It’s been over two months since I posted a new chapter to Golden Threads. When we last left Laura, she was at a meeting of teenage witches, waiting for the speaker to appear, and hoping the bullies in the group would not do anything bad to her boyfriend, Matthew. The next chapter, Appeasing, has been available on the Golden Threads page since October, but I got so involved in NaNoWriMo that I forgot to write a post linking to it. So today, I’m giving you that link and adding the next chapter: Fairy Life.
She’s in the hallway, alone, when this new chapter begins. To see what happens, click Fairy Life. To catch up on past chapters, click Golden Threads, the working title of the novel.
I’ve introduced fairies in this novel earlier, but never described them. How does one come up with the powers and behavior, the look, even, of creatures, who have been described and written about for hundreds of years? I could have copied what others say about them. There are plenty of WEB sites about fairies. But that’s no fun. I wanted to make up my own version.
I decided to tap into my subconscious memories, melding and blending things read and things imagined to serve my purpose. I made them tall and thin, with elongated limbs, much like the elves from The Lord of the Rings, but with the ability to shrink and grow in an instant. They can disappear and reappear, and transform into insects and birds. They live a long time: hundreds, if not thousands of years.
The hard thing for me as a writer is that, once those abilities are described, they are pinned down. Any time a fairy appears later on, it must behave as laid out in Fairy Life, although I left myself a backdoor: our fairy lies (for very good reasons), thus omitting a few important fairy facts. Now why would she do that? Maybe we’ll find out as the novel progresses.