Why Unicorns?

A reader of my books emailed and queried me with a question that people often ask me. “Why unicorns? Why did you begin to write about them? Why are you so interested in them and when did you decide that you like them enough to write them into the WISH trilogy?”
Unicorns have been with me since I was a girl. I can’t remember the exact moment that I saw my first unicorn… whether it was a story, a piece of art or something else, but I can remember when I began to write about them and to draw them. I wanted a horse from the time I was two or three, spoke of nothing else, and for a very long time I wanted a white horse…

I think when I first saw a unicorn, it was my 'white horse' made of magic, even though it had a tuft of beard, a strange tail and unusual hooves.

I was always a writer of stories and poetry but when I was fourteen I sat down to write a long piece of prose about the hunting of unicorns, so I must have read – (being a non-stop reader) – something about the old legends and the tales of unicorns being hunted for their horns. I still have the original artworks and writings which I wrote then, (quite a volume,) so unicorns captured my heart and my mind long ago.

Unicorns represent that which eludes us in this fast and mechanical world. They are the stuff of perfect, loving greatness and of purity. Some texts about unicorns refer to unicorns as being representative of divine love, of Christ, of magic, and of mysterious symbology… the archetype of universal/ Angelic love. And yet, there are some ancient Vedic writings where they tell of a large horse-bodied creature with a red head and black horn, huge feet and tail of a goat, which the wealthy hunted for its horn because it was said that the horn kept away disease and the falling sickness - epilepsy.

Sadly, the Rhinoceros is now driven to imminent extinction, another single horned animal, for the misguided belief that its horn too, will do ‘magical’ medical things for humans. Will it also one day, after being driven to extinction by ignorance, be glorified in stories?

I write about unicorns because their world, the one I’ve created in the WISH trilogy, takes me and my readers to a place that is sacred and not tampered with. And yet, even in my books, there is still a usurper, an intruder, evil lurking to steal the purity and revile it… where there is divine love there is always the threat of darkness… and where there is either, there are always those caught in the adventure to make what is perfect last, and to heal the wounds left by wrongdoing.

That’s why I write about unicorns… well, some of the reasons.