AI Fun
What a stunner. Fantastic image created by Midjourney AI with just a few simple prompts from me.
Imagination
Why write
Imagination – it’s something that pulls at the mind and won’t let go. Just on the edge of thought there is another place – deep woods, misty moors, castles of granite and oak – why? What do you want of me? Why plague me with insistence when you are so ephemeral and at the same time unrelenting.
Fairy Magic
Fairy Magic
When I Believed in Fairies
Are there fairies at the bottom of the garden? Many people think so. As a child in England I definitely believed I saw them on at least two occasions. This idea was probably encouraged by my grandmother who fed my imagination with stories of the Fae. Once I woke to see tiny things flying through the air in a shaft of sunlight. When I asked Grandmama what they were she said ‘fairies’. Sad to say, now I believe they were only dust motes.
My Gothic novel, The Runaways: A Haunting Regency Romance, was inspired by the probability of the Fae in 19th century Britain, and the idea of changelings, where fairies swap a fairy child for a human. This belief was once very strong and usually resulted in the changeling child being badly treated. Poor kid. He or she probably had some sort of physical or mental impairment and was punished for it.
Fairy realms have a very autocratic structure apparently. As in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there are Kings, Queens and various underlings, and their society is structured not unlike that in the time of Regency England, my favourite fantasy.
I rather like the idea of writing a story about just such a child who is heir to a great estate, but treated as a leper. This child, however, uses his/her fairy knowledge to overcome obstacles in the path to power, and develops strength and morality in the process. That one’s on the backburner.Meanwhilemy current hero in the soon to be published Alias Lord John is a changeling of a very different kind. He changes places with a lord, and finds himself the supposed owner of a large estate, a wife, a mistress and an attractive accomplice who says she is a distant cousin.
I used Chillingham Castle in Northumberland as a model for Kinborough in The Runaways. It was fun looking at the rather disturbing attractions on offer: theLady in White in the Inner Pantry, the Ghost Chamber, where there is this sense of something unseen– a chill, dark, creeping sensation. There are also voices in the chapel, and shades and shadows in the courtyard. A real treat, if you like that sort of thing.
