The Accidental Herbalist

Posted on June 7, 2013 by J.M. Ney-Grimm

Illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith That title refers to me, not Helaina, the character in my novel, Troll-magic. It happened three winters ago, when my children were coughing up a storm. We’d all caught colds, and theirs turned to bronchitis. Oh, but they were miserable. I suppose I should have taken them to the doctor, but they’d been ill only a few days. It was too early for antibiotics. So my husband and I tried the usual things: sitting them in a steamy bathroom, offering mugs of warmed milk, holding them and patting their backs, and pushing gallons of over-the-counter cough medicine. (Well, not gallons, but you know what I mean.)

Then I read an article in the health newsletter we subscribe to. Research had definitively proven cough medicine to be completely ineffective. Well, I wasn’t surprised. It was doing nothing for my young twins! But, now what? The answer, surprisingly, came from Troll-magic.

In Troll-magic, Helaina nish Bayaude is a noblewoman of Auberon. She’s also an apprentice herbalist. She studies under a wisewoman who lives in a cottage on the moors near Helaina’s home.

The reader meets Helaina shortly after a curse transforms her into a ghost and whisks her away to an enchanted palace. Magical obssession forces her to work as a chambermaid, dusting and scrubbing floors and straightening knickknacks.

Bewildered and overwhelmed, she surrenders to the demands of her situation until a north-bear staggers through the front door, wild and raging. Fear impels Helaina to stop acquiescing and to start controlling her own fate. She doesn’t have a lot of choices, but she does remember the plant lore she’s been laboring to acquire. She decides to concoct an herbal remedy for her ghostly affliction.

Her knowledge (plus my own lack of same) and her decision meant that I had some research to do. I’m no herbalist, but I had sense enough to know that “winging” this wouldn’t produce the result I wanted. I took myself to the library and checked out The Complete Medicinal Herbal, The Herbal Medicine Cabinet, Magic and Medicine of Plants, and Aromatherapy: The Complete Guide.

One of these titles featured beautiful color spreads with photographs of each ingredient (both on the plant and prepared as a powder) plus the final salve or tincture made from the plant. All the books described the symptoms alleviated by each plant part and which systems of the body received benefit from it.

Since these were western herbals, and Troll-magic‘s system of magic is inspired by eastern ideas, I didn’t find the one-to-one correspondence I was naively hoping for. But continued probing uncovered patterns of calm and soothing versus energizing. I began to see how I might map the effects of the remedies onto the radices that control energy flow within the bodies of my North-land denizens.

Eventually I created two lists: one of herbs likely to help Helaina with her accursed plight, the other, those that would worsen it.

I think most of the ingredients in Helaina’s final and successful remedy are mentioned in my novel. But I’ll share them here.

For the crown radix: Engadien pennywort, magwort, melissa

Brow radix: elecampane

Throat radix: clove, vervain

Heart radix: saffron, heartsease, rose

Plexial radix: goldenseal, wild cherry

Belly radix: coriander, fennel, mint

Root radix: Bethpaarean ginseng, fruits of the malacca tree

Foot radices: neroli

Remember that this is fantasy! Don’t borrow Helaina’s remedy (which is externally applied, by the way) for yourself. My research was aimed at devising a plausible recipe for the magical (and fictional) ailment that troubled my character. Nothing more.

In the course of my herbal reading, I did stumble upon a very simple remedy for cough. Which I recollected after learning that commercial cough medicines are useless. It was made of two foodstuffs – and seemed so innocuaous that I determined I would try it on my hacking, sleepless 7-year-olds.

Freshly squeezed lemon juice, slightly warmed and mixed with honey. That’s all.

My son and my daughter were enthusiastic about the honey, less so about the sour lemon. But I got a dose into each of them. And then?

Miracle!

For half an hour straight, there were no coughs. Not a one. That was long enough for them to fall asleep. Once asleep, they stayed asleep for four whole hours. Wow!

They each needed another dose when they awoke sometime after midnight. We went through a lot of lemons and an entire jar of expensive raw honey. But it was worth it!

