THE MYTHIC SERIES is a story about stories and Big Bear the character was the logical place to drop a bunch cat-related myths—everything from Bast to Dick Whittington and Puss in Boots to having multiple lives. Big Bear the character is also based on Big Bear the real cat so, equally, what’s on the page is my interpretation of my beautiful boy’s larger than either-real-or-fictitious life personality.
Mean girl. Teen girl. Rich girl. Bitch girl. Selene Charbon is a classic bully type. So what’s more fun than putting a bully through the wringer? Nothing!
Sweet City is full of horrors, but which is the most terrifying? The monstrous Gingerbread Men? The creepy Sorting Mat? Matron Goose, who oversees the City with a firm wing? Or the Sugar Plum Airy that brings death to those it lands upon?
In my initial plan for the series, Lucy was to be flanked by two very different contemporaries, something you can see threaded through their names. Amber Kim’s name radiates light, Lucia Knight’s balances light with dark, and Selene Charbon’s is shrouded in darkness.
Selene Charbon was originally was intended to be part of the Fictorial Four. This blonde bully’s barbed personality was to be a source of constant discord, with Lucy torn between friendships with Selene and Amber.
But Selene isn’t part of The Mythic Series’ core team. So what happened? And why did that turn out to be a great idea?
The Rules of the Fight are warrior Henry’s code, a set of rules he not only fights by, but lives by.
However, much like Lucy Knight, I tend to forget things and so I made myself some show cards illustrating each rule for easy reference.
Amber Kim’s Emma-Watson-as-brainy-but-slightly-overbearing-Hermione-Granger roots are fairly obvious but what real world person is her personality most based upon? Hint: his initials are D.C.S. And yes, he can also be slightly overbearing!
Every aspect of Sun Amber Kim’s name is filled with light and that’s on purpose, she’s Lucy’s “bright” friend in every sense of the word.
Just how many layers of luminosity are there in Miss Amber’s names?
Many layers!
Hearth High originally formed the main setting for The Mythic Series and I decided all the side-character teachers would be named after deities from various cultures. I’m fascinated by myths of all types, but especially the different pantheons. I’m always looking for opportunities in the books to add in references to them.
Some of these teachers had their roles severely reduced when Hearth High’s own role was cut back. However, I still managed to slip in a few of my favourites.
Hearth High was supposed to be the primary setting for most of the domestic action in the first four books. I had grand plans to make the school its own character over time and thoroughly ape everything from Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Glee and Beverly Hills 90210.
But then something happened…
The Scare Bears are one of my earliest creations—the entry concerning them is in one of my first notebooks. When I needed a shipload of pirates in Book Three I dug into my research and realised I’d never used this fun concept.
What were they almost named? What is their connection with Star Wars? And which bear did I save for an entire book just so I could give him appropriate treatment (“appropriate treatment” of course being that he suffers a terrible death)?
The name Yarikh Khoury begins and ends with Ys—or “why”s. Yarikh is the embodiment of the mysterious, dark-haired, handsome stranger. I wanted questions swirling around him, especially for the sceptical Henry.
But what does his name literally translate to? And where did he get his three weapons made of light?
The architecture of Sweet City is lifted from fairy tales and candy stores. This terrible town is located underground, in a huge cavern held up by red and white striped pillars “as thick as California redwoods”, encircled with a moat of boiling chocolate, while underfoot is polished toffee that is hard as concrete.
Come learn about the inspiration for this place’s architecture and fixtures including the street names, the mines, and Circus.
I have always been open about the fact that one thing I wanted to achieve with The Mythic Series was to give the world a more diverse fantasy cast.
There aren’t a surfeit of gay Middle Eastern men in any genre and, as a gay man of Middle Eastern ethnicity, Yarikh provided a way to finally put that part of myself into this series.
He’s also a standard-bearer for the mysterious stranger trope and while we do learn a lot about him in Book Three, he leaves behind a host of unanswered questions.
In The Mythic and the Horses of Doom, during a sparring session, Henry teaches Lucy what he calls “the Rules of the Fight”. But you won’t have to step into the ring with a minotaur to learn the secrets behind the five Rules—they’re just a click away. Which Rule was inspired by a Don Henley song? Which rule is based on advice I was given at age 9? And why did I purposefully give Lucy permission to use deadly force? The gloves are off!
