Guest Post: A Story’s Genesis: The Wind’s Kiss, by Dave Smeds

Readers often ask where the idea for a story came from. Here, veteran fantasy author Dave Smeds offers a peek behind the scenes in the creation of his wonderful short fiction piece, "The Wind's Kiss." Its first publication was in Lace and Blade 4, which I edited. It's a marvelous story, exquisitely written, full of pitch-perfect heart. Now it's also available in Dave's collection Swords, Magic, and Heart (see the cover below). 

A Story’s Genesis: The Wind’s Kiss
by Dave Smeds

The headstone — as you can see in the photograph I’ve included here — stood alone, at least thirty paces from any other marker in the little one-acre graveyard. Still, it was there, intact and still upright, and I was grateful for that fact. The cemetery had been used for less than four decades, from its founding in 1881 to the final burial in 1920. Once the small chapel on the accompanying acre ceased to exist, no one consigned their loved ones to rest there. The place became so forgotten that its decorative lilac bushes grew into a huge patch, concealing nearly all of the stones. People would drive right and be unaware of the nature of the site, even though they could have thrown a tennis ball out a window and the ball could easily have landed on one of the graves. Nowadays local volunteers keep the shrubbery trimmed and mow the turf. If not for that, even I, who knew where to go, might have struggled to find it.

I had always meant to stop there, sooner or later. The problem was, I had kept saying to myself that I would do it when I happened to be passing through Nebraska. But given that I live in California and always have, I reached my sixtieth birthday having found no occasion in my adult life when I had cause to be “just passing through” Nebraska. My path-of-least-resistance approach was inadequate. I had to make the goal a bucket-list item.

In 2016, I was in Kansas City, MO to attend the World Science Fiction Convention. My wife joined me on the final day, and the next morning off we went on a long, snaking course to visit family graves in not only Nebraska, but South Dakota and Iowa as well — all three of them states outside the scope of previous explorations on my part, or hers. We arrived at the lonely little graveyard on the third day, reaching it about ten minutes after we had rolled through the forlorn village of Creighton, population 1125. After paying our respects, we would go north about three miles to Winnetoon, population 63. Vacant as those communities were, we would see encounter smaller ones the next day, including, as we crossed into South Dakota, the hamlet of Wewela, population FIVE.

Where’d You Get That Idea? Story Inspirations from Lace and Blade 4 Authors

Reposting a favorite round-table blog.

Carol Berg: One of my aims when I create new heroes or heroines is to make them real people. I want readers to believe they had a life before walking onto the canvas of my story and will (if the story permits!) have a life when they walk off again. But of course, after the traumas/losses/victories of the story, the nature of that life is often irrevocably changed. 

Ever since my novel Song of the Beast was published, I’ve had readers asking what became of Aidan McAllister--a scarred, broken singer of visions, who saved his world from the scourge of dragon warfare. At the end of the story, he abandons his friends and his hope of a normal life to lead the beasts into the wild. I decided that it would be fun to satisfy the readers’ curiosity and mine, and so I wrote “The Heart’s Coda.”

Marie Brennan: Some years ago I bought a pair of black-and-red beaded earrings from the jeweler Elise Matthesen, who habitually gives titles to all the pieces she makes. The earrings are called "At the Sign of the Crow and Quill," and like many authors, I pledged to Elise that I would try to write something by that title someday. The mood that evoked in my mind was very much a Lace and Blade mood, so when I received an invitation to submit to the anthology, that turned out to be the spark I needed to transform the phrase into characters and plot.

Heather Rose Jones:  “Gifts Tell Truth” is set in the same world as my Alpennia series: a 

mildly alternate Ruritanian early 19th century with magic. One of the things I love to do when exploring characters it to make offhand references to events in their past. Events where I may not know all the details of what happened, just that it shaped them in some way. One thing that is very clear about Jeanne, Vicomtesse de Cherdillac, one of the protagonists of The Mystic Marriage and a continuing character throughout the series, is that she is a “Woman With A Past.” The more I write about her, the more fascinated I am by how she came to be the person she is in the novels.

The events in “Gifts Tell Truth” haven’t been specifically referenced in the books, other than a passing comment about how the stories of her youth aren’t appropriate for innocent ears. But I knew in a general way that during the French occupation of Alpennia, just after Jeanne’s unexpected marriage to a much older French aristocratic émigré, she led a wild and scandalous life, spurred on by a tragic event in her coming-out season (which will be told in a later story). The current story grew out of wanting to explore the origins of some of her later attitudes and reflexes, with the added bonus of showing the start of an odd but enduring friendship that features in the novels.