For more about the world of Troll-magic, see:
Who’s Who in Troll-magic
Families in Troll-magic
Bazinthiad’s Fashions
Bazinthiad, A Quick Tour of the City
Magic in the North-lands
Magic in Silmaren
Radices and Arcs
Mandine’s Curse
The Suppressed Verses
Character Interview: Lorelin
What Happened to Bazel?

Dreaming the Star-drake

Posted on February 21, 2013 by J.M. Ney-Grimm

One line in Rainbow’s Lodestone inspired Star-drake.

“The star-dragons and the wind sprites, her usual companions, could not visit her here.”

I wanted to know more about the star-dragons and the wind spirits with whom the rainbow played. Surely they would have missed her while she sojourned on the mountain, shut away from her native sky.

It felt like a story awaited me within that notion.

My concept of a wind spirit came from a snippet in Raggedy Ann Stories by Johnny Gruelle. Two little girls – sisters – lose their rag doll at the beach. He is rescued by the Tide Fairies who pass him to the Undertow Fairies and then on to the Roller Fairies and the Spray Fairies. At last the Wind Fairies carry him home to the little girls’ garden. A wonderful illustration depicts beautiful sea spirits surfing the whitecaps and tossing Freddy (the rag doll) into the sky. My wind spirits resembled them, I felt sure.

But what was a star-dragon?

I settled myself to meditate on the question, hoping for an answer. These are my notes: star-dragons are creatures of darkness who dwell in the blackness between the stars. They are emptiness. Shadow. Nothingness. They are the terror of these things, and they are the potential within these things. Nothingness has space for beginnings and newness.

The star-dragon in my story takes a terrible vengeance. He seeks out evil, strips it down to nothing, and re-creates it transformed: a newborn star-drake, destined to seek evil and transform it.

The final stone of Star-drake‘s story foundation lay with the travelers who engaged the rainbow near the end of Rainbow’s Lodestone.

Who were they? Where did they come from? I thought some more.

Emrys, the “ice-man,” was brother to the king of Tuisil-land, a small island kingdom far to the north. Emrys journeyed because he mourned and hoped to ease his grief in roaming.

Haral came from the Hammarleeding enclaves in the Fiordhammar mountains. He’d extended his wanderyar (the year of travel that most Hammarleeding boys take when they turn sixteen or seventeen) to continue studying duoja (magic) under the unusual tutelage of a Tromme-man, Paavo.

Paavo’s discipline of energetic shamanism is completely different from the Hammarleeding duoja, and Haral is fascinated by it.

The moors west of the Tahdenfiall mountains form part of Paavo’s regular ambit. He travels from settlement to settlement, much like a circuit judge, but he brings healing and insight rather than justice.

Tor and Lilli – grandson and grandmother – hail from Silmaren’s lowlands. They stumbled upon a worrying clue in their home hamlet and set off to track it down. I won’t say more here, because I envision a full trilogy stemming from their adventure!

Tallis I know the least about, possibly because she holds the most to know. She’s a salver, a healer, and is connected to Tor’s and Lilli’s quest. Yet she has her own problem to explore and resolve, one that will likely require the entire middle book of that trilogy.

With these elements – the winds, the star-drake, and the travelers – I was ready to begin, to move from dreaming to writing.

“Láidir couldn’t find her anywhere.”

On the chance that my dreaming has inspired you to read Star-drake,
I provide the links for the ebook.

Amazon I B&N I Diesel I iTunes I Kobo I Smashwords I Sony

Gefnen hunts victory, but a darker victory hunts him.

For more about the writing experience, see:
Behind Troll-magic
Writing Sarvet
Writer’s Journey

Notes on Chance

Posted on January 24, 2013 by J.M. Ney-Grimm

It started with a vivid snippet: the vision of an old, abandoned quarry overgrown by brambles and the certainty that a troll was involved.

Next came the entrance of Clary, an eleven-year-old girl, and her sister Elspeth. For a while I thought Elspeth was named after her great grandmother Jennifry nish Roanmothe. But she wasn’t. She was Elspeth, no question.

