Seelie Court – Renick's Realms

Do Fairies Believe in Science?

That’s a question that I’ve been pondering for a while as part of my Seelie Court series. The conclusion that I’ve come to is, no, not really. The Fae as a whole don’t really have any interest in science. There are a few individual fairies who might try science, but even they are hampered by two key factors.

Before I get into those factors, it would be helpful to clarify what I mean by science. There are two commonly used definitions that refer to different things. The first definition of science is that it’s a process we use to learn about the world. The scientific method consists of observing things, coming up with a theory about how things work, designing an experiment to test that theory, doing the experiment over and over again to be sure you’ve got the right result, and then, assuming the experiments turned out the way you thought, tentatively adopting your theory as truth—though always with the caveat that future information might force you to change your mind and adopt a new theory.

The second definition of science is a body of knowledge organized so as to be useful. This is what we mean when we talk about, for example “political science.” Politics doesn’t really have testable hypotheses or the ability to rerun experiments, but we do know something about how politics works, we can write about those general trends, and organize those writings, and teach what we know.

So, when I say that the Fae don’t believe in science, which definition am I talking about? Well, both. And the two problems I mentioned above relate to those.

The first problem that a potential fairy scientist has is that experimental science doesn’t really work in the Fae Realm. Now, this is the point at which my college roommate would start scoffing. She never accepted the idea of science and magic being incompatible. “It all starts with the inclined plane,” she used to say. “Things roll down when you put them at the top of the hill, right? All of mechanics proceeds from there.”

The problem with that argument in my Fae Realm is that, when you ask, “Do things roll down when you put them at the top of the hill?” the answer is, “Well…usually.”

In the Fae Realm, magic is not a discrete force, just one of many. It permeates everything and everyone. “The ball rolled up the hill rather than down, because the ball didn’t want to go down” is a perfectly legitimate thing to happen in the Fae Realm. Obviously, this is a hinderance to science. It’s not that science can’t be done, but there are so many factors that have to be taken into account: the moods of not only the artifacts in your experiment but of any powerful Fae who might affect the place where you’re experimenting; the nature of the experimental location itself; astrological signs, whether or not the moon is a waning gibbous or Venus is in the fifth house; and many more. All of these, which would be so insignificant in the real world that they’d have no measurable effect, can change things in the Fae Realm so drastically that you get diametrically opposite results.

(As a side note, I will say that I have another fantasy world where magic is a discrete force, my friend’s argument is valid, and magic and science can work together to form magitek engineering. But that’s a subject for another post.)

So, any would-be fairy scientists have a big hill to climb. And they have to do it alone, which brings me to the second problem with Fae science: the Fae don’t really believe in organizing knowledge in a way that will make it useful.

The Fae, as a whole, are not a curious bunch. Again, there are individual exceptions to this rule, but as a whole, there aren’t many of them who sit around and wonder about things. Not just scientific things like, “How does this gizmo work?” or “If I throw something in a westerly direction in the lands of the Lady of the West Wind, how long will it take to blow back to me?” but also historical things like, “How long has the Seelie Court existed?” or “Who built the Spire of Time where the Seelie Court meets?” much less philosophical questions like, “Why do the Fae exist in the first place?” Thus, there are no libraries, neatly organized by subject, where you can go and find out about fairy history or culture or, well, science. There are no survey papers or books that present a general overview of any area. Therefore, each individual with an interest in these things has to start from scratch.

Fairy scientists exist. One of them has made himself at home in my skull, and I’ll probably have to tell his story at some point in order to get him out of it. But consider how being such a scientist would be. Imagine trying to study astronomy under such conditions. You have no books to read about the stars or the planets or their movements. You have no one you can ask. All you know is what you can see and what you can deduce based on that. And now imagine that the moon might randomly not show up one night, or that the sun might decide to say, “Eh, screw it, I’m sleeping in this morning.” Is it any wonder that science is not a major force in the Fae Realm?

The State of the Writing

Because I’ve been neglecting my blog for a while now (we won’t talk about just how long “a while” has been), I wanted to give a bit of an update on what I’ve published since the last time I’ve updated here and what my plans are for the next year or so.

