Mightier than the Sword - A Part of the Aidan Moher Network

Chapter Six ended with Rowan in a pretty sticky situation - specifically being stared down by a very large, very angry creature of Faerie. Chapter Seven takes this situation and runs with it, allowing the story (and the reader’s expectations of what to expect) to expand greatly. It’s the first time Rowan truly steps from our world - the real world - to the Fey world that we all know from legend and childhood Fairy Tales.

This, of course, is going to be most delicate part of writing the novel. It’s easy enough writing about real world situations where the readers already know the rules… it’s less easy to make things up while still adhering to a consistent set of rules. The Fey world is magical, the Fey world is home to all sorts of wonderous things, but it still needs to be believable in the eyes of the reader. Of course one of the major reasons I’m writing this particular story is that it allows me such freedom to bend the rules and to play with the reader’s perceptions of what they think they know about our world, Faeries and even figures central to the history of our world (wait until you meet St. Patrick….)

Writing in this world - creating this world, really - may be a delicate practise, but it’s also an extremely rewarding one. It’s a lot of fun to take old concepts, old stories and mess them around in my head, trying to come up with ways to put a spin on what we think we know about the fables and the characters involved.

Writing in first person really allows me to explore Rowan’s emotions as she (literally) falls into this fantastic world and finds out that the Fey world isn’t all sugarplumbs, pixie dust and brownies. Of course there’re about, oh… a bajillion stories written with regards to the Fey world, going back pretty much since stories have been told, so the trick is taking the familiar conventions and making the reader excited about them again. We’ve seen the gamut of what can be done with the Fey world: Post-industrial (Michael Swanwick), skyscrapers, automobiles and warring fairy conglomerates (Tad Williams), fanciful fairy tales (The Brothers Grimm) and that makes it truly difficult to come up with something totally balls-to-the-wall different. So, with that in mind, I hope the Fey world in Through Bended Grass does feel familiar, but at the same I want the reader to feel like they’re stepping into a Fey world that is just a little different than any they’ve seen before - like stepping into your bedroom and knowing, without being able to pinpoint exactly what or why, that something’s been moved, something’s changed - very familiar, but slightly uncomfortable.

Chapter Seven is the first chapter where I really get to exercise this idea and it’s been damn fun to play around. Do I succeed? Ultimately it’s up to my readers to decide. Of course, I hope to bring a world as hauntingly evocative as Tad William’s New Erehwon, as frighteningly realistic as Neil Gaiman’s version of America in American Gods, as charmingly friendly as Charles De Lint’s Newford, or as hauntingly eloquent as Terry Brook’s Hopewell, Illinois. Of course, these are all established, legendary writers and I’m still simply learning. But it’s always good to have high heights to aspire to, right?

Word Count

Prologue: 955
Chapter 1: 1,409
Chapter 2: 2,022
Chapter 3: 3,107
Chapter 4: 1,941
Interlude: 644
Chapter 5: 3,153
Chapter 6: 3,734
Chapter 7: 2,374

Total: 19,339

 A recipe for an epiphany of epic proportions:

Start with a slow day at work.
Add a dash of wandering mind.
Sprinkle with a large helping of a story just rearing to get to the page.

Voila! You’ve got yourself not only a sizable epiphany, but also a title for the upcoming masterpiece you’re slowly pulling together during any free moment. No longer will I have to think of the work as “my untitled contemporary fantasy” or “that novel I’m working on” or “my pipe dream”. Instead I can now call it by its new title:

Through Bended Grass

Usually I leave the title of a project to the near the end, and this one could very well change over the course of the project, but something about this title stuck with me, even over the course of a couple of days. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that it was the title of the novel, it just took me some time to discover it.

Those familiar with Irish/Celtic/Fey mythology – or those willing to do a little bit of research – will undoubtedly see the relevance the title right away. The rest of you, well… you’ll just have to read Through Bended Grass and find out!

So, what d’ya think?