Character Profile: Michael Edwards
Michael Edwards grew up in the seaside town of New Canaan on the secluded island of Ennor. His father is an environmental insurance agent that assesses damages caused by errant Folds, the bends in time in space that occur throughout their island nation, creating both awesome and often dangerous anomalies. Meanwhile, Michael’s mother suffers from a rare form of epilepsy that leaves her stunned and incoherent on the best of days. Michael takes care of her while his father is away. At nineteen years old, he feels like his ambitions to go to college and study Moving are rotting on the vine. All of his friends have already moved away, and he jealously awaits their visits so they can regale him with tales of college life. Their stories of parties and beautiful girls are enticing, but most of all he wishes he was beside his friends in class, studying applied metaphysics, philosophy, and engineering. The Academy at Alexandria specializes in the training of Moving- the ability to manipulate energy with the mind.
Michael’s father, however, is no fan of Michael’s aspirations. He demands that Michael remain in Canaan to support their family. Throughout Michael’s life he always felt like he had to put aside his dreams in favor of his duty. He knows his parents need him, but his lack of freedom rots his heart. So, he does what he can, secretly practicing Moving using a set of old textbooks his uncle Sefu gave him.
All seems drearily hopeless to Michael until he encounters a strange, horned man fleeing from a pack of vicious dogs. Michael is suddenly thrust into the center of an oncoming war that may push him to become the Mover that he dreams to be, but will also test the limits of his love, friendships, and family.
Interview with the Author
Please share a little about yourself, your genres, any other pen names you use.
Most people know me as an artist. I studied painting, teach art Otis College of
Art & Design, and have exhibited my art in galleries and museums around the
world. Just in the last year, my
paintings were shown in China, Japan, London, New York, and L.A. Usually I travel along with my work but have
been so busy with writing I haven’t had a chance to step to far away from my
doorstep lately.
R.N. Feldman is my author name, but I sign my
paintings Roni Feldman. Roni is
typically a female spelling (my parents were immigrants, so didn’t know any
better) and incredibly in this day and age, many book genres under female names
do not sell as well as male-authored books.
Disturbing, but true! So I J.K.
Rowlinged it.
Tell
us a little about your latest or upcoming release.
Finishing The Creator’s Eye: Mover of Fate has been
one of the most thrilling milestones in my life. I have thought about this story every night
until I fell asleep for the past twenty-eight years. Obviously, it was not so complex when I was
six years old, but by the time I was twelve, all of the major characters and
plot points were there.
Book I takes place on the hidden island of Arimbol
where people known as Movers can manipulate matter with their mind. The story follows Michael Edwards as
discovers that he is descended from a long line Creators who not only can Move
matter, but actually Create it. When an
alien force comes looking for he and his family, he finds himself at the center
of a cosmic battle between light and darkness.
He is supported and often tested by an array of imaginative characters,
some human and some not, as he struggles to Create his own destiny.
Have
you ever based your book or characters on actual events or people from your own
life?
When I handed my mom a copy of The Creator’s Eye for
her to read, I bluntly told her, “The mom in the story is NOT you!” I still don’t think she believes me. The mom in the book has a debilitating
illness that forces the main character, Michael, to take charge and be
responsible. It helps shape who he is
(and who I needed him to be for the story).
My mom similarly became sick at an early age with rheumatoid arthritis.
She ultimately did find a cure, but until then, her inability to move freely
and her hard path to recovery were a big influence on me. But beyond that, they’re nothing alike! I swear!
Is
there a theme or message in your work that you would like readers to connect
to?
Definitely, but I try to not be overt about it. I always groan when writers take unnecessary
pauses from the plot to explain thematic points. My book is fast-paced and the meaning is
inseparable from the plot and characters.
At its heart, The Creator’s Eye is about a mythical
battle between light and dark, or more precisely, the thin, confusing,
permeable grey line between them. The
characters are pitted against hard choices, sometimes without any clear
answers. I went through a lot of
personal struggles during the writing of this book. There were moments in which reason or long
held beliefs could not guide me, and the only light in the dark was my
intuition. I see that reflected in a lot
of my characters’ struggles.
Of
all the characters you’ve ever written, who is your favorite and why?
That’s a tough toss-up between Christopher Grant and
Arion. As far as a fun character, I love
writing for Grant. He’s witty,
opinionated, and irreverent. Sometimes
he treats everything as a joke, but there is often a kernel of truth or insight
to his witticisms and he acts as cautionary foil to several of the other
characters.
