Wrede, Patricia C - SSC (22 page)

Authors: Book of Enchantments (v1.1)

BOOK: Wrede, Patricia C - SSC

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Dump batter into greased shield.
Bake next to fire while gathering loot. Give helmet back to sucker who let you
mix cake in it; promise him first piece if he gets too mad. Eat warm while
counting loot. Serves two. (Pour batter into greased and floured 13" ×
9" pan. Bake 35—40 minutes. Cake should be sort of flat and solid, not
light and puffy. Let cool before cutting, or the pieces will fall apart and the
gooey chocolate chips will get all over everything. Sprinkle with powdered
sugar or top with whipped cream. Serves a lot more than two, even if everybody
really likes chocolate.)

Notes from the Author

One of the things everybody seems
to want to ask writers is, "Where do you get your ideas?" When people
ask me this, my usual response is, "Ideas are the easy part. The hard part
is writing them down." Which is perfectly true—practically every
professional writer will tell you that—but doesn't actually answer the question.

So, for the benefit of everyone who
really
does
want to know where the ideas come from, here are the stories
of how the stories in this book came to be written.

The earliest tale included here is
"Earthwitch." I wrote the original story in 1981, and as best I can
remember, it began with the image of the terrified invading army sinking slowly
into the ground. The original story was my attempt to explain how this had come
about. It opened with the king, Evan Rydingsword, climbing the path to the Earthwitch's
cave and ended with the scene on the mountaintop. The story never sold, but it
had something in it that wouldn't let go of me. When Jane Yolen asked to see
some of my older work for possible inclusion in this collection, it was one of
the first stories I thought of.

After reading it, Jane told me she
thought it was a possibility, but there were a number of things she felt were
not adequately dealt with. To answer her questions, I had to add a second
viewpoint, Mariel's, to the story. I also clarified the ending and polished up
some of the scenes in the middle.

"Rikiki and the Wizard"
was written in 1985 for the second Liavek "shared world" Anthology—a
collection of short stories by different authors, all of which were set in the
same city (or its environs). I had spent a good portion of one morning reading
a book of American Indian folktales and had started wondering what sort of folk
stories the Liavekans might tell each other, particularly about their
not-too-bright chipmunk god, Rikiki. From there, the story practically wrote
itself.

The next year, in 1986, I got two
letters asking if I would write short stories for anthologies. The first was
from Bruce Coville, who rather apologetically informed me that he was putting
together an anthology of unicorn stories and the deadline was only two weeks
away. Did I have any unicorn stories in my files?

I didn't. I checked the
"Sorry, no I don't" box on the postcard he had included, put it in
the outgoing mail basket, and sat down at my computer to work on the book I was
supposed to be writing. But I couldn't stop thinking about unicorns. I knew
there were unicorns in the Enchanted Forest; in
Talking to Dragons,
which
had been published the previous year, I'd mentioned a well where unicorns
drank. Naturally, Enchanted Forest unicorns would be beautiful and magical and
intelligent—but, being intelligent, they would certainly know just how
beautiful and magical they were, and would expect to be treated accordingly. .
. . Two hours later, I had written five pages of "The Princess, the Cat,
and the Unicorn," and I got up from my computer and tore up the little
postcard. By the end of the week, the story was in the mail.

The other request I got in 1986 was
from Andre Norton, who was putting together a series of
Tales of the Witch
World
anthologies and asked me to contribute. Since the Witch World books
were some of my favorites when I was in high school, I couldn't bring myself to
say no, but coming up with the story was
work.
I reread all the Witch
World books (that part was fun, not work) and decided where and when I wanted
to set the story. Then I had to work out who the characters were and what sort
of trials they would face, while trying to keep a Witch World "feel"
to the story. The result was "The Sword-Seller." Writing it was an extremely
conscious and deliberate process, more like the way I often work when I'm
writing novels than the way I usually do short stories.

In 1987 I got another request
letter. Jane Yolen was editing an anthology of werewolf stories—would I write
one? I'd been rereading
The Thousand and One Arabian Nights,
and that
background mixed itself up with the idea of werewolves and a somewhat humorous
tone and became "The Sixty-two Curses of Caliph Arenschadd." I sent
it to Jane.

She turned it down.

Not because it wasn't a good story,
she explained, but because the anthology had taken on a darker tone, and a
humorous story just wouldn't fit. These things happen; I only pouted for a
couple of days. Eventually, I sold the story to Michael Stearns for his
anthology
A Wizard's Dozen.

Later that year I went on an
extended trip to Europe. In Germany my then-husband and I drove along the Rhine
River, visited Marksburg Castle, and ended up spending an afternoon at the
Lorelei cliff. That night, the
Gasthaus
we stayed at was across the
street from a bed-and-breakfast place occupied by a busload of energetic high
school students on a tour. "The Lorelei" was, obviously, the result.
I hardly had to make up anything at all.

