The Valdemar Companion

by John Helfers; Denise Little

  When I asked about her own early musical influences, she said:

  “Classical and folk—Peter, Paul and Mary, Glenn Yarborough, The Chad Mitchell Trio, The Limelighters, The Weavers, all that bunch. I used to sit up at night with my transistor radio under the covers listening to an after 10PM all-folk show out of Chicago.”

  Her own favorite styles of music?

  “Truth to be told, I have two favorites. For writing to, it’s instrumental—jazz, new age, and classical all the way—lyrics interfere with my prose-brain cells. For listening it’s a mix of classical and folk, mostly Celtic these days, though I have a significant Native American collection as well.”

  Misty often uses lyrics and poetry as a way to facilitate her fiction writing. That is, whenever she’s stuck for dialog, description, or plot, she will hie herself off and write a poem or a song about the character or story twist in question, in order to crystallize what she wants to see or say. As she put it:

  “The songs help me to write the story, definitely, nine times out of ten. The song ‘Threes’ came first—I wrote it on a plane on the way to visit Ten Lee and gave her my only copy, then decided to write the story. A couple of other “legend” songs have come first as well—’Sun and Shadow’ and ‘Windrider Unchained,’ both of which I have pretty well decided will NOT have stories written about them, as I think they work better as distant legends.”

  She has, as you might expect, clear ideas on the prevailing musical styles of Valdemar, which are, she says:

  “European (mostly medieval) folk, dance music and vocal. No opera or anything like it, no groups of instrumentalists playing music designed for formal concerts. The instrumental music played as background at court functions is still dance music and one- to three-person vocal. Sacred music is by choir, though I haven’t gotten into that, largely because I haven’t done much with religious life. It’s entirely possible that I’ll do something appropriately different for some of the other countries outside Valdemar. I ought to have mentioned Shin’a’in drumming by now, and somehow haven’t.”

  Music and musical instruments fill the books. It’s a tribute to the depth and richness of detail in the Valdemar stories that musical instruments don’t just appear, like theater props hauled up from the storeroom. We get to meet luthiers, the people who craft the instruments. A reader is as likely to encounter a harp or gittern as a sword or shield. There are also lutes, psaltries (another sort of stringed instrument), flutes, fiddles, horns, and drums. These are all instruments familiar to the cultures of our own Middle Ages and Renaissance. In at least one instance there’s even an instrument bearing a close resemblance to our own world’s modern steel-strung, twelve-string guitar. Vanyel Ashkevron, Herald-Mage of Valdemar, comes across one of these unorthodox instruments in Magic’s Promise (p. 115):

  “Vanyel took it carefully, and struck a chord—

  It rang like a bell, sang like an angel in flight, and hung in the air forever, pulsing to the beat of his heart.

  He closed his eyes as it died away, lost in the sound…“

  Before she was known as a writer and the creator of the land of Velgarth and the kingdom of Valdemar, Mercedes Lackey was known as a writer of song lyrics. There are the lyrics to literally dozens of songs scattered through the Valdemar books. Most of these have been set to music, some by Misty, others by various talented folks, including Heather Alexander, Meg Davis, Cecilia Eng, and Leslie Fish. Many of these songs have been recorded on an assortment of albums on both cassette tape and compact disk that contain at least some elements from or about the stories set in and around Valdemar. All are available in both cassette tape and CD, (except for Owlflight, which is on CD only) through Firebird Arts and Music. If you’re interested in owning them, check the discography in this book. You can buy the various albums mentioned in it on Firebird’s website, http://www.firebirdarts.com.

  Music is a large part of the mortar that holds together Valdemar’s life. It’s entertainment, but it is never a thing to be sold short. When Stefan says in Magic’s Price, “It’s not in the nature a Bard to do anything particularly constructive,” Vanyel replies (p. 88), “I think you underestimate both yourself and the potential power of your office, Stefan.”