Meanwhile, Arion is a Lightbringer, a type of alien
being that shows up in Book II (coming this Fall!). Lightbringers are composed entirely of light
and can project themselves across the cosmos, giving them multiple bodies at
once. Writing for him opens up so many
possibilities as I can switch back and forth between his different bodies,
telling different stories or perspectives at the same time.
If
this book is part of a series…what is the next book? Any details you can share?
I am in the last round of edits for Part II of Mover
of Fate, coming out this Fall. The universe I created gets much bigger in
this novel as Michael tries to flee his homeland. He and his enemies are confronted by an
ancient power that pushes them to extremes, and Michael discovers a disturbing
secret about his family that shocks him to his core.
The Creator’s Eye: Mover of Fate, Part I
The Creator’s Eye
Book I
R.N. Feldman
Genre: Science Fiction/ Fantasy
Date of Publication: November 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1501083617
ASIN: B00O705KD6
Number of pages: 270
Word Count: 58,401
Cover Artist: R.N. Feldman and Caroline Miller
Book Description:
On a hidden archipelago, people known as Movers manipulate matter with their minds while strange Folds in space transform the landscape into wondrous and often deadly anomalies.
When a young Mover named Michael Edwards discovers that he is descended from a long line of beings who can not only Move matter, but actually Create it, he finds himself at the center of a cosmic struggle for power.
Manipulated by friends, family, and an ominous prophecy, he allies himself with a host of strange creatures and characters as he fights to become Mover of his own destiny.
Book Trailer: http://youtu.be/o8-NsFjl7dA
Add it to your Goodreads Shelf
Available at Amazon
CHAPTER I DISCOVERY DAY
Michael took a deep breath as he watched another seizure wrack his mother’s body. It was a small one, but he dutifully laid her on the floor just in case it became violent. He stood nearby as she twisted and shivered. He had to remind himself not to interfere— to let the attack run its course. The seizures always caught him by surprise, but the procedure to deal with them had become almost banal— lay her on the floor, make sure she didn’t hit her head, then wait until it was over.
After a few moments, she lay still and stared vacantly at the ceiling. Michael helped her sit up. He wrapped an arm around her waist and lifted her to a chair at the dining table. Her wiry brown hair tickled his ear. It was the same color and curliness as his, but no amount of combing seemed to keep it in place anymore. He could barely recognize his own face in her sallow cheeks and sunken eyes. He looked more like his father anyway, with his golden skin, green eyes, and broad shoulders. His mother, meanwhile, had grown thin and frail, but when he lifted her up, her limp body felt as heavy as a sack of wet dough.
“Are you okay?” Michael asked as he arranged her in her chair. Her dull, dark eyes stared ahead blankly.
“Mom, do you want to eat?” he asked, although he didn’t actually expect a reply. It had been years since she had articulated a full sentence, but he didn’t like treating her like a vegetable. Once in a while she was lucid enough to grunt a response, but this time, she did not even move.
“I’m going to make dinner now,” Michael told her, tentatively leaving her, hoping she would not fall or have another seizure the moment he turned away.
He went to the kitchen sink where he had only just finished washing the vegetables when he had been interrupted by her collapse. He sliced the sweet, white ghost carrots— a summertime favorite of his town— into big chunks and put them in a pot with the other vegetables. He covered them with stock and turned up the heat on the stove. The pilot clicked a few times, but there was no whoosh of flames springing to life. Michael grumbled at the malfunctioning burner as he set the pot aside and lifted the enameled stove lid. The firebox was out. The small carton of rocks that usually glowed red with potential heat were instead an ashen grey.
Michael had boiled some water for tea that morning, so he knew that they should be working. Usually when they died, they went out slowly, becoming weaker over the course of a few days, but these had just inexplicably lost their oomph. He wondered if he had accidentally spilled something on them. Regardless, he would have to light them, but he didn’t hunt for matches. Instead, he took it as a chance to practice his Moving.
He set the kitchen timer for five minutes, rolled up his sleeves and pointed his finger at the small cluster of stones. He stared at them, or actually focused his eyes on an imaginary point beyond them. He would make them catch fire. According to the books his uncle Sefu gave him, he should not hope, need, want, or pray for the fire to manifest. He had to imagine it was already there. Anything less merely affirmed his lack of will. It was a small nuance, but made all the difference.
Michael focused his thoughts like a beam of sunlight, pushing all foggy doubt out of his mind that what he was doing was impossible. His mind wandered occasionally, but he kept bringing it back to its goal, to the reality that he required— that there was already fire in the firebox. His concentration reached a frenzied tension and his vision blurred.