I have published Books 1-5 of my Seelie Court series. My plan for that series is for it to be 12 books: a trilogy of trilogies about my main character Emma, as well as one book each featuring side characters Shane, Saoirse, and Kenneth. So, right now, we’ve just started the second four-book “trilogy.” In the first trilogy, Emma learned about the Fae and their world. Now that she’s passed the point of no return and can no longer go back to ignoring magic even if she wanted to, she needs to figure out her own powers and her plans for working through the challenges that are rapidly coming her way.

Book 6 is Saoirse’s book and will give us a closer look at the shapeshifter who serves as an investigator for the Seelie Court, what motivates her, and what she values—and what happens when it all ends up in jeopardy. Right now, I’m about halfway through the second draft of that one, and I’m hoping to get it finished by February.

Books 7 and 8 are about Emma learning what she needs to know, taking command of her powers, and being ready to champion all of humanity as we move towards the climax of the series. These books are still with beta readers, but I hope to get them back and revised soon.

My plan is to do all of the remaining revisions on these books and get them out in quick sequence, hopefully about a month between release dates. And I’d like that to happen before the end of the year. And then, we’ll have reached the 2/3rds point of The Seelie Court, with only Kenneth’s book and the finale left to go.

And then what?

Before I hit the end of The Seelie Court, I would like to some books published outside the series. I have my stand-alone The Little Mermaid retelling, but I also have a couple of other series in the works. One is an epic fantasy set in a world where magic and technology work together. The other is a steampunk fantasy that I don’t quite know what kind of series it will turn into yet; I just know that there are more stories about these characters.

I’ve also been working at writing short stories. I’m now in a bunch of anthologies with other authors, and I’ll admit, I’m excited about it. See the following:

“Once a Goddess”: A young Maltese girl flees from the Nazis, only to find an even darker secret hidden in the caverns underneath Malta.

“The Red Horse of War”: Zach Allen is a small-town cop doing his best to hold his jurisdiction together after it’s been devastated by disasters both natural and unnatural. But the borders of reality are collapsing, and the local biker gang has formed an alliance with a creature from another world. Zach must make a desperate gamble in hopes of saving his hometown. A story from the Seelie Court universe.

“The Key to the Phoenix”: A new professor at Phoenix Valley University must overcome her awkwardness and uncertainty in order to embrace the traditions of her new school and save her grad student.

“What Rory Learned”: When a telepathic cat and her telekinetic pet mouse set off in an alien space craft, they find more than they bargained for.

“You Belong to the City”: “From the moment I saw that dame, I knew she meant trouble….” But when the dame in question is a High Lady of the Fae, trouble takes on a whole new meaning. A story from the Seelie Court universe.

“A Song About Holly”: The fairy Aderyn is given the task of creating a holly plant that has both red berries and white blossoms at the same time. But she finds that even her magic can’t make this happen in within the confines of the Fae Realm. A story from the Seelie Court universe.

“The Texas Pterodons”: Early in 1976, several witnesses in the area south of San Antonio claimed to have seen pterodactyls. This story explores what might have been behind that incident.

Where did you get the idea for the sequel…?

Where did I get the idea for The Changeling? In Fort Collins, Colorado. I was just about a half a block from the Colorado State campus, walking on Elizabeth Street between Shields and City Park Avenue. I believe that I was on the north side of the street heading west, but I couldn’t swear to that.

At this point, it probably feels like we’re in a variant of the joke where a guy is in a hot air balloon, asks a passer by on the ground where he is, and is informed that he’s in a balloon about twenty feet off the ground, the joke that ends with, “You must be a computer person. The answer that you gave was technically correct but completely useless.”* And while I’m guilty of being a computer type, I’m not trying to be difficult here. “Where did you get the idea…” is not asking for GPS coordinates, I know, but in this case, that’s the only answer I have.