  Songs give life to the stories, and the stories inspire songs. They help us enter this shining kingdom called Valdemar, and let readers carry away a living piece of its heroes, villains, and people in their hearts.

  Valdemar was born in song, and it has been a delight for me to watch the world of Velgarth evolve from a handful of songs into, at my last count, a series of twenty-six books and ten albums with more of each on the way. I was there when that pivotal moment of birth happened—believe it or not. It all started from a chance encounter at a science fiction convention.

  Back in 1982, I had a very small publishing company that specialized in science fiction and fantasy songbooks and recordings. This tiny company scraped up its meager resources and I traveled from California to the World Science Fiction Convention being held in Chicago.

  There, sharing a small table with another small publisher and a gentleman selling original artwork created by his wife, we all sat packed in like sardines selling our assorted wares.

  One afternoon, at the other end of the table, there was an animated conversation going on, and some sort of conference between the fellow on the end and the publisher in the middle. Moments later a piece of lined notebook paper with a handwritten piece of poetry was waved under my nose. It proved to be a very nice piece of space-related poetry. Not just rocket ships and hug-eyed monsters, but a song based on a real event in the US space program. It was good, it was well written, and it was just what we needed to fill out a songbook we were working on called “Minus Ten and Counting.”

  Great, I thought, and looked up trying to figure out where these mysterious lyrics had come from. There stood the author, a shy red-haired woman, trying to retrieve her lyrics. When asked, she put her name and address on the bottom—Mercedes Lackey, Tulsa, Oklahoma. She never got her lyrics back. She eventually did get a contract, and then royalties when the song-book and cassette were published, and she even turned in another song for the collection. She became a professional lyricist, the beginning of a long and fruitful collaboration that resulted in many, many songs, among them those ten albums of music based on Valdemar I mentioned before.

  In the world of fiction, if someone tried to sell a tale based on the chain of coincidence that led to a first encounter between Mercedes Lackey and me, I doubt it would be accepted by any editor. They’d all think it was too far-fetched.

  As for the song, it turns out that Mercedes Lackey (known as Misty to her friends) had been standing in line behind two teenage boys who were marveling at their discovery that the early Apollo space program had suffered losses, and that several astronauts had even been killed. This ignorance so appalled her that she went back to her hotel room and wrote “Memorial,” the story of the Block One Apollo spacecraft that caught fire in January of 1967, killing Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee, and, being an old folk-music fan, set it to the haunting “Ballad of Springhill.”

  Then she showed the song to an old friend who just happened to be sitting at a dealer’s table selling his wife’s artwork, and the dealer showed it to the publisher sitting next to him, who showed it to the publisher sitting next to her, and the rest was history. Misty’s professional songwriting career was born (And this is the first chance to publicly thank both Mark Bailey and Margaret Middleton for being part of the chain that connected Misty with me.)

  Misty quickly became a lyricist of great. power, though she rarely wrote the music for her songs. In very short order she had written a number of songs for our anthologies, and even had enough material for an album of her own. The assorted singer/songwriter types floating through our recording studio figured out quickly what kind of treasure was arriving in the mail, and took to spiriting all of Misty’s songs away. Misty began sending me multiple co
pies of each new set of lyrics, so that there was a chance that one copy would still be around after some chortling composer had made off with her latest work.

  It was around this time that Misty, who by this time had become a good friend of mine, confessed that she also wrote fiction, and if it wouldn’t be a bother would I mind looking at some of it? The first two short stories she produced grew out of songs that she had written earlier, “Threes” and “Kerowyn’s Ride” (the stories later were expanded into the By the Sword novel). Both featured the team of Tarma the swordswoman and Kethry the sorceress. Misty’s writing and her characters were good, and the early adventures of Tarma and Kethry eventually found a home in the pages of the Sword and Sorceress anthologies edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

  So it wasn’t a total surprise when Misty finally admitted she also had a novel in the works, and asked me if I could possibly lake a look? The book was called Arrows of the Queen. It featured a girl called Talia and magical white horses set in the kingdom of Valdemar. I made some suggestions. She rewrote. And rewrote, and rewrote. She completely rewrote the novel three times at that early stage.

