While I’ve been waxing nostalgic about the origins of the Enchanted, Inc. series with the publication of the last book, I nearly missed another series anniversary. It was ten years ago when I took my research trip to New York to write A Fairy Tale. It’s rainy this morning, and that sparked the memory, since a tropical storm hit during that trip, so the first day was gorgeous, and it rained just about non-stop, sometimes torrentially, for the rest of the trip. If you look at the photo gallery for that book on my web site, you can see that some of the photos of Central Park show a bright, sunny day and the rest are dark and gloomy.

I’d had the first germ of the idea for that book years earlier with a mental image of a woman in a floral dress walking a bulldog and vanishing into the mist. It took me a long time to tease the story out of that image. I’d decided to try writing that book when I got a lot of rejections for another story, with the editors saying they wanted something more like Enchanted, Inc. This was a contemporary fantasy involving a southern woman in New York, so I thought it might work. I spent the summer doing research reading, digging into all the folklore about fairies. Then when I decided that the guy involved would be a cop, I read a lot of books about police.

The settings I had in mind were in parts of the city I hadn’t explored in depth. I also had never really taken a schedule-free trip, when I didn’t have any meetings, so I booked a short trip. It would be nice and like a working vacation to just do what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it, without having to worry about fitting it around meetings with editors or agents.

So, I spent a few days walking non-stop, much of it in the rain, and found all the places I wanted to write about.

It took me more than a year to get the book written (though I wrote Rebel Mechanics during that time when I put this book on hold to figure out the ending). Then it got rejected all over the publishing world, in a couple of cases because it was “too romancey,” though I find that odd considering there isn’t so much as a kiss in the whole book. There’s just some mild attraction. I guess the fact that there are two cases of a man and a woman meeting early in the book made them think it would be a romance rather than fantasy, which proves they didn’t read beyond the first couple of chapters. It was a few years later, after I’d successfully published the continuation of the Enchanted, Inc. series, that I decided to write more books in the series and publish them myself.

I’ve sold that series for audio and to the Japanese publisher, but it’s still sort of my forgotten stepchild. I may have packaged it badly. There have been a few people who thought it was intended for children. I may need a more conventional “urban fantasy” cover, or else the “paranormal chick lit” kind of cartoon cover. I do want to write at least one more book, but as much as I love that world and those characters, they’re not really clamoring for attention right now.

Maybe I need another rainy trip to New York to inspire me.

I’ve found myself taking a journey down memory lane the last few days, thinking about the origins of my least-appreciated series, the Fairy Tale books. It was at about this time in 2009 that I took my research trip to New York to prepare to write the first book. I guess I started thinking about that this week because there was all the talk in the news about a tropical storm approaching (now it’s a hurricane), and a tropical storm hit New York while I was there. The first day of my trip was gorgeous — warm and sunny. I spent the afternoon wandering Central Park. It rained the rest of the time I was there, something that found its way into the book. I didn’t mind so much because I love rain, but it did get heavy at times, and one downside of rain is that it doesn’t offer many opportunities to sit down and rest while you’re outside, unless you want to sit in a puddle on a wet bench, so my feet and legs were killing me by the end of the day.

I do hope to write more books in that series. I know some character arcs I want to do, but I’m not quite yet clear on a big-picture plot, and since those books make the least amount of money for me, and they take me a lot longer to write, they’re lower on my priority list.

Still, I really do love them. I think part of the reason that they’re hard to write is that they come from a dreamlike place in my brain, and that makes translating them into words difficult. The character of Sophie came to me in a dream around the time I was right out of college. She had a different name (the name she had in the dream ended up being the name of a main character in a TV series that I saw not long before I started writing the book, so I had to rename her), and she didn’t have all her traits, like being a dancer or having an unusual heritage, but the personality was what was in the dream. I’d been auditioning that character for a leading role in every story idea I came up with, but she wasn’t quite right until I had another dream of a woman in a floaty floral dress walking a bulldog down a city street and disappearing into the mist. This woman was the character who’d been living in my head all that time, and I wanted to figure out the circumstances of where she went and what was going on. I woke up in the middle of the night one night and wrote down the scene in which Sophie wakes up, realizing that something has happened to her sister and she needs to go to her aid (before I knew what happened to her sister). Another night, I woke up and wrote down an early phase of what would be the back-cover copy. The book changed a lot after that, but the central concept was a Southern belle queen bee type taking on a fairy queen. From there, I started researching fairy folklore and related literature. There was the Tam Lin story about rescuing a lover from the fairies, but I also loved the Christina Rossetti poem “Goblin Market,” which was about sisters. That’s probably what influenced that midnight waking scene about having to rescue a sister. Other story fragments, like the elderly sisters with a shop, attached themselves to that image, and then it took me ages to tease the plot out of all these pieces.

Before I took that trip to New York, I already knew about the dual worlds, but the weather helped me with that because it really was like two different worlds, the park I saw my first day when it was warm and sunny and the park I saw the second day when it was dark and pouring rain. The colors were different. The first day, the park was full of people, and later it was almost deserted. The sounds were different. I noticed the lampposts, since the lamps were all lit, and that made me notice things around the lampposts that I hadn’t seen on a sunny day.

I think I was in the middle of writing the book when I first heard a song that I felt perfectly described Sophie, and I took a detail from the song to add to the character — the mismatched eyes, which ended up being a perfect metaphor for her nature. The song is actually supposed to be anthropomorphizing the month of August, on the cusp between summer and autumn (well, in northern Europe — here, it’s the height of summer), but it still seems to fit this mercurial character.

Hmm, I may have to bump up brainstorming another book on my priority list because I’ve realized how much I miss these characters.