Vanessa Green

How to make one of the most tragic myths into a romantic story? That was my challenge with this one, but I knew that it was possible. I gave Eurydice the age old problem that many women face with living a life of domesticity. In this case, what happens to the wild nymph girl who slept on tree boughs and danced in the fields when she is confined to a hearth and home? They must also confront jealous lovers and a looming prophecy of doom, but their love and respect for each other transcends it all. The loyalty shown by both Orpheus and Eurydice deserved a happy ending, and in mythology death is never final.

This lesser known myth was so much fun to write, and the album Dangerous Woman was played on repeat while I was writing it. It’s sexy, it’s daring, and it’s a story of indulgence. Marpessa is given freedom and she takes it with both hands, escaping on the back of her paramour’s flying chariot and then running off with Apollo shortly after. The fight that ensues, the drama, the steam, was an indulgence for me as much as the characters.

By this time I had the confidence to plot a novel, and based on the feedback I was getting, readers wanted a longer story. Enter Eros and Psyche, the original beauty and the beast. It seemed more interesting for a poor girl to go to a god’s palace than a princess, and so Psyche became a shepherdess cursed with divine beauty. But no matter how beautiful someone might appear, every person sees their own flaws with acute sharpness. I had to give Psyche a reason not to fall for Eros’ godlike powers of seduction. In her mind, her scars and the death of her father were proof of where her vanity would take her. Eros sees what she does not, that her toxic family (especially her sisters) had warped her self esteem with emotional abuse. The god who could never be tied down suddenly had someone to protect, and the girl who hid herself from the world learned how to come out of her shell and accept love.

I’ve loved the story of King Thrushbeard since I was small. We had a VHS of fairy tales and the story of an anti-Cinderella was my favorite. I was used to princesses who were good and kind and brave, and this princess was spoiled and selfish, which fascinated me. I thought about the motivations for such a person, and more importantly, the motivations behind the bard in disguise. In the original tale he seems rather cruel to pull this trick, and so I gave him a compelling reason: to end a war. Alexandra isn’t brought low to purely to humble her, but to learn about the lives of the “enemy” and to give her the perspective she was lacking. Wars have consequences that people of privilege rarely see, and the system of war for profit that is present in this world resembles the system we see in ours (at least in the US). In the original version of the ball scene where Alexandra rejects her suitors, she was vicious. I feared it made her too unlikeable as a character, so I had to tone it back in several areas. It was tricky to find the right balance between insufferable and likeable, and so there had to be an explanation for her awful behavior. I had to scrap several beginnings of this story, but I finally landed on her father’s funeral. The reason was grief, so I started the story there.

I love witches, I love villains, and I love nature horror. For my first book not based on a retelling, I was giddy to dive into my interests. It was exciting to be unbound by a pre-existing story, but it was daunting since I had no guide. Hara and Gideon were crystal clear to me, and I began working on their story before TBB was finished. It’s pure magic for an author when your characters are fully fleshed people and it feels as though you are scrambling to take dictation because they will not be silenced. The only problem was figuring out the technical details of the witch’s prison. At first it was going to be guarded by an old sorcerer who we think at first is the villain. Scrapped. Then it was going to be in an old crumbling castle with iron enclosures. Boring. Then it was going to be in a hall of mirrors behind a waterfall. Dumb. How could this place contain magical beings and also remain hidden? One night I was watching videos about the Backrooms and I realized that was exactly the kind of place I had been envisioning. But I still had a problem: How to enter it? Is it a real place or just an illusion? I knew that my mains were going to tour a mine at one point to demonstrate the cruel working conditions. But then it got me thinking about the precious materials we mine for. Could some of them have magical properties? What about properties that could only be sensed by other magical beings? The idea of sorbite was born. A magical mineral that acted as a time portal for magical beings served as a prison. Somehow I got onto a wikipedia page about moulins and the image of a blackened pit of ice wouldn’t leave my mind. I knew that was the entrance to this fearsome prison; a prison that took advantage of the terrors of nature.