  Then writer C.J. Cherryh heard some of the songs that Misty was writing about her characters and decided that anyone who could write lyrical poetry that well had the makings of becoming a prose storyteller. At that point I was able to let the fiction experts take over and keep my mind on the music, but Misty kept me posted on what was going on. C.J. guided Misty through a whopping seventeen more rewrites of what became the Arrows of the Queen Trilogy: Arrows of the Queen, Arrows Flight, and Arrows Fall. That was before Misty even submitted the books to C.J.’s editor, Elizabeth “Betsy” Woliheim at DAW Books, who put Misty through yet another grueling series of rewrites before finally accepting the manuscripts for publication. And with every rewrite, Misty learned something new and became a better writer.

  To the outside world, it must have seemed as though Misty just exploded into the fantasy genre. But it wasn’t as easy as it looked, even though Misty and Betsy had formed a solid partnership—the new author was determined to succeed at her craft, and her enthusiastic editor had faith in her work. Only Betsy—who has been the editor for all of the Valdemar novels from that very first book, and who has been instrumental in Misty’s growth as a novelist—and a few of Misty’s friends knew just how hard Misty was working. For three long years before her first novel was published, Misty worked full-time as a mainframe programmer for a major airline. When she wasn’t programming, Misty wrote. She wrote before going to work, after work, on weekends, all during the holidays, and all through her vacations. And all of this writing was done with no guarantee of success or even, at least at first, of ever seeing it published at all. Once Arrows of the Queen was published, Misty continued this grueling schedule, and she kept it up for another five or six years before she was finally able to leave her programming job to write full time. The Arrows books were followed in short order by: the Tarma and Kethry books, Oathbound and Oathbreaker; Magic’s Pawn, Magic’s Promise and Magic’s Price; By the Sword; the Wind books; and then the Gryphon trilogy. By that time, Misty had become one of DAW’s rising stars, just as she’d become a sought-after lyricist and writer.

  It wasn’t just Misty’s talent and dedication that led to her success. Misty’s ability to learn something from everyone she worked with undoubtedly had something to do with it. I know from working with her on her songs that she always listened, she took constructive criticism well, she rewrote endlessly until she and I agreed that a song was right. She showed the same determination and willingness to learn when she became an author as she had when she became a lyricist. She recrafted all her work—her songs, her stories, her novellas, and finally her novels—as closely as she could to her editor’s specifications and until she was happy with the work herself, and she did it all without complaint.

  The books went on to become major successes with a life of their own. And Misty continued to write lyrics, many of which centered around Valdemar. Fortunately, as was true with her hooks, she didn’t have to make the music of Valdemar come to life all alone. Just as Misty had C.J. Cherryh and other writers to help her learn while she was crafting the early novels of Valdemar, and then Betsy Woliheim to edit her books and handle the publishing of her fiction once she became a professional writer, over the years a number of creative people have helped Misty breathe life into the music of Valdemar. Just like the world of fiction, many more people other than the creator are involved in the final product. Singers, songwriters, and instrumentalists have all collaborated to make the recordings of Valdemar’s songs. Though the people involved in bringing Misty’s music to life are far too numerous to mention by name and project, a few folks deserve special attention.

  The Celtic folk group Golden Bough has been involved over the years in many of the Valdemar albums, including the very first Valdemar album, Heralds, Harpers & Havoc, released in 1988. The creative core of Golden Bough has always been Paul Espinoza and Margie Butler, who between them play just about every folk instrument invented. Paul and Margie found time to work Misty’s music projects into their busy touring and recording schedule.

