Tag: selkie

My Top 3 Underrated Fantasy Creatures

Happy February! If you were here last February, you may remember that I participated in Jenelle Schmidt’s Fantasy Month…and it’s back!

If you’re here, I’m going to guess you love fantasy as much as I do, so be sure to hop over and see the other Fantasy Month blog posts, or hop over to Instagram to see some bookstagram posts on the theme. I’ll be participating as I can (though I missed a couple days already because I’ve been sick), and if you want to participate, check out the Insta prompts here:

You can find more information on Jenelle’s Instagram or on her blog, linked above.

And now, back to the fantasy goodness and today’s topic: my favorite underrated fantasy creatures!

Skoffin

First on my list is one I learned about last year when Janeen Ippolito’s If Wishes were Curses came out…the skoffin! (There is an accent over that i.)

Anyway, what is a skoffin, you ask? It is an Icelandic creature that’s a cross between a cat and an arctic fox. And its gaze will kill you immediately.

Of course there’s more to it than that, but it’s leading to the development of some interesting future projects for me. Hubs and I went to Iceland for our honeymoon, and I just can’t get over the location and the lore. This is just one more example of something I can’t wait to use in my own writing.

Do you know any books, besides the one I mentioned above, that have a skoffin? I’d love to hear about it!

Selkies

I kind of love selkie lore. But for those of you unfamiliar with this one, they are seal creatures that can come on land by shedding their seal skin and take on the form of a person, usually a maiden. Selkies can be captured by a person in possession of their seal skin, which prevents them from returning to the sea.

Selkies had an episode in Lost Girl, but I have to admit I haven’t seen much beyond that episode (though I know it’s not a clean watch, for those of you concerned about content). Seanan McGuire has a selkie in her October Daye series, and I believe Jenelle Schmidt is working on a selkie story as well, but do you have any that you love?

Djinn and Genies

I’m a little partial to this one, of course (check out my This Curse series, book 1 out now and book 2 on its way!). I love genies and djinn in fiction, and they’re not super common. As I mentioned above, Janeen Ippolito also has a series of genies (urban fantasy) with other creatures, and Rachel Caine’s Weather Wardens books also involves djinn (caution: Weather Wardens are NOT clean fiction). I am also partial to I Dream of Jeannie. 😉

Do you know and love other genie books?

Concluding thoughts

These are three of my top underrated fantasy creatures, but there are so many others out there. I also love kitsune and am working on some fox shifter urban fantasy that expands kitsune lore to a worldwide scale, but we are starting to see more kitsune in publication. And of course I love more typical fantasy creatures, like werewolves/shifters, fae, and mermaids, but they get plenty of attention. 😉

But now I’d love to hear from you. What kinds of fantasy creatures do you wish you saw more of in fiction? What are they like? Where did you learn about them? Let’s chat in the comments!

Starting with a Spark: Ember of Foxfire

It had been a while since I started a completely and wholly new story. Yes, there were a few starts, a couple short stories, a couple incomplete beginnings that have since been largely abandoned, but nothing I’d intended to be a real new world.

You see, I have been working on a series of fantasy novels since 2011. I finally completed my editing process in the month of March 2016 and sent it out to my first potential publisher. I had spent years upon years, countless hours and brain cells, thinking and living and breathing that world.

And then it was time to step back and wait, and I was left in a story vacuum.

After editing for so long, bouncing back from a huge dry spell, and needing something new purely for the joy of creation, I needed fresh inspiration. I thought about how things had started for the previous series. That was simple: I had been watching I Dream of Jeannie and really wanted to tell a story from the perspective of a genie. And it grew and morphed into a new, complex, colorful world filled with characters I loved. Stories I had to tell. Worlds I wanted to explore.

But what about now? All I had was my current fascination with urban fantasy. I was sucked into worlds of werewolves, floating on ocean waves with sirens, dreaming of creatures who prowled the night and fought evil right in our own world or in variations of our world.

And I love it.

But, truth be told, I’m not a huge fan of vampires, I’m not feeling the urge to write beautiful mermaid tales, and the world is saturated with werewolf fiction. So where did that leave me?

I narrowed down that I wanted to write urban fantasy. But I was still without the “fantasy” element. I scoured online lists of mythological beings, writing out notes on selkies, swan maidens, and kitsune, just to name a few. And of everything I read, I kept coming back to the kitsune. I searched for other kitsune fiction, and while it was there, it was sparse and questionable. But I wanted to read about fox shifters. They didn’t have to be perfect kitsune. But they were different and powerful and had a hierarchy already built in to their growth and development. It was the first spark.

And then a character started forming in my mind. A half fox shifter, half human girl just entering her independence in the human world after years of learning from the other fox shifters. She was young, naive, and not exactly popular with her peers because of her parentage. But she was also brave and strong and wasn’t afraid to be both girly and tough.

But what would happen to her? I’m not a huge fan of romance, especially the love-at-first-sight kind that plagues a lot of urban fantasy, so I knew I wanted it to be romance light or romance free. I knew she would have a fully fox brother who was older and more experienced than her. And then I read more about the kitsune. I created a similar North American kitsune lore. I developed the basic plot of what would happen to my character. I knew where she was going and what she would be facing. I knew how she would have to grow. I saw her trials, her enemies, and her friends. I had finally met Ember.

And there it was. I was ready to start creating again.