“Once upon a time is no particular time, fictional time, fairy-story time. This is a doorway; if you’re lucky, you go through it as a child, aurally, before you can read, and if you are very lucky, you become a free citizen … and can come and go as you please. ”

– Sara Maitland

Sara Maitland is a UK author, who has been describe as “writer, thinker, seeker, seer.”

This quote appealed, in part because of the reflections sparked by  Victoria M Adams’ recent posts on myth, magic, and fairy tales. I also believe books offer us doorways into disparate worlds: all we have to do is work through (yes, a little like Narnia and the wardrobe 😉 ) — and, of course, I write fantasy that features portals, gates, and other magical doorways.

The quote also resonated in terms of my personal writing and storytelling journey, because I first listened to Sleeping Beauty (on the radio) as a very small child, then later read the fairy tale for myself, before — many years later — writing Thornspell, which is my own retelling of the tale.

‘Once upon a time is no particular time…’ I love it, not least because it puts me in mind of a quote from Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea, where stories begin with the phrase: “As far away as Selidor* and as long ago as forever…”

* Selidor is the island where the great dragons may be found, 
in the archipelago known as the Dragon's Reach.

And here it is, as promised last Thursday — an introduction to The Wall Of Night Fandom.org wiki, brought to you by Nicolas Fitzgerald. So without further ado, I’m handing over to Nick. 😀

Announcing “The Wall of Night” Wiki

Dear fans,

I call for aid! A wiki has been found but it has fallen into disuse. Sliding almost out of time and memory until, by chance, it was found. A new age for The Wall of Night Wiki dawns, but it requires many hands to build, else all may be lost again.

While Googling ‘Yorindesarinen’ to check the spelling before including the star-bright hero in a Tweet, I discovered a fledgling wiki dedicated to the Wall series. However, the brave soul who created it had not edited it in so long that it was scheduled to be deleted. And so, I undertook the daunting task of updating the wiki and adding more content. In time, and after proving myself worthy (by editing the wiki regularly for thirty days), I was granted admin rights to continue in the glorious footsteps of that visionary who first created the wiki.

The first task was designing an attractive colour scheme for the wiki. Once this was accomplished, it was further enhanced with beautiful Wall of Night artwork from the esteemed PJ Fitzpatrick, book covers and more. Typos and other errors have also been corrected along the way. But now the call is going out for fellow fans to join in this great working! The wiki needs more lore, characters, locations and many other things besides. Helen’s world of Haarth is deep and rich and it deserves a wiki of equal depth!

Fandom wikis are free and open to all to edit and collaboratively create! If you don’t know where to start, feel free to message me on my Fandom profile message wall and I’ll be happy to help you get started. Or look for a red link that indicates the page doesn’t exist but should. Click the link and start writing! If you need a template I can show you how to use them or add one later after an initial paragraph. The more fans we have adding to the wiki the faster it can grow!

~ Nicolas Fitzgerald

The House of Night Wiki Page

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Nicolas Fitzgerald

About Nicolas:

Kia ora, New Zealand fantasy reader and writer, Nicolas FitzGerald, here. Long time fantasy fan, and more recently, an aspiring fantasy writer—lots of aspiring and much less of the writing. I’ve loved fantasy since first being read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and many other stories, as a child. The Wall of Night series fascinates me and I reread the books often. You can find me on Substack, Twitter or my website in addition to the Fandom account above.

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A Note From Helen 🙂

Although I didn’t know The Wall Of Night series had a wiki, I love that there’s now another place, in addition to FB Group Haarth, where readers who grok the series can share that love — and I’m very excited to see how it evolves now Nick has so very kindly breathed some life back into it.:-)

So if this is, or may be, your thing, then do get in touch with Nick via the message wall, as above — the most direct and fastest method! 😉 Otherwise you can also email me via contact[at]helenlowe[dot]info and I’ll pass it on.