  It isn’t just people who’ve had a hand in bringing Valdemar’s music lo life. Recording technology changed radically since we first started working with Misty’s music. The first albums we did were preserved on analog tape using a very simple process. We set the microphones up, recorded a song, listened to it and if it wasn’t right, we moved the microphones, rewound the tape, and tried again. Only when the first song was perfect could the next song on the album be recorded. This painstaking process was used to create a two-track stereo master.

  Eventually we began using a four-track analog tape recorder, The advantage of a four-track system was that we could record a track of music—say a guitar—and then go back and record a performer singing, and control the relative volumes of the singer and the music in the final mix. The songs could also be recorded in any order, and we could have musicians come in and record at different times. This was a huge improvement over trying to corral all the musicians, the engineer, and the location, which is what we had to do in the early days.

  Then we moved up to eight-track analog. Many albums of Misty’s music were recorded on our trusty old Tascam eight-track tape deck, including Heralds, Harpers & Havoc, Oathbound, Oathbreakers, and Magic, Moondust & Melancholy.

  Along the way we started working in larger studios, and graduated to sixteen-track and twenty-four-track equipment on projects such as By the Sword, Shadow Stalker, and Lovers, Lore & Loss.

  Then computers and digital technology started to make their presence felt in the studio. We began to link computers, electronic instruments and recording equipment using MIDI, a special language that allows computers to talk to instruments and to recording equipment. Using the new technology, a song could have a complete complicated arrangement written on the computer in advance. Then, by hooking up a web of MIDI cables, a whole collection of electronic instruments, computers with sound cards and drum machines could generate the entire song with only the vocal tracks to be added.

  Owlflight took advantage of another leap of technology: digital editing. On this album we started by creating basic chords and melodies on the computer, recorded these onto digital tape, then we recorded all the instrumental tracks and vocals, then we took the digital tape and fed all the audio recording to yet another computer, to do on-screen graphical digital editing. To me, it felt a lot like SF and fantasy coming to life in realty. They say the best technology is indistinguishable from magic—recording these days seems to bear that out.

  Convincing singers to come in on a chorus at exactly the same time has always been a challenge. With digital editing, the problem can be corrected with a few mouse clicks. Fixing the same problem on eight-track analog tape involved locating the exact starting point of the chorus by moving the tape over the heads by hand, marking the start point with a grease pencil, then taking the reels off, reversing the r
eels—the entire tape is now playing backwards—lining up the grease pencil mark with the erase head, then hitting the play button for a second so that the erase head is activated, which got rid of the offending bits without hurting anything else. This is time-consuming and nerve-wracking too, because it was a permanent change on the tape. There was no way to correct a mistake if the editor goofed. These days, it only takes a couple clicks of the mouse. Add in the ability to undo any mistakes easily, and it seems like paradise in comparison to the old analog system of sound editing.

  Back in those olden days of analog editing, all false starts, thumps, and odd noises had to be edited out with a splice block, tape, and a razor blade. More marking the tape with a grease pencil, running the tape slooooowly over the heads, then cutting out the offending bit and sticking the ends back together with the world’s least sticky tape. At least if the edit was bad, the splice could be pasted back in, if it hadn’t fallen on the carpet and become indistinguishable from all the other bits on the cutting room floor. Some people long for the good old days. Not people in the recording business. You can trust me on that.

  It’s been a pleasure to work with Misty on the songs that grow out of the novels she writes. I look at the line of books she’s published and marvel at her achievement, then I play the albums of Valdemar, and simply enjoy.

  I know that Misty would have made it on her own—she was too determined and too talented and too hardworking not to—but I was glad to have been a part of the musical pathway that Misty forged on her way to creating the world of Valdemar to share with us all. Misty’s path to writing success has hardly been traditional, as most professional writers today don’t generally start as lyricists, and most bestselling novelists don’t come from the ranks of science fiction fandom. All in all, Misty has had an impressive journey—one that began at a chance encounter at a science fiction convention.