I got the idea for The Changeling before Red Lights on Silver Mountain Road was even completely outlined, let alone written. I was working at Colorado State University at the time, and I had gone for walk while a particular complicated bit of code chewed through my data. At that point, many of the details of the world and the characters were still nebulous: the series was set somewhere in the Appalachians, and I had a vague idea of Emma as a law student at someplace like West Virginia or Appalachian State. As I said, I was walking along Elizabeth Street just west of campus, not thinking about anything in particular, when the idea of Emma trying to defend a changeling who wanted to keep a human life rather than returning to the fairy world downloaded itself into my head. I don’t know what put it there or why, but by the time I finished my walk, I was brimming with thoughts of Emma as a lawyer helping humans and fairies who had fallen afoul of the laws of the Fae. The series name of The Seelie Court occurred to me then, with the pun on it being a court of law fully intentional. (You may now groan and throw things at me through the computer).

Obviously, things changed. The setting moved to Colorado, and Emma turned out not to be suited for lawyering: she’s certainly smart enough, but she’s a woman of action who would have no patience with debates on how New York Times v. Sullivan would apply to Twitter feeds. Given that, I wondered if the idea of The Changeling would still work or if it should be abandoned in favor of some of the other ideas I had about the Seelie Court world. However, the idea stuck with me for multiple reasons: I liked the idea of Emma’s allies from the first book becoming enemies (at least temporarily), and I liked the idea of an untrustworthy and not all that likable victim who nonetheless could be considered sympathetic. It struck me as a good way to explore the uncertainty and treachery that’s inherent in being a mortal dealing with the Fae. I also liked the idea of a courtroom and a trial as the framework to let Emma explore the Fae Realm. Even though Emma was no longer a potential lawyer, she would still want to help, and indeed her lack of verbal debate experience was a plus in throwing her into the deep end of the Fairy Courts and letting her flounder.

So it was that about six months after finishing Red Lights on Silver Mountain Road, I put my fingers on the keyboard to write The Changeling and see if I could type this story out of my head…

*: I should mention that we techies have our own ending to that joke. After balloon guy’s rant, the guy on the ground says, “And you must be a buisness person. You don’t know where you are or where you need to go, but you expect me to be able to help. You’re no worse off than you were before, only now, for some reason, it’s my fault.”

To Prologue or Not to Prologue

It’s odd for me to accept, but there are people who can’t stand prologues. There are those who refuse to read them, and those who refuse to read anything that has a prologue. I’ve never quite understood this; sometimes the best place to begin is not at what would be the chronological beginning, or with characters who aren’t those we’ll follow for the rest of the story. In my mind, a prologue, like everything else, should be there if it’s done well and not if it isn’t.

For Red Lights on Silver Mountain Road, I felt the prologue was a necessity. Without the prologue, we go until Chapter 7 before anything overtly supernatural happens. With the prologue, the reader knows, even though Emma doesn’t, that the explanations she’s looking for aren’t necessarily in the category of what she might consider “possible.”

For the sequel, The Changeling (now available for pre-order), I’m a bit more torn. It has some of the same issues in that it goes through a “mundane” investigation at the beginning before the supernatural elements are revealed and take center stage, though the mundane part only lasts until Chapter 4 this time. Pulling in fairies at that point could very well be considered cheating and yanking the rug out from someone who started the series at that point. On the other hand, Emma knows about the existence of the Fae this time and can warn the readers without a prologue to explicitly tell them that’s what’s happening.

Regardless of whether I need it or not, I have written a prologue for The Changeling. I suspect it will remain Schrödinger’s prologue for another month or so, and I won’t know whether it will be included or not until I actually upload the final document. I do, however, like it; whether it belongs in the final piece or not, I think it’s a fun little bit, so I thought I would share it here. Consider it a taste of what’s to come in the Seelie Court…

***

He was a powerful fighter, no question about that. He was one with the flames, and the fire was his to command. If he chose, he could bring all of its strength and power down on her. But he did not choose. He contented himself with small flames that sparked out of his fingers, seemingly trying to threaten rather than injure. Whether that was because he was trying to avoid attention or simply because he underestimated her, it hardly mattered. What mattered was that he was holding back.

His opponent felt no such restraint. This was everything to her. If she lost at this moment, she lost everything she had ever held dear. Every weapon she had was fair game; there was nothing else she was saving them for. “Spirits of the wood, aid me!” she cried. “Give me the strength of the bear, the steadiness of the stones, the power of the sun.” She gave an incomprehensible war cry and charged at her attacker.