Helen: In my recent Q&A with Victoria M Adams, I was fascinated by the discussion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the archetype of the testing fairy. So I’m thrilled to be here with the author again today, to delve further into the traditions of fairy tale and folklore, myth and legend that have helped shape The House At The End of the Sea.

Victoria M Adams: I’m delighted you and your readers enjoyed the first three Q&As enough to want more.

The Ballad of Tam Lin

Credit: Pyle, Katharine. From “Tamlane: A Story from an Old Scotch Ballad in Wonder Tales from Many Lands”, 1920

This tale of a woman who rescues her true love from the Fairy Queen originates from the Scottish Borders area. It is number 39 in the famous Child Ballad collection, and many versions exist. In all of them, the story involves a woman who falls in love with the son of a local lord who is under the power of the Fairy Queen. She must confront challenges and prove herself worthy before the Queen will give him up (which our intrepid heroine duly does, while pregnant in some versions). It’s a wonderful tale of love and stubborn perseverance.

I obviously didn’t do a straight re-telling, in that Saffi’s relationships to those she loves and wants to win back aren’t romantic. First of all, she is determined to rescue her family from the power of the Fairy Queen. The Tam Lin element comes in with her relationship to Birdy. While this isn’t a grownup romance — they are both twelve years old, so any romantic feelings are at the level of a crush — their relationship has by that point passed through various stages, from initial suspicion through to attempts at friendship, anxieties about loyaltyand other challenges. I will not spoil but there is a scene towards the end of the book that aligns with Tam Lin, and involves magic of the most fundamental sort. Like the magical challenges set by the Green Knight, it is a test of character.

The Mabinogion

Fairy Tale Influences

Credit: “The Snow Queen” by Elena Ringo, 1998; Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

I find this interesting, especially as the tales originate in traditional, patriarchal cultures. Why are there so many excellent fairy tale heroines? Is it because these tales were told by women to their children or grandchildren? Was it because the women were the guardians of oral wisdom, whereas the men were guardians of written, religious or official knowledge? You can almost hear the women’s voices across time. ‘It’s just for children’, they say. ‘It’s not really important’. ‘Don’t mind me while I entertain the babies’.

Oh, but it is important!

So we have girl heroes. Sometimes, they win the day through more ‘feminine’ virtues: hard work, loyalty, silence (The Wild Swans springs to mind). Other times, they set out on perilous quests like their male counterparts, or win the day with wits and repartee. In all cases, they must demonstrate strength of character: courage, generosity, loyalty, perseverance, and an odd admixture of wiliness and respect for fundamental truths, depending on the circumstance. The magical realm in turn rewards such virtue by conceding defeat – half-mocking, half-admiring. What happens to the Snow Queen after Gerda wins back Kai? Nobody knows.

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Credit: Elsa and the Wild Swans by E. Stuart Hardy

This fairy hunger for what it means to be human — to feel love, practice faith, make art, have children — turns up again and again in myth and folklore. Fairies can make everything seem beautiful. They gift people ostensible power and riches. But they can’t give you what really matters: true love, family bonds, faith, hope, courage.

Helen: Thank you so much for returning today and delving deeper into the mythic and fairy-tale influences on The House at the End of the Sea. It’s always fascinating to explore the interweaving of the great traditions of fantasy—many stretching back millennia, not just centuries—with new and original storytelling. And as you know, fairytale and folklore, myth and legend are definitely my jam. 😀

Victoria M Adams: Thank you, Helen. It’s wonderful to be among friends and discuss the stories we all love.

~*~

Victoria M Adams

About The Author

Victoria M. Adams spent her childhood bouncing between Cyprus, Canada and the US with her Iranian mother, trying to achieve first place in the ‘Most Visas Acquired Before Age Eighteen’ sweepstakes. As an adult, she carried on the nomadic family tradition by adding France and New Zealand to the mix, where she worked as an animator, copywriter, tutor and story coach, in no particular order. She currently shares her London home with two humans and a feckless cat.
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Previous Posts:

• The House at the End of the Sea: Q&A #1
• The House at the End of the Sea: Q&A #2
• The House at the End of the Sea: Q&A #3

I have not one but two guest posts for you next week. “Toots vuvuzela!”

