Project Elfhome - Afterword

Isolating her creates a new problem. The narrative becomes a monologue, which is difficult to keep tension high. Lain experiencing first contact with an elf also satisfied the idea that this was the first time elves and humans meet on Elfhome. I wanted Lain to have an actual conversation with the elf, so it limited who she could meet. I didn’t want it to be either Windwolf or Stormsong since she obviously meets both of them for the first time in the first two books. Using Lightning Strikes allowed me to expand on Blue Sky’s backstory and flesh out a character important to the series and yet never shown before.

Yes, the story does end slightly abruptly but Lain has had her epiphany. The reader of the series is sure to realize that Lain manages to get to Pittsburgh while it’s cycling back and forth between Elfhome and Earth. Once there, she refuses to leave and sets up in her house on Observatory Hill.

Wyvern

This was the first short story I’d ever sold. It was written after Tinker was released. Russell Davis had e-mailed me and asked me to write something to include in a DAW anthology he was editing called Faerie Tales.

I was in the middle of writing Wolf Who Rules. I didn’t want to try to fit the short story’s plot into the events of the main storyline (that insanity would come later). At first I thought I would do some first-contact stories with new characters. I started a few but they trickled off, not to be finished.

I realized I needed a character that I was comfortable with to build the story around because I was on a tight deadline. I pulled out an old character who originally had been a space marine. What would a space marine be doing on Elfhome? I decided that she could be a big game hunter. The bigger the game, the better, so I decided that she would go one on one with a wyvern.

I couldn’t get a handle on it until I stumbled upon the idea that her “native guide” would be a sekasha. I had been raised on Tarzan movies where the big game hunter was always a brave, tall white guy and the “native guide” was this fearful, weak and small male that ran away at first sign of trouble. As a kid, I didn’t realize how racist this was. Here was the chance to address that stance by making the two characters equal.

Unfortunately I didn’t keep canon straight. Originally the female sekasha was Crow Song. In the books, however, I state that all of Windwolf’s Hands are in Pittsburgh, that he had only lost Hawk Scream and Lightning Strikes, and only Stormsong speaks English. I decided to change the female to be Stormsong as the easiest way to match up all the elements. Certainly the female acts like Stormsong in the story. (So sorry for any confusion I caused people who read this in its original form.)

Bare Snow Falling on Fairywood

Some stories are gifts from the muses. They just come. And sometimes they aren’t, and you need to build them from the ground up. And sometimes they’re a weird mix of both, stalling in some places and sprinting ahead in others.

When I moved to Hawaii, I started to meet very memorable people. A new friend impressed me in the complexity of her life. Her father is a professional Bigfoot hunter. Her mother was Hawaiian Chinese Portuguese mix that could have sprung from the pages of Joy Luck Club. She’s an avid fisherman and into outdoor sports like snorkeling and kayaking, but she also loves to shop for clothes. Every time I talked to her, she had a story of great misadventure as she rushed out to save damsels in distress.

One night I had a dream that my friend was on Elfhome. Yes, she would fit right in! But what would her story be?

Fans had been asking about the Water Clan. I decided I would bring one to Pittsburgh; she would need a human defender in the face of all the technology. Still it wasn’t clicking.

Around that time, Teddy the Porcupine videos were hitting my newsfeed regularly on Facebook. If you haven’t seen these, go, now, watch them. They’re a hoot.

One day the muse hit me with “a lesbian, an elf, and a porcupine walk into a hardware store.” Boom. For some reason, adding a porcupine made all the difference in the world. Why? I don’t know. I wrote the hardware store scene but it didn’t have an inherent conflict in it that centered on Law. So I decided to back up. At Wollerton’s, Law and Bare Snow were already a couple. How did they meet?

I made a few stabs at their first meeting being a totally random event. The very first attempt, Law left home on her eighteenth birthday and meets Bare Snow squatting out in the middle of nowhere. Yes, the story centered on Law, but lacked conflict.