Big Bear is not the only one of our cats in The Mythic Series. The breakout star of The Mythic and the Illustrious Lie is Chester, a beautiful black and white cat of few words—and fewer braincells.
But, just like Big Bear himself, Chester supplanted another character who was intended to feature in the B-story of Book Four.
How did this fluffy killing machine scratch his way into my book? Whose place did he take? And what does any of this have to do with the X-Men?
Big Bear is a real world cat transplanted into a fantasy world. His name and his appearance are lifted, almost 100%, from our beautiful black and white tomcat, Big Bear.
So you would think that there is not much more to say here.
But, given that I am a verbose author writing a series where the central tenet is that all our concepts have multiple layers of meaning, it could never be that simple!
Henry is the toughest of our lead characters, not a fan of fashion or in any way fussy and in this way he subverts the stereotype of gay male characters who historically have been portrayed as physically frail and prissy. However, we don’t learn Henry is gay until well into Book Two. I’ve had readers ask why I waited so long to confirm his sexual orientation. Did I intend to keep him in the closet for one and a half books?
When Lucy learns that her minotaur friend doesn’t have a name, and requests one, she calls him after a bull she knew from home. She’s not the most creative person in the two worlds but, equally, she chooses it because although the animal scared her, it also possessed a quiet strength that she admired. She thinks the name is “at once both informal and regal”.
I chose “Henry” for exactly the same reasons. To me it’s a name that’s relaxed but honourable, unstuffy but noble.
The central question of The Mythic series is: where does inspiration come from?
The answer: another world.
It’s a story about stories, at once both a meta, yet straightforward, take on the hero’s journey.
Since this other world was the literal source of our inspiration, its name needed to be perfect. It had to demonstrate the main concept, but naturally feel like the title of a fantasy world – to be both meta and straightforward.
Much like Lucy Knight, Amber Kim arrived, fully formed in my mind, but from the exact opposite direction. Lucy is brazenly staunch. Amber is obsessively fearful. Lucy is reckless. Amber thinks too much. Lucy is…not book smart. Amber is a self-professed genius. They appear to have little in common. But time and time again, Amber proves that she deserves the title of “lead character’s best friend”.
Like the word “harbinger”, the word “cornucopia” always looked wrong to me. It’s symbolised by a horn/horn-shaped object filled with goodies. So surely it should be a hornucopia, yes?
Amber certainly thinks so. When it is mentioned in The Mythic and the Horses of Doom that the group will need to travel to Aedea to obtain a “hornucopia” she seizes upon the word as only a girl-genius can…
When faced with how to create conflict between Lucy and Amber in The Mythic and the City of Sweet Sorrow my first step was to physically separate them in the prison. My explanation for this separation was that they were now in different “houses” who all took part in a weekly contest to mine the most rock candy. One prisoner from the winning team got to “go home”. There’s nothing like the carrot of freedom to turn best friends into bitter rivals!
When it came time to create an “evil” species for The Mythic, I was faced with a decision. Choose a familiar classic such as snake-people or go with something unexpected – sloth people or panda-people perhaps.
I chose the obvious. I was in the early stages of world-building and I wanted the audience to see things both familiar and surprising, but with the emphasis on the former. It was also a fun way to prove the conspiracy theorists right. There have been snake people walking among us the whole time!
One advantage of playing god as an author is that you get to exact revenge by lampooning characters for who you have a historic dislike.
As an example, I present into evidence Peter Panoddhio: Portmanteau character. Bounty hunter. Abomination.
There many levels to my loathing for Panoddhio. Three to be exact since he’s a mashup of Peter Pan, Enid Blyton’s Noddy, and Pinocchio.
Why do I despise each of these characters? Let me count the ways.
Book Three started out as an ode to prison escape stories. Originally Sweet City consisted of a sugar mine, a single gingerbread tenement slum prison, O’phion guards working directly for the Mad Catter, and a fairly standard prison story that borrowed from everything from The Shawshank Redemption to Hogan’s Heroes.
But in the first draft the prison storyline melted into a mess of underwhelming action. So I threw away that recipe and baked a whole different kind of cake.
City of Sweet Sorrow has a lot of horror elements intertwined with sweetness, both figurative and literal. The titular city is a slave mine, but they’re mining sugar. So I wanted its ruler to be equally whimsically/wicked.