More Fairytale and Folklore, Myth and Legend

The first, next Monday 8, is a followup post from Victoria M Adams (Mary), which expands on #3 in our recent Q&A, addressing the traditions of fairytale and folklore, myth and legend in her recently published Middle Grade novel, The House At The End of the Sea.

I was fascinated by Mary’s discussion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the archetype of the testing fairy, so am really looking forward to moar.

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Did You Know “The Wall Of Night” Series Has A Fandom.Org Wiki?

Neither did I until Twitter* friend and fellow writer, Nicolas Fitzgerald, let me know of its existence. Since then he has been in the process of reviving it for WALL readers everywhere – but I will let him tell you all about it next Thursday.

So stay posted. 🙂

~*~

* No, I couldn’t type “X friend”: it conveys entirely the wrong message. :D

Manawatia a Matariki for last Friday’s holiday and the season — & welcome July 1! 🙂

Yep, it’s that time, so also yep, I’ve posted on Supernatural Underground.

This month it’s The Year of the Villain — in Fantasy fiction — #6:

When The Author Messes With Your Mind

The particular author is Kate Elliott and the mind-messing occurs in her Crossroads trilogy: Spirit Gate, Shadow Gate, Traitor’s Gate.

It’s really take two on last month’s theme, When the Hero Is Really A Villain — but done so subtly in this case that I, for one, didn’t see it coming until the very end. And totally loved for that reason, of course! 😀

To find out all the whys and wherefores, though — for that you’ll have to read the post.

The sun rises on a new year

Tomorrow is Matariki, which marks the traditional Maori new year, te Mātahi o te Tau, here in New Zealand. The festival takes its name, Matariki, from when the Matariki star cluster (also known as the Pleiades) reappears in the winter sky.

Matariki is a season of renewal, in which those who have passed on in the past year are remembered and ongoing life celebrated — but the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, goes into it more fully (and says it so much better 😀 ) here.

I recently rediscovered this quote from a poem by English poet Sarah Williams (1837 – 1868), The Old Astronomer To His Pupil. It feels very apt for Matariki:

“Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.“

You can read the full poem, here.

And more on Sarah Williams, here.

Recently, I’ve been striving to catch up with posting about the titles on my Book Booty list for 2024. Today it’s time for System Collapse by Martha Wells, which is the seventh title in the Murderbot series.

I have loved Murderbot since first encountering All Systems Red several years ago.

To date, there have been seven titles in the series, five of them novellas. System Collapse is the second novel and a direct sequel to Network Effect, which I consider essential reading in order to fully grok System Collapse.

I make no secret of being a Murderbot fan, so I was delighted to receive System Collapse as a gift. Although unlike the previous books, it did take me some time to get into the story.

Initially it was hard to know what was going on, “because [redacted]”, but it may also have been because the story did not take me where I expected to go at the end of Network Effect. There were also a lot of characters to navigate, with new players coming in while the old “Scooby gang” were still very much part of the mix, all in a much smaller page space (243 as opposed to 349) than Network Effect.

So I had to come to terms with that and recalibrate, before I could really get into the story. But once I made that shift, and particularly once the action started, all the old enjoyment kicked in — because Murderbot, but also because the story delivers on a combination of lost colonies, corporate bad actors, frightening but also conflicted cyborgs, and equally terrifying alien tech. It also examines the effects that the accumulation of such events are having on Murderbot: that is, that it isn’t just a “heartless killing machine.”

And that’s all I’m going to tell you, but if you’re a Murderbot fan like me you should enjoy this book, even if there may be an initial adjustment required. If you’re new to Murderbot I definitely recommend starting at the beginning with All Systems Red, but if you like works such as CJ Cherryh’s Cyteen, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, or The Expanse series by James A Corey, I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy the ride.

I read the hardback edition of System Collapse (243 pp.) As noted above, I received it as a gift.

