Wintersong (Wintersong, #1)

by S. Jae-Jones

Once there was a little girl who played her music for a little boy in the wood.

Believe it or not, I added the prologue at the request of my editor, and it was the last thing I wrote for the book at a fairly late stage of the process. Nearly every draft of Wintersong started immediately with Constanze telling Liesl to "Beware the goblin men," but some readers at my publishing house wanted it clearer that Liesl had known the Goblin King her entire life. I was stumped on how to do it without being cheesy or starting with a dream sequence, until I was struck with a sudden bout of inspiration out of the blue. Why not a fairy tale? I think I wrote the prologue in five minutes after that.

It was time, as the apostle Paul said to the Corinthians, to put aside childish things.

1 Corinthians 13:11. "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." This is actually one of my favorite chapters (and my favorite verse) from the Bible, not because I am religious (I am not), but because it encapsulates my awareness of life. My favorite stories are always coming-of-age tales, the Bildungsroman, and are almost always about the painful rightness of leaving childhood behind. Chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians actually discusses the Greek concept of agape, a universal love unbound to romantic, familial, or friendly attachment. It is a selfless sort of love, and one that did not intentionally set out to explore in the book, but made its way into the pages nonetheless. People have asked me why I chose to make my characters so obviously Christian in this book, especially when I'm a heathen myself. And the answer is that the church was part of every aspect of life in the Old World, to the point of mundanity.

“Tonight is for indulgence without consequence. Tonight you are my guest, Elisabeth, and your sister shall come to no harm. Tomorrow,” he said, arch and sly once more, “we can return to being enemies.”

This is the sexiest thing the Goblin King says IMHO. Or is it just me?

“Elisabeth!” Unbelievably, his voice cracked, like a schoolboy’s.

Voices cracking at inopportune moments never ceases to be hilarious to me and is a trope that will probably turn up in every future book of mine. (And yes, it turns up in Guardians of Dawn: Zhara, which will be out in August!)

“No,” I agreed. “The topic is why and how you’ve made my sister believe she’s married to you.” “Jealous?” He looked pleased. “Did you force her? Coerce her somehow? Or is this all an elaborate fantasy you’ve orchestrated to trap her here with you forever?” “Coerced is such a strong word,” he said. “I like to think I am persuasive on my own merits.” “She thinks you are a Hungarian count.” He waved his hand. “We all have our flaws.”

I once said that the character most like me in the book was Thistle the goblin-girl, but my friends all corrected me and said that the character most like me was, in fact, the Goblin King himself. Rereading this...yeah, I can see it.

“What did I say about knocking?” I returned. “You didn’t,” Thistle said cheerfully. “You wished for a door and a lock. You didn’t wish us to use it.”

ON THE OTHER HAND...this is 100% something I would do. MALICIOUS COMPLIANCE.

Deep below the labyrinth was a lake. After descending what seemed like an endless spiral of stairs, we came upon its desolate shores. Its black expanse appeared suddenly from nowhere, its dark waters lit by candelabras fashioned like arms holding torches.

This is obviously drawn from Phantom of the Opera, but the candelabras shaped like arms—while in the Broadway show—was definitely lifted from Jacques Cocteau's La belle et la bête. (Gorgeous film, highly recommend!)

So I would not forget what it was to live, even as life itself forgot me.

Damn, I wrote this? Good job, past me.

The floor became paved with enormous gemstones, each the size of my head. They glittered beneath our feet as we passed, their surfaces polished by thousands—millions—of feet smoothing them over centuries.

Jim Henson's Labyrinth was not the only inspiration for the Underground! This image from The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander has been seared into my brain ever since I read it for the first time at 10 years old.

I was amused by the shape of my utensils: the fork, fashioned into a thin, slender goblin hand with its many-jointed fingers and pointed claws serving as the prongs; the knife, suggesting a long fang slipping from a smiling mouth.

Damn, I wrote this? Good job, brain.

“I’ve given you everything you’ve ever wanted. I’m tired of living up to your expectations.”

