Strange coincidence or happy accident?

I’m nervously awaiting the arrival of the first proof copy of Treespeaker at the moment. CreateSpace has told me it should arrive within a couple of weeks. It has been a long, frustrating road to this point, but thanks to a lovely friend who took pity on me and offered to do the formatting (which may as well have been brain surgery for me), my first e-book is now on its way to being a real, three-dimensional, smelling-of-ink book.

In the process of trying to format it myself, I made an interesting discovery. At one point in the story, when there has been a death in the forest, Jakan the Treespeaker intones words over the body as they farewell it into the care of Arrakesh, the spirit of the forest. In the ebook, I had the words on the left hand side of the page, unsure if trying to justify it would muck up the formatting. This time, I thought it would look neater if I centred this song on the page so that it stood out. This is how it came out –

Arrakesh,

You are wind,

You are bird’s song,

Dew on morning grass,

Velvet on deer’s horn,

Shelter from rain,

Warmth of fire,

In us,

Around us,

Beginning to end.

Does it remind you of something? If I’d tried to write a song that formed a stout-trunked tree shape, I couldn’t have done it better, but this was purely coincidental. I have to admit to finding it a little creepy the way it worked out. A prayer from the Treespeaker forms itself into the shape of a tree?

The friend who did the formatting probably wished this coincidence had been in the shape of a frog or an elephant – anything but a tree – because getting this tree to stay together all on one page was a nightmare. Hopefully it has now come out that way on the printed page and not morphed into something else.

I’ll let you know when the book is available from CreateSpace/Amazon. In the meantime, I’ll worry about whether the cover is too dark, if the chapter breaks look right, etc etc. I do wish mail from the US was quicker!