The counterattack caught him by surprise. He stumbled backwards, fighting to keep his balance on the loose gravel beneath his feet. She felt a surge of hope and pressed her advantage. But she had forgotten that her opponent was not alone. She was caught by surprise as a mass of claws and feathers descended on her. She threw up her hands to protect her face, and as she did so was forced to let the man go. He came at her again, and now she was the one scrambling backwards trying to avoid the danger coming from both in front of her and above her.

Allies, I need allies, she thought. What I wouldn’t give to have a myrmecoleon or a bugbear nearby! But even though those great beasts were not a possibility, she was far from alone. She sang out to the creatures nearby, and one by one, they responded. They would help her if they could, and she would not hesitate to use them.

As the man continued to advance on her, she raised her hand and dozens, perhaps hundreds of grey moths flitted out of the ground and surrounded him. “What the—” he started to say, but as he opened his mouth to speak, the moths flew in, and his words were soon drowned by the force of a thousand wings. She continued to retreat, looking for an avenue of escape. She knew the moths would be no more than an annoyance to him, and indeed, after a moment, the man’s skin started to glow. He turned red, then orange, and then transformed for a few seconds into a blazing bonfire. When he returned to his human form, the moths were no more than ash.

“Come now, be reasonable,” he said. “You can’t possibly expect—ow!”

Her second set of allies had arrived. From the trees above him, dozens of squirrels scurried about, hurling down whatever they could get their paws on. He found himself pelted with nuts, seeds, branches, and even a few small rocks, although how those got up into the tree, she couldn’t say. He looked incredulous, presumably at the fact that such small creatures could possibly launch such a painful attack. Ask any college student about the squirrel army, she thought with grim satisfaction, remembering equally puzzled looks from her classmates on the Oval during the fall as the squirrels rained down their attacks on them. And those squirrels had merely been indifferent to the fate of creatures below. These were actively hostile, and their every action proved it.

But he had an ally too. “A little help here!” he called, and the raptor who had attacked earlier swooped into the tree with talons bared. The squirrels were loyal, but unlike the moths, they weren’t suicidal. They ran for the safety of the innermost branches. A few tried to continue their attacks, but the nut-based bombing run was over, and the man stood up and advanced again.

“I’ve had about enough of this,” he said. “I’d prefer it if you came quietly, but if you want to do it this way, I can oblige you.”

The fire appeared in his hands again, larger this time. He still wasn’t bringing as much power as he could, but she knew that he was done merely threatening. She ran, and he caught her by the arms. She screamed as the fire touched her flesh, searing away layers of skin. She kicked him as hard as she could, and he loosened his grip for a moment. She pulled her arm away and felt a brief surge of hope, but then he grabbed her other arm, and she screamed again. He knocked her to the ground, and all she could see around her was fire. She yelled and kicked and fought with everything she had, but she hurt too much, and he was too powerful. She knew it was useless.

Then she heard a howl, and even through her pain, she felt a spark of hope. The howl was joined by what seemed like a dozen others. The pressure on her released ever so slightly, and then it was his turn to scream. We’re here! said a chorus of voices in her mind, and she directed them to her adversary. The fire moved away from her, and she was able to sit up. She could see her enemy surrounded by tawny, mangy fur as he tried to fight off five coyotes. Another three were attacking the bird and keeping her pinned in a tree, unable to come to the aid of her partner.

She took advantage of her freedom. Without hesitating, she ran across the gravel lot, hitting the unlock button on her key fob as she did so. When she reached her car, she leaped in and slammed and locked the door behind her. Only then did she spare a moment to look at the coyotes. They were faring better than the squirrels had, but she still saw two whose fur appeared to be singed and another who was limping. Thank you, my friends. I’m safe now. Let us all run to freedom. One of the coyotes looked through the windshield of the car and gave her a quick nod, then howled as she started the ignition. As she peeled out of the parking lot, she could see the coyotes scattering behind her. She hoped that her enemies wouldn’t pursue them. There was no reason to, and it would do them no good, but she had no reason to believe they weren’t the vindictive type.

