Wanderer's Tales #8 - Freedom
Welcome to Issue 8 of Wanderer’s Tales, the newsletter of Ancient Roads. In this issue is Night Ride, an original song.
Welcome to Issue 8 of Wanderer’s Tales, the newsletter of Ancient Roads, the web site of Seattle writer and composer Chris Struble.
Here you will find fantasy fiction set in ancient worlds where music makes magic, and the road ahead is always uncertain. Wanderers welcome.
As I write this it is early July, after the Summer Solstice and Independence Day. Summer is an important season to our family, filled with camps, music and fun. It’s a chance to see old friends and make new ones. It’s also a time of service when my wife and I volunteer in the communities we support. For these reasons, I have less time to write in the summer.
I wrote and published almost 15,000 words of fiction and 3000 words of newsletters in the first six months of this year. Giving myself two months off for summer, that comes out to about 30,000 words a year, not bad for a spare time author.
Instead of releasing a new chapter of Shield of the Goddess, this month I released the sheet music for Night Ride, an original song I wrote in 2021. The first verse was inspired by a scene in the original version of Shield of the Goddess, but the rest of the song was inspired by world events, in particular the plight of refugees fleeing Afghanistan after the takeover of the country by the Taliban. As I added verses, "night ride" became a metaphor for the refugee journey.
Chris Struble
The theme of this newsletter is “Freedom”.
Philosophers have been debating freedom and its definition for hundreds of years. At its root, freedom is the ability to make choices and move in the world without restraint by other people, like the young woman in the featured image.
Freedom has been the natural condition for humans for most of our existence. The opposite of freedom is slavery. Scholars agree that slavery was rare in hunter-gatherer societies, because in small communities constantly on the move, there were more opportunities for anyone who wanted to escape a situation to run away.
In Chapter Five of the Shield of the Goddess, when Shala listens to her father tell a story about a group of people that captured and enslaved other people by attacking boats at sea, Shala has no words for them, because her world doesn’t have slavery. She calls them “people stealers”.
In our world, “people stealers” are still around. Anti Slavery International estimates that 50 million people worldwide are in various forms of modern slavery today. Does that surprise you? Does it anger you?
What does freedom mean to you? What would it be worth to live in a world where everyone had it?
As always, thanks to my subscribers. If you enjoyed this newsletter, or the chapters, songs, or reviews I am sharing here, I hope you will leave a comment below.
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See you on the road!
Chris Struble