Through the Portal: a back-page pass
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!”
Some of you know this already, but An Echo of the Fae was supposed to be a Rapunzel retelling. In its very earliest stages, it was simply the glimmering of an idea as I tried to come up with something that would work for Kendra’s Fairy Tale Retelling Challenge and multi-author-release. She told us that the theme would be Rapunzel back in… I believe it was 2018. And while I didn’t quite make it in time to be part of the release, and my story really didn’t end up being a retelling… like… at all… that is where the first flickers of idea began. That’s where it all started.
How the Pieces Fell into place
At the very first absolute beginning of tossing this story around in my head, I had this idea of Rapunzel being a selkie (selkies are merpeople who can transform from seals into people and back), kidnapped from her true parents by the fae. I wanted the fae-lands to be the “tower,” and the longing for the sea (a longing she doesn’t understand, as Rapunzel would not remember the sea or her seal-form) to be like the “prince.”
Originally, the story was going to be about the Rapunzel character and from her perspective. The prologue pretty much wrote itself and has remained mostly unchanged from its very first draft.
But then I got stuck.
I couldn’t think of a single scene beyond that story. So I set it aside and kept working on Turrim Archive.
Around about then, Derek and I had a friend over who ran a short role-playing game based on the Savage Worlds system for us to play through (quite different from D&D 5E, which was the only version I had any familiarity with at the time). I think it took us 3-5 rounds to get through the whole adventure, which was fun.
In our RPG adventure, we had to leave our little village and go into the forest (which ended up holding all sorts of fae creatures) to find out why all these strange things kept happening in our village. In one of our encounters, we happened upon a water elemental attempting to create a changeling out of sticks and mud to leave in the place of a baby that she was going to steal for the Fae Queen. Our party convinced the elemental that the queen would probably enjoy a puppy more than a baby (for the elemental informed us that the queen often grew tired of babies once they started crying), and promised to bring her a puppy and that she would probably get a nice reward from the queen.
That’s when I had the idea of adding a changeling to the story I was working on
If Rapunzel had been kidnapped, was anything (or anyone) left in her place? Who would she be? A child of the fae, presumably… as one cannot write a story about a construct of rocks and mud and twigs that falls apart when the glamour wears off. What would cause a fae stealing a human child to leave a child of their own in its place? If “Rapunzel” was a selkie, then the real parents would know their child was a changeling as soon as they saw she couldn’t transform. What would they do? What would that child do when she found out about her true heritage many years later? Why were the fae stealing human children, what did they want with them?
Questions are a huge part of my drafting process
Usually it’s mostly a matter of coming up with the right question or set of questions, and that sets me off down the path to writing an actual story rather than throwing together an outline of ideas and snippets of thoughts.
But the idea was still incomplete
The final piece to the puzzle fell into place one super snowy night in February 2019. We broke all the records for snow that year, and we hadn’t moved into our new house yet, so we had to go buy a snowblower to keep the driveway clear for the subcontractors who needed to come finish up things like siding.
While standing in the Menards checkout lane, I noticed that the cashier’s name was Jana. I asked her how to pronounce her name, because I liked it. (It’s like Anna with a J at the beginning). As it was a cold and ridiculously snowy evening, there were few other people in the store and I ended up standing there chatting with her as Derek ran back down an aisle for something we had forgotten to grab. I told her I collect cool names as I am an author, and she brightened and told me, “Well, my middle name is Echo, if you want to use both!”
Thus, “Rapunzel” became Jana, and Echo was born.
once i had the characters figured out, the story came to life
It was then that the story really grabbed a hold of me and refused to let go.
The snow continued to fall, and March of 2019 saw us getting ready to move into our newly finished home. I was purposefully taking a month off from writing so that I could focus on the move. But I couldn’t stop thinking about my Rapunzel retelling.
I sat down and wrote out a 1400-word outline just to try to get it to leave me alone, but it wouldn’t.
I wrote the first scene.
Still no relief.
March ended, April began, and I went back to drafting the final book in my Turrim Archive, but every word was a struggle. Every word felt like I was wrestling tigers to get the letters pounded out onto the page.
One night I dreamed an entire scene of Echo’s story, and when I woke up, it still made sense. That had never happened to me before. I was pondering this whole thing one morning, and also thinking about the Bible lessons we’d been teaching to the kids at our church’s mid-week program. We had just gone through the introduction to Samuel and his calling by God in the middle of the night.
It was at that moment that I had an epiphany. I was thinking about how God audibly spoke to Samuel and called his name 3 times before Eli or Samuel realized that it was God speaking to him.
It’s often easy to look at the characters in the Bible and think they were super dense not to realize certain things. But suddenly I had to ask, “Lord, am I the idiot, here?”
That would make a pretty good book title, actually
I decided to talk it over with my husband (for surely he would talk me out of this ridiculous notion, nobody on the planet wants me to finish Turrim Archive more than he does!) and he said that maybe I should pause on Turrim Archive and write this new story!
So I did. And the words continued to flow. I finished the book in less than 2 months, and can honestly say that this story was the easiest one I’ve ever written.
Except for two things
The ending and the title.
I’ve never edited and re-edited anything more than I did with the ending of this book. It went through TWELVE different drafts, and ultimately ended up completely different (and several chapters longer) than the original rough draft. I was still in the middle of rewriting versions of the end when I realized I still didn’t have a good title.
I had been calling this story Summer Princess the entire time I was drafting it… but coming up with a real title for this book was extremely difficult. It was hard to think of it as anything else, but since the story ended up being from Echo’s perspective and NOT Jana’s, the title definitely didn’t fit.
Then my daughter (7 at the time) designed me a cover and titled it “Before the Echo.”
I really liked that. A lot.
But it wasn’t quiiiiite right.
Derek tweaked it a bit and said, “What about An Echo of the Fae?”
And that stuck.
It also handed me the final ingredient I needed to get the ending just right.
And thus, we were ready to send Echo out into the wild.
And now she’s a whole year old!
I have been so thrilled by how much readers have seemed to be enjoying this little heart-project of mine.
Don’t forget to grab your FREE copy of An Echo of the Fae from the Kindle Store this week!
I’m also hosting an epic giveaway with tons of prizes to celebrate Echo turning 1 year old!
And that’s the behind-the-scenes, back-page pass of where this story started and how it all came together.
Dear Reader, do you enjoy hearing these sorts of “behind the scenes” stories?
Dear Author, what sparks your imagination for a story?