Why the Imps?
A few people have asked me as to where the imps come from that help me review books and even one person asked me about why my email has to do with imps as well. Well there are a few reasons around this.
The first is to do with the imps that serve as my helpers for book reviews. These imps are a lot like that whole concept of an angel on one shoulder and a demon on the other shoulder, except I have to deal with one imp on each shoulder, an imp on my head, and one clinging to each of my ears. So while everyone else is only dealing with whether something is good or bad to be doing, I’m getting five different grey area options that all tend to end pretty horribly.
This is what has always made my morals questionable on quite a few fronts. Each one of these imps even comes with their own voice and their predilections for particular things in the world. (not just books). My super special imp that likes every single book is also my imp that always wants me to use brute force for any situation. Let’s just say I have almost never listened to him. The others become increasingly vicious, with my third imp being the one I listen to the most, who suggests various means of playing a part or manipulation of people.
It can get pretty terrible. My fifth imp is the most terrible though; she laughs at people’s pain and loves to try to cause drama. I used to listen to her all the time a few years back, but I’ve since lost interest in her whispers.
Overall, they aren’t all bad though. Like I said they are pretty grey (or versicolor) when it comes to life and morals. So while my fifth imp loves causing drama, she also is all about letting people choose, and is the first to stand in line when it comes to giving people choice. She’s also all about being equal too, for anyone. So yes, my fifth imp is a total feminist.
The second reason around all this has to do with an anthology project my group of writers have been working on, and one of the things I wanted to do for the project, since it is a fairy tale and mythology anthology, was have every contributor be connected with a faerie creature. So we have trolls, pixies, wulvers, and sidhe. As for me? Someone said I was an imp, which at the time I had only heard of imps in cases of like World of Warcraft. I never really invested time to learn about them and as I read and saw them, they made a lot of sense.
Of course one of the most known pieces about imps is a little story called The Bottle Imp. It’s a really amusing and interesting story to read, and I might do a review on it, though I try to avoid reviews on short stories unless they are in collections. Anyway, one of my concerns about the bottle imp, that was never brought up in the story was: How did the imp end up in the bottle? And what did that imp do to end up in that bottle? Well, I wrote a piece about that, and while I’m not ready to release it, it will be a fun one to show when I can.
So, from reading all these tales, an Imp really made sense for who I was. They aren’t technically evil, but they often get a bad name for it, because they are tricksters, and usually do cause trouble. I mean, one of the main reasons I’ve been drawn to faeries and such is because they were the in between. Not angels of all virtue, and not demons all about sins, they navigated the in between, and imps fall along the same lines really. Except they can go one step better. You see most faeries are tied to specific rules. Like some can’t lie, and others can’t move from their tree, so on. Most of them also don’t have choices in matters, they just have to follow the rules that have been set by them.
Imps fall into an interesting category though, that is along the same lines as Djinn from Islamic mythology. In fact many people have speculated that Robert Louis Stevenson had gotten imps and Djinn mixed up, or that he wanted to make a similar story to Djinn but with a creature that was more known in European areas: The Imp. That’s why we get a bottle imp, which is very similar to the Djinn that get trapped in bottles as well. The bottle is actually one of the only few ways in which a Djinn or imp can lose their freedom of choice. Yes, Imps and Djinn from original mythology have freedom of choice, they were the only other creatures besides humans to get such a thing based on Islamic mythology.
This means imps aren’t just a moral grey area for their life, they are capable of choosing whether they want to be evil, good, neutral or so on, or any combination of.
Anyway, all of these facts led me to really connect with and enjoy imps, which is why the voices that make up my mind quickly took on the forms of imps and they’ve existed ever since. I might add, each of my imps are a different type of Djinn version too. My fifth imp (I really have to name them) in an Ifrit which is supposedly the most powerful type of Djinn. And really they are Djinn, they just like being called imps and taking the form of imps. They like the word and form better. That’s all really.
So because of all of this, I am clearly a creature that can commune with these creatures that are most often invisible to humans, which probably makes me part imp and part human. Somewhere between both worlds. So this is where I came in with the unbottled imp area, as I am an unbottled imp, with more power than I know what to do with and no one to command me to use it properly.
As a final note around this, I spent a few months in a relationship with someone where we referred to each other as an imp and a pixie. In a way by doing this we found our own way of circumventing gender and a lot of other stigma surrounding what a relationship is supposed to be like. We had a lot of fun during that time, and we were pretty balanced because we would keep making up random things of what an Imp was or a pixie was and that allowed us to remove a lot of the expectations from the relationship for a while.
It was probably because of that relationship that I’ve come to most identify with imps, and because I still do, it shows that I’m carrying something on from that relationship. And I like that.
