It’s the little things

Well, here it is, zero-dark-thirty, and I’m finishing up my work day. It’s been a really good one. Not because I got a lot of pages written. Heck, I spent abotu twelve hours trying to complete my art fact sheet for the fairy book for Harlequin. The art fact sheet, if you haven’t met one in person, is the information an author gives the art department about her book so they can create a cover….actually, so they can ignore it completely while making a cover. The new art fact sheets have been computerized, and that was such a successful idea, that if you live anywhere in a five-state radius from me, you should have heard my shreeks(how DO you spell that?) of frustration.
So it left little time for actual writing. However, I overcame a stumbling block today that’s important to me. It also will help illustrate how God is in the details in writing. The book I’m doing for Silhouette is the first of a trilogy about an Irish Faerie clan in Sligo, whose queen is Mab, or Maeve, if you will. They have been going along pretty happily until the moment my hero falls down a fairy rath and right into their living room. Drama and comedy ensue, but also an attack by the bad, bad fairies. Okay. That works. I get itchy anymore if I don’t have at least one fight scene or gunshot per book. The only problem with that idea is that the only really bad fairies I know about from my research are called air fairies. Yeah. Not particularly scarifying. So I really had to find them a good moniker, or they wouldn’t terrify anybody. I do have to say that I’ve had great fun investigating gaelic names and translations, and, of course using them with impugnity.
So there I am trying to find a name for a clan of fairies who are patriarchal(obviously Mab’s clan is matriarchal), and once upon a time, a postive, powerful clan. Recently, though, they have become dark and fearsome( you know what happens when kids hang around with the wrong crowd). So I needed a portentious name, but one that could be interpreted for good or evil. I searched and I searched, and finally I found it. My patriarchal fairy clan is the Dubhlainn Sidhe. The Fairies of the Dark Sword. Cool, huh? Okay, maybe it doesn’t send you into raptures, but the minute I had their name, I knew exactly who they were. Tarnished knights who have been influenced by powers beyond their control. Redeemable, of course. The hero of the third book in the trilogy is Liam the Protector.
Symbols are very important to me. The dark sword is my symbol for my dark fairies. The symbols for the series, tentatively called Daughters of the Glen(or the Mists or Myth), are the three Filial Stones which rule the world of faerie and must be in their right place to maintain balance. But that’s a topic for another post. Good night, all. It’s time to curl up with my cat and dream about the clash of fairy courts. More fun, certainly, than dreaming about art fact sheets. I did that last night.

Eileen/Kathleen the evil twins