~The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself. ~William Blake.
My husband and I have cowritten, under the pen name A.N. Timms, the first book in a Young Adult Fantasy trilogy. (Title coming soon.) The novel is a mythopoetic adventure-quest written with an alchemical-science and art appeal. Its big inspirations are: Alchemy, William Blake’s cosmology, and the 19th century artists the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The book’s mythology, philosophy, and cosmology is not too heady for young adults; we’ve made it very accessible for ages 12 and up. It’s a crossover novel, so adults will enjoy it too. (If you fancy reading further ahead in this post, you’ll find an excerpt from the chapter The Winged Woman.)
Images inform so much of my writing and creative life ~ so I wanted to post some images here and reflect on how they inspired us to create the world of our fantasy trilogy.
Alchemy
The alchemical emblem ouroboros inspired our story’s Black Beast.
The ouroboros is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail and forming a circle. Because the ouroboros represents infinity and in some ancient texts the milky way – a serpent of light residing in the heavens, we were inspired to create the Black Beast. The Black Beast is the abyss, the sentient fabric of space and time. The beast keeps Primordial light locked in its heart and it swallows up stars with its Black Hole of a mouth.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood:
John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt.
~For our fantasy novel we’ve appropriated the Pre-Raphaelite names Rossetti, Millais, Ruskin, Hunt, Madox, and Grimshaw and created a group of alchemist wolves called the Brotherhood. The germ for making our alchemists wolves was that like the Pre-Raphaelite artists, our wolves want to “artistically sublimate their wild nature.” Thus they are walking, talking wolves who long ago achieved turning base metals into gold. Now their burning obsession is to immortalize themselves and the king of Brim Umbra in order to usurp the Sun god and ascend to the sun realm to carry out a higher, exalted alchemy.
Character development:
We wanted our group of alchemists to have aristocratic style and a taste for the avant-garde. So we dressed their characters, both in attire and behaviors, as dandies. Like the historical 18th and 19th century British fop or gallant, our alchemists strut about on their hind legs using silver canes; they sport frock coats with frilly cravats and lacy cuffs, and they look down their noses through pince-nez spectacles.
Image: Sporty Parisian dandies of the 1830s
The Child Enthroned by Thomas Cooper Gotch (1854-1931)
Thomas Cooper Gotch was a late Pre-Raphaelite artist. His painting The Child Enthroned was the springboard that catapulted us into writing the novel. We laid eyes on the young girl in the portrait and instantly our heroine Nessa Icon was born. Wow, love at first sight creates children! In our novel, the Brotherhood of Alchemists has enchanted this painting at the Tate Britain; and there’s a secret embedded in the girl’s golden halo!
William Blake
“The Ancient of Days” 1794, a watercolor etching by William Blake, depicts Urizen, Creator of the Material World. In Blake’s mythology/cosmology Urizen is one of the four Zoas – a division of the primordial man, Albion. (Zoa in Greek means “living one” and the primal zoas represent the “human form divine”.)
~The extraordinary “The Ancient of Days” brings to my mind a god of the Sun bestowing upon mortal man the rays of godly perfection and insight… this imagined mythology became the inspiration for our novel’s Sun god, and Primordial Light as his gift of consciousness and evolution. And Urizen became our character Dylan’s father’s name.
Thanks for getting this far ~ to read an excerpt from a chapter of our Fantasy novel, go to the side bar and click on the link page: Novel excerpt: The Winged Woman.