Unable to hold his thoughts anymore, Michael relaxed his stare. His vision re-focused and to his satisfied surprise, a small spray of sparks issued from his fingertip. It surrounded and warmed the firestones. Without stopping his Moving, he checked the kitchen timer. Two minutes had elapsed. It was not a personal record, but Michael acknowledged that there was at least merit in consistency.
The dull stones crackled, catching fire on their own. Michael ceased his Moving, lowered the stove top, and replaced the soup on the revived flame. While waiting for it to boil, he chopped garlic and parsley. Even though his mother was about as responsive as the firebox was a moment ago, he did his best to make her meals taste good. He hoped that a well-cared for meal was somehow healing or imperceptibly uplifting to her spirit.
Michael added some herbs and salt, and when the vegetables had softened, he turned off the flame and crushed the whole concoction with a sturdy slotted spoon. It was kind of a shame to mash it up, but lengthy chewing was beyond his mother’s ability.
“Here you go,” he said, serving her a bowl. “Eat it while it’s hot.”
At first it seemed she hadn’t heard, but a ghost of awareness flitted across her face. She dipped a spoon into the beige puree and after a slow moment, dragged it to her lips. Michael watched her mechanically eat for a while. He listened to the clumsy clink of the metal spoon against her teeth and the sloppy glug of her throat. Once he was sure that she was underway, he got up to wash the dishes and perhaps find a moment to pour himself a bowl. But before he took a step, he heard the rustling of packs at the front door. His father was home.
Michael hurriedly opened the door for him. His father was still rifling through his pocket for his keys. “Ah, thanks!” his dad, Simon, smiled through crow’s feet and a thick salt and pepper beard.
Michael took his father’s bags.
His dad stepped into their living room, shutting the door behind him. “So?” he asked as he peeled off his coat and slung it over the sofa. “Is your mom okay?”
Michael described her recent seizure and added with measured assurance, “I think she’s fine now.”
“Was that the only one?” his dad asked, but did not sound particularly concerned. “No, she had a series of them a couple hours after you left. She’s been mostly
absent since then. I had to stay around the house the past couple of days keeping an eye on her.”
His dad nodded aloofly and patted his belly, which along with a slope to his shoulders, had grown more pronounced since his wife took ill. He strode over to the stove and ladled himself a bowl of soup. “Is this all there is?” he asked disappointedly.
“Um,” Michael began, a little frustrated by his father’s dissatisfaction, “I think there’s some phoenix in the ice box from last night,” he suggested.
Phoenixes were a fiery-colored, long-plumed fowl commonly raised in the region, but lacked any of the powers of resurrection borne by their mythological namesake.
Michael’s father wrinkled his nose at the prospect of cold bird and glumly muttered, “I’ll stick with the soup.”
Michael tried not to make a face and instead asked how his trip was. “Interesting,” Simon began as he took a seat at the far side of the table away from
his wife. “This was an exciting one.”
Michael’s father worked as an assessor for the government’s environmental insurance agency. Arimbol, the island chain on which they lived, was full of unexplained natural phenomena colloquially called folds. They were places where nature and physics would bend. Most folds were so subtle that unless you were paying close attention you could pass through them without notice, but others were beautiful, miraculous places.
Michael had heard of some where water flowed uphill, optics went awry, or wind burst from the ground with the force of a hurricane. There were also folds that were quite dangerous, that could make you sick, crazy, or even kill you. Most folds were relatively small though, only affecting an area the size of his living room, while the largest engulfed the entire Arimbolean archipelago.
Michael had never had the chance to travel, so loved to hear stories whenever his dad returned from one of his many trips. He had seen more of Arimbol than anyone else in their village, so knew a great deal about its flora and fauna, most of which existed nowhere else on Earth. Some were widespread across the islands and were even farmed. Besides the phoenix and summer ghost carrots, their town of New Canaan was particularly famous for the blue wine squeezed from coastal cobalt grapes grown on the surrounding hillsides. East of Canaan, towards Alexandria, was miles of black wheat.
While the hills around Canaan were called the Blue Mountains, that area was sometimes referred to as the Burnt Plains.
Some plants and animals were less widespread. They were so specifically adapted that they might inhabit a single pool of water. His father had told him about the white thorn fish that clung to the slippery rocks of a single stream north of Urgench, or the roaks, the giant birds that nested on the tallest peaks of the Morningstar Buttes. Michael’s father told him that they were so large that they could easily carry off hesats— the shaggy, one-horned buffalos that grazed on the southern grasslands.
Michael was anxious for his father’s story. He sat down with him, keeping an eye on his mother to make sure she was still eating. “So what did you see?” he urged.