And it’s time — for another post in the About The Characters series, which focuses on the minor characters in The Wall Of Night series, in large part because:

“I think it’s the presence of the smaller characters that “makes” a story, creating texture around the main points of view.”

~ from my Legend Award Finalist’s Interview, 2013

USA

Initially, the series focused exclusively on characters from The Heir of Night, but now I’m continuing on with minor characters from both The Gathering Of The Lost and Daughter of Blood — in alphabetical order, by name, of course!

Speaking of alphabetical, the series has finally exited “N” for “O”, where the first character is so minor he is only referred to, never seen — but a mention, is a mention!

UK/AU/NZ

Old Alth: the senior wyr pack handler in the Red Keep, principal stronghold of the House of Blood

Although neither so large, nor as terrifying as Kalan’s memories of the Hunt of Mayanne, the wyr hounds at the entrance to the Envoys’ Quarter were tall, with sleek narrow heads. His muscles tightened as the pale, phosphorescent eyes turned his way. The sentries’ eyes followed those of their hounds and one of them cleared his throat. “Seems they recognize a Storm Spear; Old Alth said they would.”

“Alth’s our senior wyr handler,” Jad explained, as the other sentry shifted stance.

~ from © Daughter Of Blood: The Wall of Night Book Three, Chapter 27, The Turnings of Fate

Today marks the third and final post in The House At the End of the Sea Q&A series with Victoria M Adams — and I really love her thoughtful and indepth answers to the questions, as well as the glimpses into the story. It has been a real privilege, as well as a great pleasure, hosting both her and the Q&A.

On which note…

Art Credit: Sharon King-Chai

Victoria M Adams & The House At the End of the Sea: Q&A #3

Saffi’s family has accepted a similar bargain down the generations without questioning it. This has disastrous consequences for themselves and others. Each time the Queen renews the deal, the heir receives a magical ‘gift’. But there is, as always, a price. In a twist on the usual Faustian bargain, the price in the case of the True family is paid by others – those the family exploits, those they cheat or bully, even those within the family who are too curious or who don’t play by the rules. It is a family that has accumulated wealth by nefarious means down the generations. Time and again, the Queen asks her question: ‘What do you want?’ Time and again, the Trues reply: ‘Wealth, power, influence.’ I suspect the Queen might long for a different answer.
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Art Credit: Frank Victoria

from © The House at the End of the Sea — produced here with permission.
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Victoria M Adams

About The Author

Victoria M. Adams spent her childhood bouncing between Cyprus, Canada and the US with her Iranian mother, trying to achieve first place in the ‘Most Visas Acquired Before Age Eighteen’ sweepstakes. As an adult, she carried on the nomadic family tradition by adding France and New Zealand to the mix, where she worked as an animator, copywriter, tutor and story coach, in no particular order. She currently shares her London home with two humans and a feckless cat.
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Previous Posts:

• The House At the End of the Sea: Q&A #1
• The House At the End of the Sea: Q&A #2

I hope you enjoyed Monday’s post just as much as I did. 😀 Now, onward to Q&A #2 and shining a spotlight on Victoria M Adams and her newly released novel, The House at the End of the Sea.
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Art Credit: Sharon King-Chai

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Victoria M Adams & The House At the End of the Sea: Q&A #2

Helen: What is magic, to you? Why do you use it in your story? What does magic add that a so-called ‘realistic’ tale might not convey?

Victoria M Adams: I’m so fascinated by this question. On the surface of it, in fantasy stories especially, magic is power. It’s the fantasy of being able to do extraordinary things – fly, shoot lightning bolts out of your fingertips, whatever – to wish a thing into being. Dig down a bit, though, and magic is so much more. It has to do with what it means to be a human being, why the world is the way it is. That’s the question magic asks. It asks if there are hidden aspects to the world. If there are things that don’t appear on the surface but which are just as real as going down to the shop and buying a loaf of bread.

