Livy and Kit’s gazes met, and they smiled.
“Actually,” she said, “I took a spell off him.”
AFTERWORD
“Nature is awesome, but be careful, that shit’ll kill you.” So said cartoonist (and my friend from high school) Astrid Lydia Johannsen to me a few years ago via Twitter. Her sentiment is the basic philosophy I worked under for this story. Like Livy, I love the natural world and want to preserve and help it, but like most pampered city dwellers, I’m also kind of scared of the gazillion ways nature can kill us. Humankind has always felt that way in general, I suppose, thus all the legends, faery tales, and myths involving gorgeous yet dangerous forces of nature. These forces became the stars of our longest-lasting stories, personified as gods and faeries and goblins and other beings, dressed up by human imagination (i.e., the wilderness inside our heads rather than outside).
In writing this, I also operated under the notion that even in our urban society, fae and spirits could be hiding in the scraps of the natural world that do remain, and we wouldn’t know, because we rarely even notice the natural world. How often do we really look at the tops of trees? Or ponder the bottoms of rivers and lakes and oceans? Or notice whether exotic invasive plants are growing in our own gardens?
My original inspiration for this story was, of course, the poem “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti, published in 1862. I became aware of it in 2011 when a longtime online friend of mine named Aaron brought it up in a blog comment, in which he related a story from his high school years. In his words:
…an English Lit teacher (let’s call her Judith) announced to her room full of sixteen-year-old charges, including me, that each of us would have to memorize and recite a poem to the class; she suggested “anything from the Oxford Book of English Verse.” Some of my classmates raced to find the shortest and easiest to memorize. (Should you ever need to do this, it’s “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”) Meanwhile I took a moment to make sure I was awake and had really been handed such a blank check, then sat down to memorize “Goblin Market.” I was looking forward to my classmates’ reactions to:
She cried ‘Laura,’ up the garden,
‘Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me…’
Came the day, and alas I had got no farther than “Clearer than water flowed that juice/She never tasted such before” when Judith woke up, realized what was coming next, and stopped me in my tracks with a frosty “Thank you, that WILL be all.”
Much amused by this story, I Googled the poem, read it, and commented back to Aaron:
Ooooh la la! This poem is gold to the paranormal romance writer! And um, yeah, surely even the Victorians noticed the overt biting and sucking going on. Still, I may actually have to stick this in my “story idea file” and use it sometime. For a modern paranormal romance, however, I’d need more nuance than “maiden good, goblin evil.” This day and age, after all, it’s “maiden conflicted, goblin sparkly and heartthrobby.”
As it turned out, of course, I did more or less go with “maiden good, goblin evil.” By the time I got around to writing this novel, I had just come off a long, epic trilogy about Greek gods (Persephone’s Orchard and its sequels), and was tiring of immortality and special powers being the goal. Ordinary human life appealed to me this time around.
But I also didn’t want the fae to be only troublesome; that would imply forces of nature were inherently sinister, which isn’t my opinion at all. For that matter, it would be unfair to the larger body of faery lore, in which the fae are all kinds of things, ranging from benevolent to lethal. So I invented some local fae, the native species, to balance out those invasive species, the goblins. All of them, in keeping with ancient faery tales, live by very different rules and morals than we humans, so their behavior is never going to make perfect sense to us. Glimpsing them and their ways would be fascinating, but all things considered, most of us (as Livy, Skye, Kit, and Grady would agree) would prefer to live in the human world.
Bellwater and Crabapple Island are fictional locales, but lots of small towns and islands in the Puget Sound area could stand in for them, including some I’ve vacationed at my whole life. My grandparents bought property in Mason County that my family still visits, and everyone who goes there sees the alluring mystique of the area—the tall evergreens, the calm water slipping in and out with the tides, the little islands, the modest marinas and one-lane bridges, the smell of forests and saltwater. My sisters and I loved our visits there (and still do), wading in the cold shallows, rowing boats around, eating huckleberries in the woods, building bonfires on the beach, and examining the mossy stumps with their fantastical shapes. My grandmother told us those were the houses of Teenyweenies, which became the inspiration for Livy and Skye’s Teeny-tinies.
I decided Bellwater stood on the shore of Hood Canal—which despite its name isn’t a human-dug canal at all, but merely one of the many long segments of the Sound. That way their backs could be right up against Olympic National Forest, in which, of course, “Here be goblins!,” as I wrote on my homemade badly-drawn map of the area.
To find out the depth of Hood Canal—something Livy has to experience firsthand—I talked to my husband Steve, who’s an environmental scientist. He gamely consulted official maps to find out some numbers for me. I was guessing the Canal would be maybe twenty or even fifty feet deep, but apparently most of it, in spite of its narrowness, is more like four hundred to five hundred feet deep. Yikes! Daunting indeed. However, if there was an island right offshore, as is the case for my imaginary Crabapple Island just across from Bellwater, then probably the water in between would be somewhat shallower than all that. So I settled for “around a hundred feet,” which is still plenty daunting enough, thank you.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the writing of this novel, I must thank:
My husband, Steve, for fun geography tasks, for answering “what would this character drive” queries because I know nothing about cars, and for generally tolerating my “creative temperament” moodiness.
My kids for tolerating same, and for making me laugh, and for having fabulous imaginations that make this story look tame.