This was THEE Labyrinth reference I couldn't give up. There were a lot more I changed before publication, but this was the hill I was going to die on.

“Life,” he said softly, “is more than flesh. Your body is a candle, your soul the flame. The longer I burn the candle…” He did not finish. “A candle unused is nothing but wax and wick,” I said. “I would rather light the flame, knowing it will go out, than sit forever in darkness.”

This is probably the most popular quote from Wintersong, and yes, I put an Easter egg in Guardians of Dawn: Zhara about it.

It was easier not to think of the long road ahead, lest I drown in the mire and muck of my mundane life.

"Mire and muck of my mundane life," or Damn I wrote this? Pt. 2.

I had my first taste of boredom, and I hated it.

Hi, my name is JJ, and I have ADHD. I, too, hate boredom.

Our lips meet in a clash of teeth and tongue. The retiring room falls away, and we fall together, the Goblin King and I. We land on a soft bed of leaves that crackle and rustle with every twitch of our limbs, every sigh of our bodies, and the world around us is dark, secret, safe.

I absolutely cannot reread the steamier scenes ever again. They are so cringe. I sense my mother reading over my shoulder. I'm going to throw a blanket over my head and pretend these don't exist.

I am not a saint; I am a sinner. I want to sin again and again and again.

Fun fact: I kept taking this line out when editing down the steamy scenes from Adult to Teen because I thought it was way too dramatic, but my editor kept sticking it back in. It was the hill SHE was going to die on.

I could not play, could not compose, could not think fast enough; my mind outpaced my fingers, and the errors and wrong notes that ensued caused me as much laughter as tears. More, I wanted more, I needed more. If Lucifer’s sin was pride, then mine was covetousness. More and more and more. It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.

I have bipolar disorder, and I subconsciously gave it to Liesl in the writing of this book, even though I didn't recognize it at the time. During the writing of Shadowsong, I decided to lean into Liesl's "madness," to unpack why it seems to creativity and mania are connected, if it's healthy, and the damage it does to the people we love.

He was the bow, I the strings, and his fingers brushed my body to make me sing.

Okay I said I was never going to read the steamy scenes again, but this line slaps, or Damn I wrote this? Pt. 3.

His letters were ill-formed and childish, and I saw that he hadn’t even learned to join them properly into up and downstrokes.

Josef has the Opera Ghost's handwriting. That little detail, the fact that the Phantom of the Opera never properly learned to connect his letters, always stuck with me and inspired far more pity than anything else in the novel ever did.

So I tried my best to stifle hope. Because hope’s twin was despair, and despair was infinitely worse. If hope hurt, then despair was the absence of hurt. It was the absence of feeling. It was the absence of caring. I wanted very much to care. But it was getting harder to meet each day with purpose. It was hard to find excitement, joy, or anticipation, even in that which had brought me so much happiness before.

After mania comes the fall.

She used to say that it was best to have the biggest, because you got the most strawberry for the littlest effort. I would retort that bigger wasn’t always better; the reddest berries, the ones most vibrant and even in color, were always the sweetest.

This little exchange was inspired by a similar one I had with my mother when I was a child. We were sharing a bowl of blueberries, not strawberries, and I complained that she was eating all the best berries first instead of saving them for last, as I was doing. "Well, of course," my mother said. "That way every berry I eat is the best of the bunch." "But if you do it my way," I returned, "then every berry you eat is better than the last." These differing life philosophies are probably why my mother and I clashed so hard when I was young. Sorry, Mum!

You are the monster I claim, mein Herr.

Beauty and the Beast is one of my favorite fairytales, but I'm the sort of person who loves monster romances, both literal and metaphorical. There is something about embracing the monstrous that appeals to me, so much so that I devoted the entire sequel, Shadowsong, to exploring it.

Be, thou, with me.

This quote is a my own translation of Bist du bei mir, from The Little Notebook of Anna Magdalena Bach. It's original from the opera Diomedes by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel, but the version in the Little Notebook is probably the best known. However, I first heard the tune as a Korean hymn my grandmother used to sing when I was young. Remixing and sampling have existed since at least the 1600s, friends!