{"id":110,"date":"2009-03-08T09:36:04","date_gmt":"2009-03-08T14:36:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quackingalone.wordpress.com\/?p=110"},"modified":"2009-03-08T09:36:04","modified_gmt":"2009-03-08T14:36:04","slug":"liberties-with-a-legend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/08\/liberties-with-a-legend\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rest Of The Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

I've just published my novel, A Faerie Fated Forever<\/em>.\u00a0 It's up now and available at Mobipocket and partner\u00a0e-tailers but is still \"in the formatting loop\" at Kindle.\u00a0 It should be up on Amazon and available for the Kindle shortly.\u00a0The\u00a0setting is partly\u00a0the Highland Isle of Skye in Scotland and\u00a0partly\u00a0Regency(ish) England.\u00a0 It tells the story of Nial Maclee, a laird whose family labors under a faerie curse and of Heather MacIver, the local\u00a0lass whose adoration of the laird is legendary and whose\u00a0disguises\u00a0to hide her\u00a0unusual looks earned her the nickname, \"Heather the hag.\"\u00a0<\/p>\n

Faerie<\/em>, and the two sequels that I've written already, were born from my perversion of a very famous legend.\u00a0 I love Scottish tales and wanted to write one but wasn't sure where to start.\u00a0 For inspiration, I searched the Internet for interesting historical tidbits about clans and found the one on Skye, the Clan MacLeod.\u00a0\u00a0The MacLeods famously have the blood of faeries in their family line thanks to a long ago handfast or temporary (sort of) marriage between a laird and a faerie.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the MacLeod legend, after a year and a day, the faerie princess returned home, leaving behind the\u00a0laird and their baby, Ian.\u00a0 She made her hubby promise that he'd never let the baby cry.\u00a0 For a long time, thanks to constant nursing care, the little one never cried.\u00a0 But one night, Ian's nurses\u00a0were lured away\u00a0by a party and the baby cried.\u00a0 His Mother came down from the land of faerie and crooned to him\u00a0to soothe him.\u00a0 She wrapped him in a cloth and told him the cloth was a faerie flag that could be used 3 times\u00a0to call for help from the faeries.\u00a0 The clan has the famed faerie flag\u00a0at their castle.\u00a0 It has reportedly been used twice and one use remains.\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The tale goes that the third use would have been during \"D-Day\" of WWII, had the landing occurred in a different location.\u00a0 They say that the laird had been approached and agreed to wave the flag from a cliff over the landing troops.\u00a0 Legend also says that during WWII every soldier from Skye carried a picture of the flag in his breast pocket and that every soldier from Skye came home from the war.\u00a0 It's a fascinating\u00a0piece of history and\u00a0a number of romance novelists have written tales framed around the legend.\u00a0\u00a0I read it and stepped away from my computer to let it ferment in my\u00a0perverse\u00a0imagination and (only slightly) deranged\u00a0brain.<\/p>\n

My muse took me back to the point of the story where the faerie returned home and the laird let her go.\u00a0 As the late, great Paul Harvey would have asked, what's the rest of the story? To me, that's the quintessential writer's question.\u00a0 Whether it's a movie, a great work of literature,\u00a0a real life story, or a TV script (my muse's choice is Grey's Anatomy), my mental choo-choo train will stop at a pivotal point in the story and re-write it.\u00a0 In my alternate, made for MAG versions, the characters make different choices that set in motion different events.\u00a0 I think re-directing reality is a great plotting device.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With the MacLeod legend, I had to work out why and how the laird just let his faerie love boogle\u00a0back to the land of faerie with no reports of a battle or a clash of wills to keep her with him.\u00a0 And once she's boogled off, there's a braw laird who has a castle without a lady wife.\u00a0 When the laird weds a new bride, how will the faerie feel about that?\u00a0 If it makes her miserable and she's the princess, how will her Da, the King of the Faeries, feel about this brash upstart who let his bonnie\u00a0daughter walk away without a fare thee well and replaces her with a mortal?\u00a0 Questions are golden and answering them makes a novel.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The MacLeod Faerie Flag legend is, of course, fascinating in and of itself.\u00a0 And what fodder for a fertile imagination it is!\u00a0There are many, many other jumping points where the story could leap off in a different direction.\u00a0 Because I used artistic license to craft\u00a0a new legend, I changed the clan's name in my tale and the Clan Maclee was born.\u00a0 I enjoyed the characters I met along the way so much that (so far) I've written two sequels -<\/em> A Golden Forever\u00a0 <\/em>tells\u00a0Viv's story of\u00a0what she found when she ventured to the gold\u00a0rush in California to try to fund an independent future.\u00a0 A Sixth Sense Of Forever <\/em>tells Boz's story - how\u00a0he's related to the Clan is another jumping off point in the original legend.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To everyone who's ever written a book or wanted to, I recommend the exercise.\u00a0 Take a famous event, legend or story and trace it back to one of the pivotal points and ask the Paul Harvey question.\u00a0 The rest of the story may be where your tale starts.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I've just published my novel, A Faerie Fated Forever.\u00a0 It's up now and available at Mobipocket and partner\u00a0e-tailers but is still \"in the formatting loop\" at Kindle.\u00a0 It should be up on Amazon and available for the Kindle shortly.\u00a0The\u00a0setting is partly\u00a0the Highland Isle of Skye in Scotland and\u00a0partly\u00a0Regency(ish) England.\u00a0 It tells the story of Nial ...continue reading \"The Rest Of The Story\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}