Origin and Background
Between 2010 and 2011 I thought about writing a fantasy set not in Ireland,
England or Wales but in the landscapes where I lived.
During that period two characters entered my mind: a brother and sister
separated by their parents so early in their lives that the children didn’t
know the other existed. Each parent took one child and settled far from the
others. Perhaps each parent told a tale of the other parent dying and never
mentioned that there had been another child. Years later the teenagers found
evidence of the deception, and hoping that the other still lived, wanted to
find them.
Writers can be influenced by many things, not always consciously. In
creative acts, magic happens in the mind and if you’re lucky that can be
transposed into works of literature, music, visual art, plays, and so on.
I didn’t know it at the time but realized later that the core of my
story had been influenced by a German book, made into a movie in my childhood. This
was ‘Das Doppelte Lottchen’ by Erich Kästner. Two girls meet at a summer camp
and are astounded by how alike they look. They discover that they are twins and
their parents have never told them of the other’s existence. Sound familiar?
Disney took the story for the movie ‘The Parent Trap,’ first seen in 1961 with
Hayley Mills, who played both parts. Sidenote, in the German black and white
movie out in 1950, two real twins played the parts.
I called my book Queen of Fire
after a character in an imaginary book that appeared in my story, called The
Leather Book. As the characters developed, the main character in Queen
of Fire, the teenage Rowan, became a kind of queen of fire herself. A pair
of silver bracelets became the magical objects that the two main characters
used.
Joseph Campbell’s book ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ influenced me
quite consciously. The journey of the hero/heroine is a key element of my
series.
With the help of a writing group and other readers, my story developed,
and I eventually published it. In 2015 it was listed as one of three finalists
in the Young Adult Category of the High Plains Book Awards.
By this time, a rough outline of a longer story was unrolling in my head,
and I decided to call the series The Leather Book Tales, and to have
that leather book appear throughout. I knew that I would write four books and
that each would focus on one of four elements: fire, water, air, and earth.
These elements go back to ancient Greece as ways to explain the natural world,
and have been used in other stories as means to obtain and use power.
So far, the books are Queen of Fire, Child of Dragons, and Companion
of Eagles. Two of the book titles incorporate one of the elements (see
below for the second). The other two titles refer to an element through a named
creature. For example, the dragons in the second book are water dragons.
For the landscapes I used places I knew, though I transformed them to
fit into a story of an ancient land and a multicultural civilization with
independent cities as well as rural communities.
I also used elements of places I’d heard and read of but had never seen,
as well as stories and myths. Through my research of those, I was able to grow
and expand the world I’d created. Issues that concerned me made their
appearance in the book.
I enjoyed incorporating people from cultures that fascinated me: indigenous
inhabitants of the land, a family of French-speaking artists, an enigmatic
soldier with Asian roots, a city with Icelandic elements, and another with
German-speaking citizens.
The more I wrote, the more I learned about this world and these
characters.
I’m close to getting the fourth book published: Daughter of Earth.
And a surprise to me, I’ve also written part of a fifth book that takes
place in the same world. It focuses on a character who appears in such minor
roles in the other books that he or she may be overlooked.
For more about the books and my writing go to https://www.facebook.com/RegineHaenselwriter. This is a public page, so whether or not you have a Facebook account you can see it.
