I’ve been intrigued by urban fantasy for a long time. As a teenager, I was quite into Shadowrun, the faery cyberpunk series, and later, I picked up Charles de Lint’s wonderful Spiritwalk and inhaled a host of his books, continuing with Moonheart (backwards I know), The Onion Girl, The Blue Girl, Widdershins and more. At the same time, I came across the Merry Gentry faery detective erotica series (it feels unkind calling it paranormal romance) which I also greatly enjoyed, and need to finish at some stage!
It’s something that I sort of explored in Aenigma (apologies – it still needs a bit of a re-write) which is set in a modern world very much like our own, with the simple addition of faery and humans trying to co-exist uneasily.
But I wanted to write something tighter, something closer to a modern faery story, closer to what might be considered a ‘classic’ tale with a modern twist. Partially inspired by a few concepts I’ve come across in a book I’m reading, at the same time (well, sort of) as going walking in the woods, and a host of other pieces of inspiration, I’ve started a draft provisionally entitled Small Places which looks at faery in modern day England.
It’ll have witches and woodsmen, the seelie and the unseelie, fantastic beasts and weird alchemists, as well as friendship, hope, despair and growth. I’m still working on the structure a bit, but it really seems to be flowing much more easily than Wild Court was. So bear with me, and hopefully I’ll have updates soon.