In the first chapter of The Book Previously Known As The Fairytale Way (I either need a new title or a symbol of some sort, I feel) one character, Fliss, reads her love interest's fortune, using tarot cards.
In the original draft, I'd skimped over this a bit, and one thing that came up in my meeting last week was that the agent would like to see a fuller reading in the scene, for a variety of reasons.
Sadly, I don't know a great deal about tarot. But I do have a book. So last night I pulled out my cards and my book and I did a few sample readings for my fictional character, Mac, just to play around with the meanings and the combinations and the spreads.
I wasn't expecting Mac to be the unluckiest bugger ever imagined.
Seriously, no matter which way I cut the cards or shuffled them, every spread ended up with the ten of swords in it, and me reading the words 'unavoidable disaster and ruination' in my book. And that was just one of many feared cards that kept landing in his fortune.
For a secondary character with a happy ever after planned, this was not a particularly good sign, I felt.
Anyway, after removing most of the ill-omened cards from the deck, I was able to cobble together the sort of fortune I think Fliss should read for him. Still, I'm now worrying about what Mac's got in store for me in the later parts of this book...
3 comments:
Ooh, now this is getting interesting! Not that I'm an expert or anything, but can you revise the reading to have the card appear upside down to soften the message?
Yeah, I have to admit, I did take quite a lot of liberties with whether the cards were dignified or reversed. And, you know, which cards they were...
LOL!
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