Why set it after WWI?
The From the Ashes of Victory series opens on Christmas Day, 1918, a month after the Armistice that brought an end to the fighting in the First World War. Why there? Why not during the war, with witches in the trenches flinging magic around? Millie laments that she never gets to do that, after all.
Because I wanted to write a series about what happens when the war is over. The tremendous social, political and personal fallout of such a cataclysmic war is just as ripe for the exploration of character as the war itself. Especially for women. Endless work has been written about the men who fought in the war, but not much about who they left behind, especially in fiction. The time following the end of WWI saw incredible upheaval in the social order, and I thought that it was a great place to see what would happen if you put the most extraordinary of people in these extraordinary circumstances.
As I note in Remember, November, women can't even vote yet in this time period. If you can't vote, but you can perform miracles with a thought, what does that do to you? What if you're a woman who loves other women, but also bulletproof? Do you become resentful, or vengeful? Do you work towards changing it?
The Roaring Twenties get a lot of attention for being a time of change, but this period now is where it starts. It's when those ideas we associate with the 20s were still new and revolutionary. Think about Victoria's bobbed hairstyle, for example. It's iconic, and synonymous with the 20s, but having hair that short at this time? She might as well have had a mohawk.
There is a French documentary on Netflix called 'Women at War, 1914-1918' that encapsulates a lot of the threads I touch on in this series, and I highly recommend it. It's entirely composed of colorized film from the era and makes it more 'real' than anything else I've seen. If you want to see the kind of factories Victoria and Millie worked in, they're there.
That said, this is a fantasy series, and it's not 100% accurate, but I do want to pay homage to the people who helped shape the 20th and 21st centuries by drawing attention to things that don't get a lot of it, like the fact there were female arms factory workers 30 years before Rosie the Riveter, the Order of the White Feather, and that there were women serving in combat in 1918.
The end of empires, the toppling of a world order that had been in existence for centuries, the Russian Revolution, poison gas, tanks, aircraft, the First World War changed the world. But this series is about the people it changed, the terrible toll it took on them, and the new world they shape as a result.
A war the Allies won took everything from these witches, leaving them only with gifts of extraordinary power, and each other.
Let's see what rises from the ashes of victory.
Because I wanted to write a series about what happens when the war is over. The tremendous social, political and personal fallout of such a cataclysmic war is just as ripe for the exploration of character as the war itself. Especially for women. Endless work has been written about the men who fought in the war, but not much about who they left behind, especially in fiction. The time following the end of WWI saw incredible upheaval in the social order, and I thought that it was a great place to see what would happen if you put the most extraordinary of people in these extraordinary circumstances.
As I note in Remember, November, women can't even vote yet in this time period. If you can't vote, but you can perform miracles with a thought, what does that do to you? What if you're a woman who loves other women, but also bulletproof? Do you become resentful, or vengeful? Do you work towards changing it?
The Roaring Twenties get a lot of attention for being a time of change, but this period now is where it starts. It's when those ideas we associate with the 20s were still new and revolutionary. Think about Victoria's bobbed hairstyle, for example. It's iconic, and synonymous with the 20s, but having hair that short at this time? She might as well have had a mohawk.
There is a French documentary on Netflix called 'Women at War, 1914-1918' that encapsulates a lot of the threads I touch on in this series, and I highly recommend it. It's entirely composed of colorized film from the era and makes it more 'real' than anything else I've seen. If you want to see the kind of factories Victoria and Millie worked in, they're there.
That said, this is a fantasy series, and it's not 100% accurate, but I do want to pay homage to the people who helped shape the 20th and 21st centuries by drawing attention to things that don't get a lot of it, like the fact there were female arms factory workers 30 years before Rosie the Riveter, the Order of the White Feather, and that there were women serving in combat in 1918.
The end of empires, the toppling of a world order that had been in existence for centuries, the Russian Revolution, poison gas, tanks, aircraft, the First World War changed the world. But this series is about the people it changed, the terrible toll it took on them, and the new world they shape as a result.
A war the Allies won took everything from these witches, leaving them only with gifts of extraordinary power, and each other.
Let's see what rises from the ashes of victory.
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