I’m pleased to say Wendy’s book, The Unhewn Stone, placed in two categories in recent the Preditors and Editors Poll, 3rd in Young Adults and 2nd for e-book Cover Artwork (done by Tiger Matthews).

For more on this delightful lady and her book, see below:

Thank you for inviting me to your place Heather. I’m delighted to be here.

Wendy Laharnar
The Alchemist

Whether planting characters in a modern romance or trapping them on alien planets or in prehistoric caves, writers create worlds and situations to tell their stories. Some see themselves as gods. I don’t.

I see myself as the Alchemist.

I love symbolism, so it is natural I should gravitate to the art of the ancient alchemists who used physical symbols as metaphors to hide their spiritual philosophies which conflicted with the Medieval Church.
As the alchemist, my aim is to create my Opus Magnum or Great Work, so in my novel, The Unhewn Stone, I focus on the alchemist’s three prime elements: sulphur (fire), mercury (water) and salt (form).
The Alchemist strove to find the right balance between these minerals to produce the sacred elixir (philosopher’s stone) that would transmute base metal into gold. The process led him from ignorance to enlightenment. So I take a blank page, add verbs, nouns and prepositions, and strive to do the same.
Ideas bubble and boil in the apparatus in my laboratory. Characters and conflicts fuse into scenes and bake in the self-feeding furnace of my imagination. The result is a jumble of words like chemical experiments. Some work, some don’t. So I seek the sacred elixir, which I call creative juice, to transform chaos into order. To do this, I turn to the alchemist’s symbols for direction.
I become sulphur, the Sun, the omnipresent spirit of life. I am mercury, the Moon – a passive and imperfect reflection of the sun, I am salt, crystals: impure  purified. A particularly fine idea is that salt symbolizes self-knowledge & wisdom. In its lowest form it is bitter and painful. I love that! So I make my characters suffer as they grow in understanding, but I hope I learn something along the way, too.
Actually, as a Gemini my own ruling planet is Mercury, the messenger, so it is little wonder I should make my main character, Stefan Gessler, a messenger. But he is born on 23rd December, the day known as the Secret of the Unhewn Stone, so he is a Capricorn with the ruling planet, Saturn. To me it is most appropriate that Saturn should be associated with ‘restriction and limitation’ and did I make good use of that – my poor Stefan, hehe. But like all good parents or rulers, Saturn’s lessons actually help him to grow.
As Hermes, the swift messenger (Mercury), and Apollo, patron god of the Arts (Sun) I, the alchemist, dissolve or coagulate scenes and characters, to my heart’s content. There’s plenty of symbolism here to keep me happy and give my stories form. But I use more.
The alchemist believed the Divine world is reflected in a Material world which is corrupted. Only by removing the imperfections can he reveal the true state of matter and show its perfect union with the Divine. For him, the golden sun, represents the Divine (religion) and the silver moon, represents Matter (science). He saw the marriage of the two in the total solar eclipse. It’s a beautiful concept: All in One.

In my writing, I try to do the same, by showing both the sacred and secular aspects in everything. Like the self-devouring serpent, the ouroboros, I create the circular union of endings and beginnings: goal, crisis, consequence, which lead to new goal, crisis, consequence etc.
And I must have my staff of Hermes or caduceus wand. This is the symbol of the transforming alchemical power i.e. the transcendence from the profane to the sacred. This is the union of the two opposing forces in our nature, seen in the coiled snakes rising on the caduceus pole. They represent duality – a blending of the positive and negative aspects in my stories.
The Alchemist labours on, dissolving away the imperfections in his metals, trying to purify them so they not only reflect the sun, but reveal Divine Light. Like he who murmurs, ‘Dissolve, dissolve, dissolve,’ I sift through the dross in my chapters, in search of true gold, and delete, delete, delete.
I will spend a lifetime striving and never achieve my full potential, but that’s okay. If alchemists had given up, we would have none of their lesser achievements today.
So, it was not as a god I created the world and characters in The Unhewn Stone, but as a 14th C. alchemist who found the secret of transmuting base metal into a magic gold orb that reflects the Divine Light of the Sun.

The Unhewn Stone is available from Amazon, B & N , Smashwords , MuseItUp Bookstore, and where most ebooks are sold.

Wendy’s light, short story, Happiness Guaranteed, (Sci-Fi) was released by MuseItUp Publishing on 2nd December, and Billy the Bonsai Bull, a short chapter book for tweens, about a little white bull who is bullied, comes out on February 3rd.

Wendy is the editor of the monthly e-zine Calamity’s Corner. Contact details on her website My Imagination She is also found on her blog Wendy L

Link to The Unhewn Stone – Book Trailer Video
{{Heather, if the hyperlinks don’t work here are the full addresses, if you want them.}}

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GRAWNW the Amazon Book link.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GRAWNW MuseItUp Book store

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s?keyword=The+Unhewn+Stone&store=allproducts&page=%2Findex.asp&prod=univ&pos=&box= B& N

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/82188 Smashwords

http://wendylaharnar.blogspot.com/ My Blog

http://wendylaharnar.weebly.com/ My website.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8C1VzSUGeY Book Video