The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra is known today as Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes. If you are a regular here at Life in the Realm of Fantasy, you may know I am a Don Quixote fangirl.
The main character, Alonso Quijano, is possessed of a mighty imagination. In search of chivalric adventure, he becomes Don Quixote, the great knight of La Mancha.
I believe my early exposure to this book was the subconscious inspiration for the Achilles heel of my own great knight, Julian Lackland. Both men believe in the chivalric code, and both are a wee bit insane. However, the plots and narratives have no other commonalities.
I first came into contact with Don Quixote when I was given a children’s illustrated version of the novel for my eighth birthday. I read that book, cover to cover until it fell apart.
The summer I turned ten, I was scavenging the house for something to read and discovered my father’s personal library. He had the entire collection of Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World. To my surprise, volume 29 was Don Quixote as translated by John Ormsby.
Several years ago, I bought Edith Grossman‘s modern translation, published in 2003. I think her translation is the best of all that I have read. This excellent version is available as an audiobook for those too impatient to read literary fiction. It does require a bit of perseverance.
Cervantes wrote a brilliant, enduring story that has survived intact since it was first published in 1605. He took many risks with the vocabulary of his native language. He had as immense an effect on the Spanish language as William Shakespeare did on English.
The themes in Don Quixote’s story are timeless, as are his quirks and flaws.
The conflict between the modern world and outmoded values – No one understands Don Quixote, and he understands no one. Sancho, a modern man of the peasant class (and with his own agenda), has a basic understanding of morality that is rooted in common sense. Sancho often agrees with the morals of his day but then surprises us by supporting Don Quixote’s outdated ethics and chivalry.
Knightly virtues – This is a morality tale. Don Quixote strives to present himself as an example, becoming a knight-errant as a way to force his contemporaries to face their failures. In his eyes, noble society has abandoned honor. They have turned their backs on the traditions of morality and the chivalric code. His duty is to show them the way back to righteousness.
The nature of reality – Don Quixote doesn’t understand the priest’s rational view of the world or his objectives. Conversely, Quixote’s belief in enchantment is ludicrous to the priest, but it is real to him. Only Sancho, his good-hearted, loyal friend, can mediate between Don Quixote and society. He interprets for Quixote, a buffer who translates his philosophies to the world, and in turn, explains the world to him.
The Distinction between Class and Worth – Cervantes gives us philosophers in the walk-on characters, the shepherds. He challenges the notion that social class and worth are entwined. Cervantes demonstrates that Nobility of Birth does not necessarily confer wisdom or kindness. In the characters of the Duke and Duchess, he gives us thoughtless cruelty, casually delivered purely for its entertainment value.
These themes share equally in supporting Don Quixote’s narrative. The plot may wander, and so does the protagonist, but the themes keep the narrative glued together.
Quixote’s insanity is gentle and easy to sympathize with—he can’t understand the harshness of the people around him. He is a man of action and a champion of the oppressed.
And being a man of action, Don Quixote’s efforts frequently are not appreciated by those victims he steps up to help.
“For the love of God, sir knight errant, if you ever meet me again, please, even if you see me being cut into little pieces, don’t rush to my aid or try to help me, but just let me be miserable, because no matter what they’re doing to me it couldn’t be worse than what will happen if your grace helps, so may God curse you and every knight errant who’s ever been born in the world.”
~Miguel de Cervantes, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, 1605 [1]
The life of Miguel de Cervantes was worthy of a novel in its own right. In 1575, pirates kidnapped Cervantes and his brother and sold them as slaves to the Moors. Originally from Morocco, the Moors were the longtime adversaries of Catholic Spain, which they had once conquered.
Cervantes was taken to Algiers. His three or four attempts to escape his slavery were unsuccessful. Finally, he was ransomed in 1580 and returned to Spain.
He was a true indie author, a genius who never earned much from his writing and didn’t expect to. He just wanted to write.