The troll seemed to be both good and evil, which was confusing until I understood there were two trolls. Aha! And then I discovered that kinship existed between the little girls and the trolls. Time to draw a family tree. I needed to know just what that kinship was.

Calcinides Roanmothe family tree

Before I received my revelation about the troll sisters, another intense vision swept through my mind’s eye: the shabby, disordered front room of Clary’s cottage. Her parents were weary, so weary they were neglectful. What made them so? I didn’t know, but I jotted notes for what would become an early scene in my story: dining table cluttered with last night’s supper, cloth hanging askew.

There I stopped for two weeks, letting the story lie fallow while I devoted myself to publisher tasks. I believe I worked on the print edition for Troll-magic.

When I returned to Perilous Chance, the image of a pegasus took me by storm; it was coal-black and shining, and bursting from the egg. With wings, are pegasi born from eggs? Or, with equine bodies, are they birthed live from their mothers? The answer still awaits me, because Clary’s encounter with a fabulous beast does not feature a pegasus after all. The scene from a future story had arrived, not to be incorporated into this one, but to spark a necessary idea.

No, Clary’s creature was not a pegasus, but I knew what it might be. I did some research: king of the beasts, king of the birds, powerful and majestic, symbol of divine power, and guardian of the divine. Yes! (But I’m not telling here. Too much of a spoiler!)

Once I had these pieces – two girls, enervated parents, two trolls, and a miracle-bearing beast – my story fell into place. I made a rough outline and started writing.

In three places I faltered.

The first was the simplest. How did Clary’s father make a living? He did not possess inherited wealth. He worked with his hands, but he was more than a simple craftsman. He didn’t fashion “bramble furniture” as I’d initially believed. Nor was he a businessman, supplying city households with the products of craftsmen under his organization. What did he do? He worked with his hands, but made decent money from it and received considerable respect.

If I ask myself a question with enough variations, I usually get an answer. It turned out that Tiber was a sculptor, and a renowned one at that. He designed the fountain in the main square of Auberon’s capital city and sculpted the horses cavorting under its play of water. He regularly receives commissions from the Morofane himself.

That settled, I wrote on. And reached a point of resolution. Was this the end? Events were resolved, but it didn’t feel like the end. I sought a first reader’s opinion. Was it finished? No, it was not. But no wonder I wanted it to be. In order to write the proper denouement, I needed to comprehend the judicial system of Auberon better than I did.

I set to work, researching a bit, brainstorming more. And I figured out enough to go forward. The current Rofane ni Calcinides is Justicar of the Peace. Local disputes and crimes are handled under his purview. Several wardens and a secretary, appointed by the royal judiciary, work under his leadership.

Writing the validation was easy after that. I knew where to place emphasis – Clary’s experience – and where to glide lightly – the visit to Arteme’s manor. And then I was done.

Excepting one problem: my opening wasn’t quite right.

I studied the openings written by my favorite authors. Why were they so effective? What was their underlying structure?

All About Emily by Connie Willis supplied me with the structure that would work for Perilous Chance. In Emily, Willis begins with a paragraph describing the protagonist’s predicament from much later in the story. That was what I wanted! And I knew exactly what piece I would use. Now my tale truly was complete.

cover image for Perilous Chance She was eleven, and she was hurt. Her leg lay under her, knee throbbing. Her arm ached, the broken bone within sickening in its pain. But worst of all, worst of all, a vast shadow loomed above her, dark wings spanning distances too great for the grotto enclosing them, razor-sharp talons sparking with the spitting blue fire of a strange power.

“No, please, no,” she whispered.

How had it come to this? Her day had started so ordinarily, getting breakfast for herself and her sister, because Mama could not. She cast her thoughts desperately back to the morning. I’m there. Not here. I’m there.

Something wondrous this way comes!
Amazon I B&N I iTunes I Kobo I Smashwords

For more about the stories behind my stories, see:
Dreaming the Star-drake
Writing Sarvet
Behind Troll-magic

For more about Perilous Chance:
Justice in Auberon
Clary’s Cottage
Not Monday, But Lundy
Cover Creation: Perilous Chance