He is so obsessive that he forces his subordinates to rhyme.
Near him, to not end with a correspondence of sound is a crime.
The practice of adorning the bows of ships goes back thousands of years. Actual figureheads – statues attached to the boat’s prow – are a more recent decoration. They’re visually very striking and something I’ve always found fascinating. But Muriel Maidenhead did not exist in the first draft of The Mythic.
The journey of crafting the character of Mr Twist was as bendy and byzantine as his name implies.
You see, Rick Twist’s surname was meant to be a red herring.
I intended for him to be Lucy’s supportive surrogate father but I would drop a sufficient number of clues to make it seem he was going to turn traitor. It would even look like he’d actually betrayed her. Then he’d turn out to be a good guy after all. I would twist Twist.
Big Bear was never meant to be in The Mythic. Let that sink in for a moment. Big Bear. Was never meant to be in The Mythic.
The plot of first book changed a lot during the first draft, especially the middle section where Lucy travels to Aedea. However, the scenes in the Caverns of Ataêgina were always there and remained fairly much the same through every iteration.
I consider the minotaur the most misunderstood and mistreated “monster”. Symbolically he represents the price we pay for daring to stray from “nature”. He is the prototype for the science fiction trope of the forbidden experiment that escapes the laboratory and must be destroyed. But as a gay boy growing up, I saw a lot of myself in him. To me, he is just an unwanted child, the thing that shouldn’t exist yet does.
The themes of light and dark – both literal and figurative – are repeated all throughout story-telling and, for a series all about mythology, I wanted my lead character’s name in particular to reflect that relationship/conflict. However, I didn’t want that reflection to be so on the nose that it felt unnatural. Also, there was the tiny fact that this was my lead character’s name! I’d be typing it thousands of times. I needed to love it.
I wanted – needed – the Shield statuette to deliver a lot of exposition. The scene of Lucy and Amber unpacking Dr Parom’s crates is designed to show the way Aedean inspiration translated to our creativity. And especially, as far as the Shield statue was concerned, to language and design. Amber calls it “a jumble of things that don’t belong together”, which is possibly as an apt a description of Aedea as you’ll get.
I wanted the first prison of The Dark to be revealed to have a name that sounded both grand and ominous. I also wanted the object to be hefty, because it was a physical symbol of the burden Lucy had assumed as the Mythic. For plot purposes, it also needed to be something buoyant. Given this, a wooden box made the most sense.
When Lucy Knight introduced herself to me, I had no idea where had come from. She appeared – seemingly from thin air – demanding attention.
But looking back I can see that she existed in embryo form in several unfinished earlier novels.
Because The Mythic had to do the grunt work of showing the relationship between Aedea and our world, a lot of the correlations in the book are straightforward, especially early on.
Thus, “Elapidae” (our world) refers to a family of poisonous snakes while Elapidae (Aedea) is a hybrid snake-human. She is O’phion (an Aedean race) and “Ophion” (our world) is the name of a snake-god.
The scene where Lucy and Amber unpack Dr Nadia Parom’s crates of curios is the first time we’re presented with a range of Aedean objects, so it was my primary opportunity to define the rules of how that world related to ours. It was effectively opening-night for the lore underlying the series. #nopressure
There is a lot of duality in The Mythic. Aedea/Earth. The Light/The Dark. Lucia/Knight. I wanted to symbolise that contrast, and also indicate that we were about to step through the looking glass.
My whole life, I have struggled to spell the word “harbinger”. It’s that R. I was sure that it was in the wrong place. We speak of a “harbinger of doom”. If doom is coming, then surely someone or something is “bringing” it rather than “binging” it?
But no, autocorrect always put an angry red line underneath my “habringer”. To be fair, in this case autocorrect is…correct.
So when I wrote The Mythic, I decided to make my version of the word a reality.
I was born in a small town called Stratford, located in Taranaki, New Zealand.
That Stratford, of course, is named after the town in England. English Stratford was the birthplace of the Bard so it will come as little surprise to learn that the streets in my Stratford have Shakespearean-inspired names – Ariel Street…Falstaff Street…Cordelia Street…Verona Place. There is a Capulet Place which is an offshoot of Montague Grove – so those two families must have made amends.
