ATTENTION ALL FAE: Don’t Mess with Lara Jansen

I think Shakespeare introduced me to faeries.

Not fairies: not the little winged flowery creatures which tend to litter little girls’ possessions, but rather the human-sized, capricious beings who give Bottom a donkey’s head and gleefully wreak havoc on lives, both human and immortal. I was about nine when I first saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and probably not much older when I ran across the classic tales of Tam Lin. The two pieces left the impression that while some are nicer than others, the fae in literature are generally rat bastards, and not the sort of people you want to mess with.

This is obviously an appealing place to develop characters from. I love starting a story with folklore and legend as a springboard, and seeing where I can leap to from there. With Truthseeker, I wanted to embrace that traditional superior, arrogant mindset that I’ve so often seen in faerie literature, and then do what I could to turn my hero’s world on its ear. Dafydd ap Caerwyn, Prince of Faerie, is born of a self-righteous, smug culture–and can be as charming as the day is long, in that way that utter self-confidence can inspire.

There’s a tradition in fairy tales that the fae can’t lie, only mislead and imply. Though I never state it specifically in Truthseeker, that was something I kept in the back of my mind throughout writing it. My human heroine, Lara Jansen, always knows when she’s being lied to, so Dafydd has to be very careful about what he says to her, even as he pleads for her help in finding a murderer. Finding a balancing point between arrogance and charm, truth and misleading, was just plain fun (if hard work!) for me as a writer.

In retrospect (ie, in writing this blog), it occurs to me that there’s so much faerie literature to draw from and stand out against, it’s amazing I had the nerve to tackle it at all. But then, that’s the great thing about this job: no matter how many times someone has approached a story or an idea, nobody is ever going to do it quite the way I do. There’s room for originality and exploration in everything, even the familiar world of faerie.

Truthseeker is out in September 2010. I hope you’ll enjoy it!

Photo © C.E. Murphy

C. E. Murphy is the author of the epic fantasy series The Inheritors’ Cycle (comprising the novels The Queen’s Bastard and The Pretender’s Crown), as well as two urban fantasy series, The Walker Papers and The Negotiator Trilogy. She has also written action/romance titles under the pseudonym Cate Dermody. She lives in Ireland.

C.E. Murphy online: CEMurphy.net | Twitter | Facebook | LiveJournal