That, of course, is a gold mine for stories, especially stories that involve liminal spaces, thresholds between worlds, secret histories and so on. Fairy stories. Tales about hidden worlds, portals, beings who cross between our world and another. These stories are saying: reality is so much bigger than the story told to you by your five senses. There’s more going on. Don’t just look on the surface. Don’t just listen to received wisdom.

Fantasy for me is about metaphor – not necessarily straight allegory, but creative metaphor. In The House At The End Of The Sea, I could have told a story about a girl, Saffi True, who has lost her mother, who has family problems, who discovers that her ancestor built his fortune by making others suffer. But I wanted to turn the screw a bit tighter. I wanted the problems to come knocking on Saffi’s door in a very concrete way, like the Green Knight visiting King Arthur’s court. Unavoidable.

Magic turns the screw. It asks: ‘How does grief distort reality, every day? How do past injustices shape our world, here and now?’
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Art Credit: Frank Victoria

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An Excerpt from The House at the End of the Sea

“Sometime in the middle of the night, Saffi woke with a start. The room was full of shifting shadows. It had been cloudy earlier but now a light shone through the window. The moon was up. The shadows were tree branches, shaken in the wind. There was a noise, too, but it wasn’t the branches.

It was the sound of laughter on the stairs.

People were coming up from the front hall. She could hear voices, the light tread of many feet. The memory of guests filtered through her mind. So Dad was wrong and Grandad was right. They had come, whoever they were.

The laughter sent a shiver through Saffi. She got up and tiptoed out on the landing in her pyjamas. The lights were on so she had no trouble finding her way. She crept towards the edge of the stairwell, peering down.

‘My Lady,’ said someone from below.

Without thinking about it, Saffi moved down a green carpeted step, drawn by the sound of those voices. There was a musical quality to them, sweet and enchanting. She had never heard anyone speak like that – as if the speaker lived life only for the sake of pleasure and laughter, and all other experiences were unknown. These people sounded as if they had never been angry, or lost someone dear to them, or wept. Saffi longed to be like that. She moved down another step. Then one more, in growing confusion.

It seemed to her that there were too many steps. She could never reach the end of them. Her legs felt heavy, as if she was pushing through water. The stairwell stretched on and on like a dim green tunnel. She felt queasy and clutched at the banister.

Then – as if an elastic had snapped back – she was at the bottom, facing the guest suite. She stopped in amazement. How had that happened? A few seconds ago, she couldn’t walk down the flight. Yet here she was on the landing. The green door was open. Beyond it, she glimpsed figures, flashes of iridescent colour. Satin maybe, or feathers.

All at once, Grandma was there too, blocking her view. ‘What are you doing, Saffi?’ she hissed. ‘Go back to bed!’

Saffi hurried up the stairs to her bedroom. By now, her curiosity was roused to fever pitch. Who were those guests? She lay in bed, listening intently, until she heard the sound of her grandparents creaking upstairs. They were talking in anxious murmurs, a strange contrast to the visitors’ easy chatter.

‘Answer by the seventh day,’ she heard Grandad say before their bedroom door closed, and silence descended.

Who had to answer what? Saffi wondered. Across the room, Milo stirred in his sleep. She tossed and turned, questions gnawing at her. Why were her grandparents so worried? The guests had everyone in a flummox. She even speculated whether they were foreign royalty. Why else would one be called ‘my Lady’?

She must have fallen asleep after that. When she opened her eyes, it was morning.  Sunlight filtered through the curtains onto her bed.”

from © The House at the End of the Sea — produced here with permission.
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Victoria M Adams

About The Author

Victoria M. Adams spent her childhood bouncing between Cyprus, Canada and the US with her Iranian mother, trying to achieve first place in the ‘Most Visas Acquired Before Age Eighteen’ sweepstakes. As an adult, she carried on the nomadic family tradition by adding France and New Zealand to the mix, where she worked as an animator, copywriter, tutor and story coach, in no particular order. She currently shares her London home with two humans and a feckless cat.
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Previous Posts:

“The House At the End of the Sea”: Q&A #1