After gaining his freedom from the Moors, he worked in many clerical capacities, notably as a purchasing agent for the Spanish navy (i.e., the Spanish King). His ill-placed trust in Simon Freire, an Andalusian banker with whom he had deposited Crown funds, led to his imprisonment for a few months in Seville after Freire went bankrupt. [2]
Here are a few sayings you might hear every day in one form or another that were coined by Cervantes:
- By a small sample we may judge of the whole piece.
- Can we ever have too much of a good thing?
- No limits but the sky.
- Why do you lead me a wild-goose chase?
- Thank you for nothing.
- Let every man mind his own business.
- The pot calls the kettle black.
- Tilting at windmills.
Don Quixote’s story of insane genius and chivalric mayhem was born when Cervantes went to prison. All his life, Cervantes had to work a day job to support himself, writing at night and whenever he had the chance. Although he was wrongfully incarcerated, prison allowed him to spend his entire day writing.
Credits and Attributions:
[1] Quote: Miguel de Cervantes, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, 1605 PD\100.
[2] Information Source:
Royal provision of the judge of the Degrees of Seville, Bernardo de Olmedilla, to collect the assets of Simón Freire de Lima, amount that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra had given him. Date 1595-08-07. Cervantes Universe (universocervantes.com)
Image: Don Quijote de La Mancha and Sancho Panza, 1863, Gustave Doré [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
The events set in this world are linked by family, warped by lies and secrets kept across three generations. Themes of hubris, truth vs. falsehood, heroism, and coming of age power this truly epic fantasy series.
, demons, magic or sorcery, and multilayered quests. They often have constructed languages, coming-of-age themes, and multivolume narratives.
Binabik‘s people, the Qanuc, are called trolls by the humans and Sithi. They are a cross between Tolkien’s dwarves and hobbits, made wiser and less concerned about gold. The Hunën are brutish giants who serve the Norns and are often at war with the Qanuc.
In that case, it’s time to widen your reading horizons and try reading something in a different subgenre. Maybe you’d like a space opera or a portal fantasy. You’ll never know what you are missing if you don’t read outside your favorite genre.
Now, we probably wouldn’t have plumped for such a fancy getaway, but my husband has a conference there, and what with him not driving right now, I am along as chauffeur.
It’s a fjord, not a canal, so why they named it that, I don’t know. But there it is, one more thing our pioneering ancestors have to answer for.
The man and the baby: We arrived on Sunday afternoon. We sat at a romantic table for two for our first dinner, overlooking the beach. It’s the Pacific Northwest, so people come dressed for January in June (or June-uary as June is known here). The lawn chairs were full of guests lounging in their summer finery of Gore-Tex and wool, ignoring the intermittent misty rain and drinking steaming coffees. Off to one side was a young man sitting alone. Beside him was the fanciest baby pram I’ve ever seen.
On Monday, I decided to be adventurous. I thought I would try the spring salad with fresh peas, pea vines, fennel, watermelon radishes, and a champagne vinaigrette. I had never thought of eating pea vines, but I’m not afraid to try new things.
Today we are on our way home, where we will indulge in budget-friendly home-cooked meals and other economies for a few weeks to make up for this splurge.
We who write because we love words spend a great deal of time framing what our words say. We choose some words above others because they say what we mean more precisely, or they color our prose with the right emotion.
Two: Placement of verbs in the sentence can strengthen or weaken it.
Four: Contrast—In literature, we use contrast to describe the difference(s) between two or more things in one sentence. The blue sun burned like fire, but the ever-present wind chilled me.
Seven: Alliteration is the occurrence of the same letter (or sound) at the beginning of successive words, such as the familiar tongue-twister: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Alliteration lends a poetic feeling to passages and enhances the atmosphere of a given scene without creating wordiness.
Active phrasing generates emotion. Sometimes, using similes, repetition, and alliteration in subtle applications enhances the worldbuilding without beating your reader over the head.
Readers connect with these stories across generations and across the centuries because the fundamental concerns of human life aren’t unique to one society, one technological era, or one point in time.
Acquiring food becomes their first priority. Having a surplus of food becomes a reason to celebrate. To go without adequate food for any length of time changes a person and makes one determined to never go hungry again.
