Once Upon a Time...

...I wrote a book, by accident, about Leonardo daVinci.

To clarify, I didn't write the book by accident, I wrote it on purpose. It was the second installment in an adventure story about a girl and her friends and her time-travelling dog, Delaney. When I started the book, SECRET OF LIGHT, I knew it was going to be set at some point during the Renaissance, but not much more than that.

One day, I was writing a scene where the main character, a girl [who, incidentally, has only one leg] fell, along with a couple of her friends, through a hole in the fabric of time. [This happens a lot near Eagle Glen School. In fact, I would hazard a guess that if the fabric of time really was an honest-to-goodness piece of material, the bit wrapped around Eagle Glen was pretty much made up of cheesecloth. Or Brussels lace.]

Darrell ends up somewhere entirely unlike where she started, with has a wicked case of time-sickness and is well and truly disoriented. She makes her way through a darkened room, only to discover she is not alone. On the far side of a very untidy table emerges the chalk-dust-covered head of a brilliant, talented and arrogant fourteen year old boy.

And thus Leonardo walked into my story, and my life.

Now, I had never inserted a person who had actually taken breath into one of my stories before this time. The beauty of fiction is the whole make-believe part of the gig. But faced with this interloper, I did what I had to do -- research, and a lot of it.

In the way of these things, further study into the life and times of Leo made him eerily perfect for the story. Common knowledge places the man firmly into humanity's cultural zeitgeist as an artist, but to his contemporaries, Leonardo was so much more. He was a renowned weapons-inventor. He designed toys for the crowned heads of Europe. And he even aspired to build a time machine. All of this [and many other wonderful and weird coincidences] fed my muse until she was fat and happy and writing up a storm.

A big part of my job as an author was to give my _character_ of Leonardo as much shape and substance as the man himself. And so, today, [courtesy of one of my favourite blog sites, Boing Boing] when I stumbled across this TED lecture, it spoke to me -- just like the face of that fourteen year old spoke to me more than five years ago when he walked into my manuscript -- and my heart. And if you ever read SECRET OF LIGHT, you can now evaluate whether I got it right ...or not.

Hope you enjoy this musing on what Leonardo really looked like.

~kc

Spring Break is here...

...or will be, as of tomorrow afternoon.

But there is one more day of school to get through before the joy of a spring holiday happens.

Highlands Elementary School in North Vancouver is approaching the day with undeniable sensibility. They are having Pyjama Day, with the ultimate goal of six hours spent in maximum comfort, reading.

I get to be a part of it, and though I don't plan to be sporting my pyjamas (which are not really fit for public consumption), I promise to wear something odd and flashy and well-suited to reading gory, scary and cool stories.

The image above is a copy of Leonardo's actual signature, which figures large in one of the stories I may get a chance to tell tomorrow. You'll note the signature is in mirror-writing -- not only right-to-left but backwards, as well suited that most remarkable of men.

In other news, Silas has made it through the week without eating a couch or a cushion or a wicker chair. (He did eat the dish scrubber -- for a total of three dish scrubbers now consumed -- but in terms of volume it barely rates a mention.) Part of this may be due to the fact that he went through most of the week with bare gums on both sides, but now his adult teeth are pushing through and perhaps his couch-chewing days are behind him now [she sez, hopefully...]

And on the computer front, I am afraid that Leopard OSX For Dummies will be supplanting Mansfield Park tonight. (I'm on the final book of Jane Austen's sadly small oevre. She died at 41 of tuberculosis of the liver). I'm more in need of Leopard learnin' than of a brisk walk through the English countryside, so Jane and her plucky heroines and gallant gentlemen must step aside for the moment.

Let's hope some of it sticks.

~kc