“Well, a few days ago, a farmer in Skarra claimed that a long chasm had opened in the ground and green fire just shot out of it, destroying a huge swath of his crops. But when I arrived, the fields were burned, but there was no sign of a fold. For all I knew the farmer had lit the fields on fire himself while burning leaves. But upon closer inspection, there was a series of cracks running down the center of his land. It looked like the ground had unzipped like a pair of trousers.” He gave a sharp snort then slurped back a spoonful of the thick stew. “Hmm, needs salt,” he said, reaching for the shaker across the table before going on. “I told the farmer, ‘Look, I can fill a report out, but there’s nothing indicating that a fold did this. For all I know, you just got drunk and did something foolish.’”
“The guy looked offended and exclaimed, ‘It’s happened more than once! Just stick around tonight and you’ll see!’” Michael’s father sighed. “I didn’t particularly want to stay there any longer than I had to, but he seemed sure of his tale. Plus, in my job, I’ve seen stranger things than fire shooting out of the ground, so I agreed to spend the evening there. He and his wife were hospitable and offered me dinner, but I couldn’t take it, of course. Regulations, you know. I fortunately had the sandwich you packed for me.”
Michael nodded, glad his cooking had been of some use.
“I waited there until midnight, but nothing happened, so I got up to leave. The farmer begged me to stay just a little bit longer, but I was tired from the trip and wanted to go back to the inn. Just as we stepped out onto his front porch, I noticed a green glow coming from the field. We stood there watching as the ground began to hiss and jets of green fire streamed from the earth. It followed the jagged slit I had seen earlier, but it cracked wider. The crops around it caught fire, and the line jutted quickly across the field. It ran straight for their house.”
“What did you do?” Michael asked, leaning in.
“We were dumbfounded at first. I mean, we just sat there with our jaws hanging open like a thirsty hesat. It was probably only a couple of seconds, but the fire moved quickly. I got my wits about me and yelled at the farmer and his wife to get inside and go out the back.”
Folds rarely appeared in places people had inhabited for a long time. Usually his father was called in to examine some place that people had wandered into while traveling. It was his job to categorize and map them, and to file claims for people if they were injured or lost property, but this was unusual that he had to rescue people himself.
“I ran out into the field and the damn farmer followed me. There was an irrigation ditch running nearby. I quickly Moved the ground with blasts of energy until I carved a trench running to the fissure. The water flowed through it and made the flames die down a little, but the ground was still cracking and burning and running for the house. So, the farmer and I built up a huge mound of dirt to bury the rift.”
“For a moment, it seemed like we stopped it, but then it just shot straight through the mound. A few seconds later, the farmer’s entire house was gone— just burned to ashes. The fold finally stopped just short of the tree line at the end of their property.”
“Was his family okay?”
“No one got hurt, but it’s a hell of a mess for the agency. We don't know if the land will be safe to live on, or even their neighbor's land for that matter. I’m going to have to go back with a crew and run a bunch of tests on it. For now, the farmer and his neighbors are staying with friends, but we're going to have to find somewhere permanent for them. It’s going to cost the crown a lot of money.”
“What a mess!” Michael added.
“But we'll solve it,” His dad said confidently as he got up to drop his bowl into the sink. “I’ll probably have to go back there next week. Are you okay with watching your mom again so soon?”
“Sure,” said Michael, his willingness buoyed by his father’s heroism. “But I was wondering if you could do me a favor tonight? My friends have been back from college for the past few days and I haven't had a chance to see them, plus tonight are the Discovery Day fireworks.”
Michael’s father sighed and rubbed his temples. Michael could feel the refusal coming on.
“It’s been a long couple of days, son. I could really use a night to relax…”
“But I haven’t seen them in almost a year!” Michael implored. It had been a while since he had used such an insistent tone with his father, but his friends were back for summer from the Moving Academy in Alexandria and he was dying to catch up with them.
His dad grimaced, “Alright, just come back in time to help me get your mom upstairs.”
Michael was elated. He thanked his father and set about finishing his chores so he could hurry to see them.
About the Author:
Mover of Fate is the first novel in The Creator’s Eye series by author and artist R.N. Feldman. Feldman lives and works in Los Angeles, CA where he teaches at Otis College of Art and Design and spends as much time hiking through the local mountains as he can. Art, metaphysics, useless scientific trivia, and extensive backpacking treks throughout the world have all been major influences in his work.
Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/thecreatorseye
You can also see his latest paintings on www.RoniFeldmanFineArt.com
Website: http://www.rnfeldman.com/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thecreatorseye
Twitter: @RNFeldman
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