Jeel plays a very prominent role in Upon A Burning Throne and the rest of the Burnt Empire series. She is, in fact, the closest thing to a God Supreme in that particular world. (At least for now. Who among us mere mortals can truly know which other Gods may lie lurking in the celestial cosmos?) She has great power and influence, since she governs all water bodies in the world of Arthaloka.

I first wrote this story in January 2017 (it’s been a long and winding road). 2017 was Canada’s sesquicentennial, and this story was largely my way to work through some very, very conflicted feelings about “Canada 150.” At the time, I worked in heritage/tourism, and there was a lot of soul-searching involved in balancing the demand for “FUN HAPPY MAPLE SYRUP PARTY, EH?” and the reality that Canada’s colonial settler history and present are pretty terrible.

Just earlier this morning I was walking through the Ramble in Central Park, not thinking about anything in particular, when I was suddenly struck by a memory of a specific smell: the tart, pungent, synthetic scent of the pleather seats on the bus that I rode as a child. And a feeling of nostalgia immediately overwhelmed me. The memory hadn’t been triggered by some similar smell in the air around me. The memory had come to me completely randomly.

I’ve been thinking about the pendulum of history a lot lately; that process of revolution, backlash, correction, and overcorrection, and the way you can see it within a family as much as you can within a nation. This story began to develop for me when I was thinking about the relationship between science and magic, and how folks like to pretend they’re separate things.

The story was very much inspired by me turning fifty and the realization that I was (at least in some ways) at the midpoint of my life. When I conceived the story, it had a far more downbeat ending, but stories are created in the writing, not in the planning. The ending came as a pleasant surprise to me, even more so given my personal circumstances at the time . . .

Vrath is inspired by a famous character from the Indian epic Mahabharata, which was the starting point and inspiration for a part of Upon a Burning Throne. I was going to write him pretty much as he appears in the novel, which is as a strong supporting character. But I wanted to know more about him than I found in the Mahabharata or any other source.

It will come as no surprise that beginning as a child, I loved wolves. I had a couple of picture books about wolves and I also got Very Upset when they were cast as the bad guys in so many things. Some early influential reads were The Changeling Prince by Vivian Vande Velde; Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George; I read White Fang at way too young an age.

The Bolton Strid is a real place that really exists and I really want to go there, except for the part where I am a fairly clumsy person and I would very shortly be swept away forever, and my friends would miss me. So the story started with the Strid.

I wanted to be vague about what the spells do and what type of monster these women are, but all the details are based on folklore from Slovenia and neighboring regions. There really is a traditional creature that splits in two and hops around leaving a single footprint! “Novak” is a Slovenian name meaning “new,” which the family got because they used to move around a lot and were newcomers wherever they lived.

As I began writing this story, my uncle was dying. My father’s family is from Mexico and sometimes they practice interesting ancestral medicine. One of the treatments for cancer and leprosy involves boiling a vulture, bones and all, down to a thick stew and making the sick person eat it. A tía from Mexico somehow caught a vulture, killed it, and fed vulture stew to my dying uncle. I was trying to explain to a bewildered friend the reasoning.