Dissecting Literature

 I know, I know, I promised more fairies but… but… It’s here!  Our newletter subscribers already saw the cover and the blurb of Caravan of Fire, the second book in the Spirits of Seiran series. If you want to get the freshest news before anyone else, make sure to check out the subscription formula on the left 😉 We send a newsletter every month with the latest news about our WIPs, what happened on the blog, and some group promotions where you can get a lot of free short stories, excerpts and more. Yes, this was an advertisement. With our second book, creating the cover wasn’t as big of a journey, as it was with Shackles of the Storm. If you’re interested in the complete story about us creating the design theme, you can read about it here .  We saw a video somewhere, made by a really successful author about how she sold a lot of books. One tip was keeping the cover similar in a series, so people might recognize that as a brand. It was one of those advice that aren’t comple...

The journey into one of the most important recent tropes continues with some mediterranean islands we now call Greece, and their version of the fairies: the Nymphs. As I did my research on the topic, I already came to some conclusions about these ancient and diverse creatures, so I plan a wrap-up post at the end of this series.  Although nymphs were only associated with fairies in the medieval times and onward, when classical literature and mythology became fashionable again, I think they are at least closly related. So even if greek nymphs seems a side track, they’re worth a post, so here we go! In ancient greek folklore the nymphs were minor nature deities and exclusively female – unlike fairies of other cultures and later times where they could be both male and female. They were described as beautiful and fair creatures, even the world nymph’s primary meaning is „young women” and „bride”. Every nypmh was bound to a special place, like a tree, a spring or a mountain, but honestly...

After a long slumber – longer than I expected – I’d like to continue our blog with interesting topics that aren’t closely related to publishing or our book. There are many more myths and creatures out there we haven’t touched yet buta re worth exploring, so I’ll take this opportunity to start a new series with one of the most popular creatures – fairies and other fae folk. It’s quite a chonky topic, something that’ll give us several posts’ worth of material (one reason I haven’t touched on fairies before), but it’s just as interesting! Fairies don’t have a single origin, but are rather a collection of folk beliefs from different sources. In pagan traditions they are minor deities, spirits of the dead, spirits of nature or a race predating humankind. All of these can be seen in myths and in literature also, so in these blogposts I’ll go through the different cultures where fairies appear and try to find a literary piece where they used that interpretation of these diverse creatures. I r...