In the spring of 1990 a friend and
I visited England and Wales and happened to stay in the town of Harlech. The
ruins of Harlech Castle, with birds nesting in cracks in the walls, grass
growing between the paving stones, and plants trailing undisturbed out of empty
windows, caught my imagination. "This," I said to my friend, "is
what the Sleeping Beauty castle would have looked like if the prince had never
come." And then I went home and wrote about it. The story turned out to be
"Stronger Than Time."

The initial idea for "Roses by
Moonlight" came from listening to one too many sermons about the parable
of the Prodigal Son. I never found that parable altogether satisfactory; it's
as if somebody left off the ending. The Prodigal Son comes home, but his elder
brother won't come to the welcome-back party. The father goes out to talk to
the brother, but the story ends before it says whether the brother went back to
the party or not. And then I heard a sermon that dwelt at some length on the
elder brother's attitude, and it got me thinking about
his
viewpoint. Or
hers. . .

So that's where I started, with
Adrian out in the driveway avoiding her sister's party, though the story took
its own path very quickly after that. I finished it in 1994.

"Cruel Sisters" is based
on a song, or rather, on several different versions of a particular folk song.
Child's
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads
lists it as number 10,
"The Twa Sisters," and gives two versions. I heard a third version,
titled "Cruel Sister," sung by a friend many years ago, and since
then I have run across many others. The basic events of the story are always
the same. And then, in late 1994, I heard a new version that referred to the
king's
three
daughters in the first line. The middle girl disappears
after that one line, and we're back to the jealous girl who drowns her sister
over a man, but that one mention was enough to make me wonder—what did that
middle sister think about all this? So I let her tell her story. I finished it
in 1995.

"Utensile Strength" is
the only story written specifically for this collection. Jane Yolen asked if I
could include another Enchanted Forest story, preferably one that involved some
of the characters readers would recognize from my books. I said I'd try. Over
lunch with friends a few days later, I was complaining about the vast number of
enchanted weapons that appear in fantasy books, comics, and role-playing games.
"There are oodles of Lightning Spears and Fire Swords and Broadswords of
Ultimate Destruction," I said, "but nobody ever does enchanted
ordinary
things."

"Like what?" asked my
friends.

"Oh, like the Frying Pan of
Doom," I said, and the minute I said it, I knew that frying pan belonged
in the Enchanted Forest somewhere. But what do you
do
with the Frying
Pan of Doom? Well, in all the fairy tales, they have to find the person to whom
the magic weapon is meant to belong. And it's really only logical that the way
to find the proper owner of a magical frying pan is to have a cooking contest.
From there, it was all quite straightforward. Well,
relatively
straightforward,
as much as anything in the Enchanted Forest is.

Editors usually ask for changes or
additions of some sort when an author submits a story, so when I sent
"Utensile Strength" to Jane, I was expecting a phone call. I wasn't
expecting the particular addition she asked for, though. She wanted the recipe.
It was the first time I ever did my "revisions" standing at a mixer
instead of sitting at the computer. Two weeks and many chocolate cakes later, I
hatched the recipe for Quick After-Battle Triple Chocolate Cake.

So that's where my ideas come from:
unexplained pictures in my head, the unexpected intersection of a request for a
particular sort of story with whatever I happen to be reading or doing, the
logical extension of illogical premises, real things looked at sideways, and
even a very conscious and deliberate building up of material. There isn't just
one place that ideas come from, and every story is different.

Ideas really
are
all over
the place. They're in little towns one stays at by accident on vacation and in songs
one hears on the radio, in old folktales and in sermons at church, in casual
remarks made by oneself or one's friends. All a writer has to do to get ideas
is to really look at and really listen to the things around her.

Ideas are the easy part. The hard
part is getting the words down on paper that convey the ideas, and getting the
words
right.

Permissions
Acknowledgments

"Rikiki and the Wizard"
copyright © 1986 by Patricia C. Wrede; originally published in
Liavek: the
Players of Luck
(Berkley Publishing) edited by Emma Bull and Will
Shetterly. "The Princess, the Cat, and the Unicorn" copyright © 1987
by Patricia C. Wrede; originally published in
The Unicorn Treasury
(Doubleday),
edited by Bruce Coville. "Roses by Moonlight" copyright © 1996 by
Patricia C. Wrede; first publication. "The Sixty-two Curses of Caliph
Arenschadd" copyright © 1993 by Patricia C. Wrede; originally published in
A Wizard's Dozen
(Jane Yolen Books/Harcourt Brace), edited by Michael
Stearns. "Earthwitch" copyright © 1996 by Patricia C. Wrede; first
publication. "The Sword-Seller" copyright © 1990 by Patricia C.
Wrede; originally published in
Tales of the Witch World 3
(Tor Books),
edited by Andre Norton. "The Lorelei" copyright © 1996 by Patricia C.
Wrede; first publication. "Stronger Than Time" copyright © 1994 by
Patricia C. Wrede; originally published in
Black Thorn, White Rose
(Avon),
edited by Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling. "Cruel Sisters" copyright
© 1996 by Patricia C. Wrede; first publication. "Utensile Strength"
copyright © 1996 by Patricia C. Wrede; first publication. "Quick
After-Battle Triple Chocolate Cake" copyright © 1996 by Patricia C. Wrede;
first publication.