Twisting Myths

To celebrate the publication of The Bitter Seed of Magic we’ve got an exclusive blog piece from the fabulous Suzanne McLeod all about twisting myths in her Spellcrackers.com series.

Suzanne writes:
When it comes to supernatural creatures, I like to have my cake and eat it 😉 In my Spellcrackers books I wanted to write about vampires, and faeries, and witches, and goblins, and trolls, and all those other creatures that fuel our fears and dreams in myths and legends. So that’s what I’ve done. I’ve kept the majority of the traditional elements (such as vampires surviving on blood and forgoing the suntan *g*), set it all in contemporary London, and added my own little twists here and there.
My twists come when I spend time daydreaming, err, sorry, doing some serious research on worldbuilding. One of the myths I find fascinating is that of the sidhe fae wanting to seduce humans. When you look at it from the human side, it’s a great way to explain away that unwanted pregnancy, or the young man who runs away leaving his responsibilities on the farm behind – so easy to blame it on some supernatural being who you couldn’t say no to. But if you look at it from the sidhe point of view, it doesn’t stack up. After all, if you’re such a beautiful being, living amongst others like yourself, are you really going to want to seduce some poor farm girl who happened to be feeding the hens? Is a faerie queen going to be so desperate as to steal away the lad that milks the cows? Nu-huh, somehow I don’t think so.

So I asked myself why. Why would this happen? What would encourage the sidhe to be attracted to humans, and how would it affect not just the sidhe, but also the humans, and other non-human races? How would they all interact together? How would this cause the Spellcrackers world to evolve? And endless, endless other questions 😉

Answering all those questions is how the specific Spellcrackers mythology surrounding the fertility rites and the creation of the witches and wizards (who are the human offspring of sidhe/human relationships), and the effect witches and wizards have on their part of the world’s magical society, came about. An aspect of which is very pertinent to the plot and character motivations in The Bitter Seed of Magic, the third book in the Spellcrackers series.