She sped down the road and was halfway to the highway before she allowed herself to think. She had won this round—anything that allowed her to escape had to be considered a win—but she wasn’t about to delude herself that there wouldn’t be another. They would keep coming after her until they captured her or she killed them. She had no intention of allowing the former, and the latter was likely impossible, especially if they stopped fooling around and started fighting for real.

I need allies, she thought again. Allies more capable than suburban wildlife. When she got to the highway, she took the onramp heading west with a vague plan of perhaps finding some larger, more dangerous predator, but she rejected that idea before she was even out of town. Mundane animals, no matter how powerful, wouldn’t be enough here. She needed something that could think as well as fight.

As she drove, she planned with a ruthlessness that would have surprised most of those who knew her. She had a number of contacts among the underworld, and she considered them all, but rejected each of them in the end. Most would sell her out in a heartbeat, and the few that she could intimidate into a facsimile of honor would be too weak to win the necessary battles.

She thought and thought. And then a name came to her: Deputy Emma Greer. She considered everything she had heard about the woman. If the rumors were true, Deputy Greer could be the one she was looking for. Dealing with Emma would be a dangerous game, but she had dealt with dangerous creatures before. She was willing to use this Emma Greer as ruthlessly as she had used the moths, squirrels, and coyotes.

So Where Did You Get the Idea for…?

Back in the sixth grade, my reading class had to do projects on their favorite authors. As we were starting these projects, the teacher asked us each to come up with a question that we wanted to answer about . There were a few exceptions scattered in there, but ninety percent of the class—the teacher included—had the same question: “Where does Author X get his ideas?”

It took about twenty-five years before I realized that was the wrong question. As an amateur, I—along with many other people, I believe—assumed that being a writer was primarily a matter of getting brilliant ideas. You get the idea of a boy who goes to Wizarding School, a beautiful vampire who falls in love with a human girl, or a teenage girl who must join in a game that’s a fight to the death. Once that spark of inspiration struck, it was a simple matter of writing things up, then collecting the money and accolades.

The truth is that ideas are everywhere. I didn’t realize just how many of them there were until I started keeping track of them in a file. Currently, my idea file contains enough that, at my current pace of writing, I’ll be busy until sometime in 2029. And it grows every time I take my daughter to the playground these days; that playground seems determined to write the seventh Seelie Court novel without much if any input from me.

However, whether it’s the “right” question or not, I know that people do wonder about where writers get their ideas. And because I can answer that question in the case of Red Lights on Silver Mountain Road, I feel I should satisfy that curiosity.

I remember exactly what gave me the idea that eventually turned into Red Lights on Silver Mountain Road. It was February 12, 2016, and I was reading Sarah Hoyt’s blog and her anecdote about driving from Colorado Springs to Denver on a foggy night. She described following the taillights of the car in front of her, turning where they turned, and hoping that the path that got that car safely along the highway would do the same for her.

Immediately on reading this, I thought of the legends of the will-o’-wisp. The original legend might have referred to lanterns in bogs, but the idea here was much the same: navigating via light. What if that light proved untrustworthy? And further, what if you knew that light might be untrustworthy—might you follow it all the same? What are your other options? I thought about Mrs. Hoyt and her drive along that mountain road. If she knew that those lights in front of her could be maliciously leading her to her doom, would she continue to follow them? Or would she try to navigate blindly, only able to see a few feet in front of her?

I thought about that idea for a while, and thought about writing it, but eventually I had to put it aside. All I had was an idea, and an idea is not a story.

It’s Live!

Red Lights on Silver Mountain Road, the first book of my Seelie Court series, is now for sale on Amazon! It’s available in either ebook or paperback editions. That means that I’m now a published writer. Funny, I always thought that accomplishing a lifelong dream would come with fireworks, or at least balloons and streamers…

Emma Greer became a deputy in order to help people, so when a friend suspects that his brother’s fatal crash on Silver Mountain Road was no accident, she’s eager to come to his aid. Trouble is, Emma doesn’t believe that the accident was arranged or even that it would be humanly possible for it to have been so. But she soon learns that what’s humanly possible is only the beginning of what can happen on Silver Mountain Road. Creatures unlike any Emma has ever imagined lurk along its shoulders, and an ancient evil has discovered a new way of committing murder. Emma must find a way to vanquish that evil, or she might become its next victim.