#shadowlack

look! It’s some ice!!!

I'm not sure how far I'll get into posting this story so I wanted to give some overview of it first.

When first planning my NaNo novel I wanted to write about witches, mostly based on this quote:

“The archetype of the witch is long overdue for celebration. Daughters, mothers, queens, virgins, wives, et al. derive meaning from their relation to another person. Witches, on the other hand, have power on their own terms. They have agency. They create. They praise. They commune with nature/ Spirit/God/dess/Choose-your-own-semantics, freely, and free of any mediator. But most importantly: they make things happen. The best definition of magic I’ve been able to come up with is “symbolic action with intent" — “action" being the operative word. Witches are midwives to metamorphosis. They are magical women, and they, quite literally, change the world.”

- Pamela Grossman

In the end I'm not writing about witches at all. But I stuck with theme of women finding agency on their own terms. My main character is a woman who was constantly defined as being the daughter of someone important and than the wife of someone important. But both those figures die, she questions in place in the world and then comes to terms with constructing the image she wants for herself.

I also have a secondary character who's only know as 'The Wife' for half of the novel. No one gives her much screen time, which they are pretty much all doomed for doing. She marries a man in a powerful position and I didn't want it to be out of some need like money, or protection. Not something she was forced into but who actively set out to do this on her own ambitions.

Another big inspiration for this story was a course I once took called Plagues and People. It made me want to write about sickness and disease because of how it can completely change the culture and behaviour within cities. And because I love coastal towns and because this city was used as one of the class examples, I modeled my setting after Gibraltar. 

And then I took all that and fit it into the Shadowlack universe. This pretty much just means I'm pulling on a decade of world building so I'll do my best to provide reference links when using language / critters and such from the Shadowlack knowledge base.

Miasma, a Shadowlack novel