This is the second of the two memes I’ve been tagged on on Facebook recently, and this one came at me via fellow Here Be Magic author Sonya Clark. As with the previous meme post, I won’t outright tag people on this. But if you’re a fellow writer and want to jump in, feel free!
From Sonya’s post:
Amy Burgess tagged me to share a “heart” book and the story behind it.
This one’s almost too easy, really. Because even with five released books, to this day I continue to think of Faerie Blood as the Book of My Heart.
And not just because it’s my first released novel, either. Every author’s going to be partial to their first release.
I could say as well that Faerie Blood‘s notable for being the book I finished Nanowrimo with in 2003, which gives it extra heft in my affections. But that’s not really why it’s the Book of My Heart, either.
What makes Faerie Blood my Heart Book is that I’ve thrown so much of what I love into it.
Music, obviously. Elessir is an “unofficial” Elvis impersonator and Christopher is a bouzouki-playing Newfoundlander for music-fangirling reasons that will be obvious to anybody who knows me: i.e., that I’m a lifelong Elvis fangirl and that Great Big Sea remains my all-time favorite band. But not even just that. Multiple characters in Faerie Blood are musicians, and not for any reasons that are particularly relevant to the plot or the worldbuilding, but rather, just because I feel very deeply that making music is an important part of life.
This is also why there’s a scene in Faerie Blood in which Kendis and Christopher geek out a bit about bouzouki tuning, and another in which they just hang out together and play their instruments. The latter in particular has its origins leading straight back to Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, and how much I simply adored that Aubrey and Maturin took the time out in between all the action to just hang out and play music together. That won my love as a reader, and that love hung out in the back of my writer brain until I was able to write a “characters hanging out and bonding over playing music” scene of my own.
Then there’s the Sidhe. I know it’s fashionable in the SF/F genre these days to dismiss elves as a cliche. I know there’s such a thing as the Our Elves are Better trope and the Screw You, Elves trope. I know there’s even an entire filk album called Everybody Hates Elves.
As y’all might guess, I do not count myself amongst that “everybody”. C.f. all my previous commentary about how Elfquest is such a formative influence on me.
Now, also obviously, Faerie Blood is only the first step into my Warder universe. And I’ve got a lot coming that I’m very eager to share with you, stories that will hopefully do for you as readers what they’ll do for me as a writer: deepen the universe, show you more about what’s going on, and give you more to love about it.
But really, Faerie Blood is what started it all. And for that, it’s the Book of My Heart.
