Chapter 0: The Play behind the Prologue

This was actually the second-to-last chapter I wrote for the entire Keepers Trilogy. I knew I needed some way to explain the main plot points that were implied to have gone on before the action that constitutes KOS. Of course, doing so would  make for a challenging introduction. I knew that. But, without this explicit context, some later plot developments and references would seem confusing, or have less effect to for uninitiated reader.  Other than simply summarizing these points through something like a historian’s note — which beyond seeming somewhat contrived and complicated is more than slightly dry — I wasn’t sure how to go about it. Until inspiration struck:

I was back in Los Angles, visiting family. They I took me to Temecula for the weekend to see a play, entitled ‘Equivocation’, by Bill Cain. It was about Shakespeare’s ostensible process of drafting Macbeth.  There were more actors in the play than there were members of the audience.  It was the best work I saw all summer.

‘Equivocation:’ the play that inspired the prologue. Shakespeare in the Vines festival, Temecula.

In the final soliloquy, the character of the bard’s daughter speaks of stories — the ones we tell when we think that no one is watching —  relating that the preceding play had been her own.  It was suddenly as if one of my own characters was speaking to me, in the persona of the character on stage: Keepers of the Stone was her story.

I walked away from that play in a daze. Unable to sleep that night, I realized that a paradigm shift was required. To stop thinking of Keepers of the Stone as a continuation of preceding developments from In Desert and in Wilderness and Stas, Nell and the Lost Jewel of India. To start viewing the story told in Keepers as the main action. Just one with a rich and involved backstory. One that is explained in the form of a  prologue, which as we shall see (notice its title: Future’s Prologue), itself becomes an integral point of the main plot. Still a bit dense? Maybe. But that’s the nature of the beast: it provides the basic bones of the characters’ backgrounds,  which are then clearly present to be embellished as the story develops. And that makes things easier in the long run. All shall be revealed.

Just go with it….