- Extraordinary Seasons
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- Friday, August 8, 2025
This is the seventy-fourth installment of West Wind, your weekly drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. Unfortunately it’s not the seventy-eighth, but we’ll let this one slide.
In addition to being a very numerically sound day, today is also the feast of St. Dominic de Guzman, founder of the Order of Preachers, otherwise known as the Dominicans. Here he is, as painted by the artist Claudio Coello in 1670.
And… what’s with the dog at his feet? Why is it holding a flaming paper tube? Dominic’s mother struggled with infertility, and she had a vision of a dog leaping from her womb carrying a torch in its mouth, setting everything around it on fire. She had little Dominic shortly afterward, and that’s exactly what he ended up doing, eventually influencing the whole world through his preaching, the Rosary, and other feats. The dog with a torch in its mouth has become an enduring symbol, so much that the leading bluegrass band made up of Dominican priests wrote a song specifically about the tale!
St. Dominic has had an influence on my own life, since I was born in a Dominican hospital, and have close ties to two other major OP saints, Thomas Aquinas and St. Martin de Porres. I choose to keep that connection strong by not only making everything black and white around here, but also through the name.
It isn’t mentioned anywhere in Octave of Stars, because I hadn’t finalized it yet, but the world that it, Dreadful Holiday, and the Sword Bearers series all share is called the Torchmouth Saga. It’s set on Earth, in roughly the modern day, but slightly more fictional than real. There are plenty of fantastical elements, from people being able to control matter and energy with a thought, to odd spiritual beings that call themselves reindeer but look like regular humans…
Another element I decided to include, which confused lots of early readers, was purposefully avoiding any kind of brand name for any product or service, even when it was a little awkward.
The Vase on the table was full of red daisies, as though the one Ash had put in it earlier had spread its crimson beauty to the other flowers. He ate out of the foam food container quietly, a familiar meal in an unfamiliar place. Everything that had happened sunk in and smoldered in the embers of his mind.
Yes, I could have just said “the Styrofoam box”, but I didn’t. Why? Because that dates the story to a time and place in our world. I wanted the whole thing to exist slightly outside of that.
Ash handed Azalea the box of matches. "Hey, do you still have some of that strap material you used to attach your flashlight to your slingshot arm?"
She looked up at him from inside the [shopping] cart, after adding the box to her stash of treasures. This was not the strangest thing she had heard in the past few days. "Um, I think so, it should be at Lumina's."
Oh, you mean Velcro? Nope! Let’s keep it a little more mysterious. Besides, why is she sitting inside a shopping cart in the first place?
Someday soon Octave will be transferred to a new World Anvil instance, but until then, you can read the whole thing online for free. Stay tuned for more!
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