Love and loss, safety and danger, loyalty and betrayal—the eternal themes of tragedy and resolution. Hardship contrasted against ease provides the story with texture, turning a wall of “bland” into something worth reading.
We writers must make our words count. We have to show the comfort zone in the moments leading up to the disaster, not too much, but just enough to show what will soon be lost.
Scenes of conflict are crucial to the advancement of the story. They should be inserted into the novel as if one were staging a pivotal scene in a film.
If you have no experience with combat or fighting, you don’t understand the limits of a normal athlete’s physical abilities. So, you must do the research. Think of how the human body works in reality. If your character knees a foe in the jaw, how is it possible?
If you don’t show how such a strange hit could happen, the reader will say, “That’s impossible.” It’s a risky choice though, because going into that kind of detail bores the heck out of our readers. Our readers mind will fill in the details and if it’s confusing, they may stop reading.
Don’t do this for every incident. After they are armed and armored as much as they are going to be the first time, just have them meet the enemy, skirmish, and continue on. The reader already knows what armor and weapons they had.
In real life, conflict happens on a sliding scale. It begins with a disagreement and escalates to an all-out war. While my outline will have a note alerting me to the level of conflict that must happen, I choreograph my fights to reflect that sliding level of intensity.
Person-to-person combat doesn’t stretch for hours because no matter how well trained a fighter is, no one has that kind of strength.
A typical 
I try to show this discreetly by sitting back and visualizing the scene after the choreography is laid on paper. I replay it in my mind as if I were a witness to the events and look for each combatant’s facial expressions and reactions.
The first incident has a domino effect. More events occur, pushing the protagonist out of his comfortable life and into danger. Fear of death, fear of loss, fear of financial disaster, fear of losing a loved one—terror is subjective and deeply personal.
However, the reader has an edge—they will be offered clues from the antagonists’ side, which the characters don’t know. The antagonist’s actions will affect the plot in the future. Even if the antagonist isn’t an overt enemy at the outset, the readers’ knowledge creates a sense of unease, a subliminal worry that things will go wrong.
But not every author has that option.
In most standard book contracts, royalty terms for authors are terrible, and this is especially true for eBook sales. Most eBooks are sold through online retailers like Amazon. If you’re a traditionally published author and your publisher priced your eBook at $9.99, this is how the Amazon numbers break out. No matter what you think of Amazon, it is still the Big Fish in the Publishing and Bookselling Pond:
However, to be considered for a traditional contract, you should hire an editor, beta reader, and proofreader to ensure the manuscript you submit to an agent or editor demonstrates your ability to turn out a good, professional product.
Regardless of your publishing path, you must budget for certain things. You can’t expect your royalties to pay for them early in your career – and many award-winning authors must still work at their day jobs to pay their bills.
Conferences are an extension of the self-education process. I have discovered so much about the craft of writing, the genres I write in, and the publishing industry as a whole—things I could only learn from other authors. I gained an extended professional network by joining 
Sometimes I am invited to participate in panels or offer a workshop, and I can share my experiences with others. Either way, I learn things. In September, I will be on a panel with 
The plan or design is submitted to the client, who likes it. A mockup of the first iteration is submitted to the client, who still likes it, but … their needs have changed a little, and a new adjustment must be incorporated.
Books are one area where project creep is not only appreciated but encouraged. Stories are particularly prone to this continual expansion of the original ideas. Short stories grow into novellas and then into novels, becoming a series of books.
The first aspect of this is to Identify your Project Goals – create a rudimentary outline with names, who they are in relation to the protagonist, and decide who is telling the story. Remember, your story is your invention. Some inventions are in development for years before they get to market. Others are complete and ready to market in a relatively short time. Regardless of your production timeline, this is where project management skills really come into play.
Your map doesn’t have to be fancy – all you need are some lines and scribbles telling you all the essential things, like which direction is north and what certain towns are named. Use a pencil, to easily update your map if something changes during revisions.
Time can get a little mushy when we are winging it through a manuscript. A calendar gives us a realistic view of how long it takes to travel from point A to point B, or how much time it will take to complete a task.
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