Children of the May (Children of the May Book 1)

Afterword: Where do you get your ideas?

Dear reader,

Thank you very much for reading Children of the May. Below I answer the question: ‘Where did I get the idea for Children of the May?’, but first:

First things first: I want to stress that I plan to keep all of the Children of the May books complete and free to read here on Wattpad. I fully appreciate that not everyone can afford to, or wants to buy books, and I want to make these stories as widely available as possible.

But Children of the May, Balin and Columbine (with Prince Accolon) and Ides of the May are now all available to buy from Amazon and Smashwords, and will shortly be available from iBooks, Kobo, etc. Children of the May (this book) is as cheap as I can make it and still keep it up on Wattpad. Here’s the link to my Amazon author page, from which you should be able to find copies in your local Amazon store: http://www.amazon.co.uk/S.-J.-Moore/e/B00MH8H6NM/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

It would be great if you could support my work by buying a copy of one or more of the books. I would love to be able to give my collaborators, the fantasy artist Jodie Muir (jodeee.deviantart.com) and designer Reanimated Imagery, a fair amount for their superb work.

If you’d rather not, or can’t afford to buy a book, you can support the series in other ways:

*by recommending to your friends on Wattpad and elsewhere

*by rating and reviewing it on Amazon, Goodreads and so on

*by talking about the series on your blogs, twitters, tumblrs and other social networks

If you could do just one of these things it would really help me and the series

For the latest Children of the May news you can follow me on twitter @s_j_moore, at Goodreads, and here on Wattpad.

That done, let’s get on with the afterword proper, shall we?

* * *

One of the questions writers get asked most often is ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ So I thought I’d write a little bit about where the idea for Children of the May came from.

I can tell you pretty precisely where I was when the first crumb of the idea came to me. I was sitting on a Tyne & Wear Metro train on my way to visit my parents, with my kindle on my knee. A few days earlier I’d downloaded a free copy of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur from the excellent website Project Gutenberg (lots and lots of lovely free out-of-copyright books there, do check it out – I recommend Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and George Eliot and Herman Melville and... oh, hundred and hundreds of others).

I’ve always loved stories of King Arthur and his knights, and had a vague idea that I’d like to find a way to write my own version of them. My particular favourites are those versions that place Merlin, magic and the weirdness of the medieval world-view centre stage. I have very fond memories of reading Stephen R. Lawhead’s Pendragon cycle in my early teenage years, Susan Cooper’s quasi-Arthurian Dark is Rising a little bit after that, and I particularly love two movie treatments of the Arthurian cycle: John Boorman’s Excalibur and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, both of which in their different ways capture the weirdness that, as I sat on that metro train, I was experiencing in an early version of the legends for pretty much the first time.

I think the train was between the Pelaw and Hebburn stations when I read Chapter 27 of Book I of Le Morte d’Arthur. It is a very short, very strange chapter. In it, Merlin prophesies that a child born on May Day will end Arthur’s reign. So Arthur orders that all the May-children in Britain should be gathered up. He puts them on a ship, the ship is wrecked, and all of them but Mordred are drowned. It is a brutal, horrible thing for a king to do – as one of my May-children says in the hull of Arthur’s ship, it is Arthur performing his own version of the slaying of the innocents, turning himself into a second King Herod.

I turned the page (alright, pedants: I pressed the screen, the screen started displaying different words), expecting to see the king’s actions challenged in some way, for there to be some consequences for this terrible action. But what did I see?

I saw the start of a Book II, which concentrates on the story of Sir Balin. No further mention of the May-children. Indeed, the incident of the ship is never mentioned again. (Incidentally, this isn’t Malory being a bad writer – the conventions of his time, his sources, and the genre he was writing in simply aren’t as interested in analysing and psychologising the actions of kings and knights and we are. It seems very weird by our standards, but probably wouldn’t have seemed so – or at least not as weird – to people in Malory’s time.)

And I thought: ‘Hrrrrm. I wonder if anyone’s ever used this before?’

When I finally got to my parents’ house I did a bit of leisurely googling to check, and I discovered that no, no one had ever done it quite like I wanted to. There were plenty of Arthurian renditions that make Mordred their hero, and at least one that takes the incident with the May-children as its starting point (Nancy Springer’s I am Mordred), but none I could see that addressed all the points I wanted to hit. Which, for ease of reference were:

1. How people might really feel if Arthur slaughtered their children, and what kind of man might have done something so terrible (we’ll find out a lot more about my version of Arthur in the later books in the series)

2. What the children themselves might do, presuming more of them than Mordred survived the shipwreck

I also wanted to:

3. Increase the number of interesting female characters and the types of roles they play in the stories

4. Cover a bit more of the social scale, to include peasants as well as lords, ladies, knights and kings who populate the Arthurian stories

As soon as I’d established that my version of the story wasn’t too close to anyone else’s, I sat down and tried to figure out 1) how I would tell the tale, and 2) what characters I’d include amongst the child survivors to satisfy the way I wanted to tell my version of the story. I’ll tell you a bit about how I went about developing cast of characters in the afterword to Ides of the May. But I will say it involved reading on the rest of the way through Malory’s long, long book.

But to return to the question at hand: Q. Where did I get the idea for Children of the May from?

A. Children of the May came from the inspiration of the passage which forms the epigraph of this story acting on my brain – a brain that incorporates many years of enjoying Arthurian stories (and, to be honest, frustration with the direction some retellings have taken), certain ways I’ve learned to look at the world, and years of thinking about, and writing, stories.

Nothing comes from nothing, and that’s just as true of storytelling as anything else, from the formation of stars to the fertilisation of an egg: you squidge some things together and see what they turn into. The trick in the arts is simply to squidge those things together in a slightly different way than anyone else, and hope that some folk like it.

So, yes, I hope you like what I’ve squidged together, and will follow the adventures of Drift, Mordred Epicene and the rest of the May-children as they continue their adventures during the Ides of the May.

Much love,

SJM

August 2014

P.S. Ides of the May begins serialising here on Wattpad 31st August, or is available to buy complete on Amazon (and shortly everywhere good ebooks are sold) right now