see Kobo or GoodReads although they would also be useful.

You can save the search terms to a file. This isn’t the kind of tool that tells you how many people search on the search terms you find. It just ranks the terms in order of popularity.

(3) PublishDrive is an e-book and print book distributor based in Hungary. It sounds similar to Smashwords or Amazon’s CreateSpace in that you can opt in or out of each online store. The difference appears to be that PublishDrive has access to more local stores in international markets.

They require DRM (digital rights management) whenever possible. Like Smashwords and CreateSpace, you can get a free ISBN for e-books, but need to buy an ISBN from your country of residence for print books, as you do for Ingram.

(4) Agentur für Buchmarktstandards is where you get ISBN’s if you write and publish in Germany. I also learned that ISBNs are free for Canadian residents. Sounds like a writer-friendly country. Go Canada! 🙂

(5) Douban Read is an e-bookstore in China. According to this blog post, it’s not the first e-book distributor in China. Their presentation kicked off with this YouTube video of Dutch author Thomas Olde Heuvelt (2015 Hugo Award Winner).

There’s something enticing about reaching a world market this way and finding new readers in another culture.

Anything you want to try, either as a reader or a writer?

_________________

Thanks for your interest in my work! If you’d like to stay in touch, sign up for my Reader’s List. Once a month, I share new middle grade fiction, story-related freebies, and/or related blog posts. If it’s not your thing, you can unsubscribe at any time.

What do Babies and Manuscripts Have in Common?

Baby gray flamingoes in a flock of pink adults.
Baby flamingoes are gray and wobbly. But then they grow up. Weltvogelpark Walsrode, Germany. ©Laurel Decher, 2015.

How is a manuscript like a baby? These baby flamingoes in Weltvogelpark Walsrode don’t look anything like their parents.

I’m thinking about the time when my mom came to visit and I had a new baby in the house. I was obsessed at the time with the number of errands I could accomplish before the baby put an end to them.

We lived in snowy Minnesota and doing errands with a new baby was a major expedition. It meant packing the snow-suited child in a thrift store perambulator with a down pillow as a blanket. The snowplows clear the streets, but they throw up snow walls on either side, blocking the sidewalks’ connection to the streets.

The snow is a mix of salt, sand, ice, and snow and, after a few wind-chilled days, settles into a concrete-like mass only accessible to goats. (No complaints, mind you, this sort of physical activity can help a new mother avoid depression and find her waistline.) The other advantage to packing up a child is that you don’t have to heave them in and out of the car and wake them up. I proved very early that three errands were the maximum allowed.

The other option was the car. It’s embarrassingly unenvironmental and wickedly convenient. I once took a visiting Dutch conservation biologist on a tour of all available drive-throughs in our neighborhood. We had a pay-at-the-pump gas station, and a drive-through drugstore, bank, and county library. That’s four.

My mom made a mild comment. “Babies grow up you know. One day, the baby will suddenly be able to do something she couldn’t.”

I didn’t know. Our children are now 21 and 14 and they do all the amazing things other peoples’ children do (and more 🙂 of course). You’d think I knew how this worked by now, but growth still takes me by surprise.

Right now, many #pitchwar contest hopefuls are waiting to see if their manuscripts have unexpectedly grown-up. Like any field of endeavor, writing fiction involves a long list of skills to practice. Maybe today, our strengths are dialogue, pacing, and persistence. Tomorrow, we may find a new vehicle for our story, and achieve a new high in plotting, humor, or voice. “No” doesn’t mean failure. It means “not yet.”

We may yet find a way to delight.

Good luck Pitch Warriors! Many thanks to Brenda Drake and the 108 Amazing Mentors! (They have to be capitalized because they are.)

 

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