So, I’m going to be brutally honest here and start off by saying it’s been a long week. Between the continuing COVID-19 crisis, racial tensions in the US plus the riots of recent days, and the discovery that an alt-right anti-LGBTQ group on 4chan decided to use a name that happens to be the name of one of my books, my mind hasn’t been super focused this week. That means progress on my editing of book 1 in my Slavic fantasy series has been slow, and it also means I didn’t have the mental energy to put together a Slavic Saturday post. Instead, since I’m planning to release the working name of the first book in the series to my newsletter subscribers in mid-June, I thought it could be fun to talk a bit about the book so far as well as my motivations behind it.
The obvious starting place is my heritage. According to the genetic tests I’ve done, I’m almost exactly 50% Polish (maybe a bit of Slovenian in there), and while I knew a lot about the other significant parts of my heritage (especially German), I knew little about the Polish side. That was odd, especially since the Polish side of my family is my mom’s side, who we spent every holiday with growing up. And over the past couple years, I’ve found that some of the traditions I knew came from that Polish heritage without me knowing. Still, especially when my grandparents passed away over the past decade, I felt disconnected from the history of that Slavic heritage and wanted to learn more.
Oddly enough, much of that learning aside from Wikipedia came from video games. If you know me personally, you know I’m a history nerd about some things, and the game Crusader Kings II, which I’ve played for years, is one of the few games that really let’s you play as a historical Slavic character. Long story short, the Slavic pagan religion in the game piqued my interest, and when I started playing the well-known game series The Witcher (all three, not just the third one), things kind of fell into line.
Like many people, The Witcher was my first introduction into Slavic mythology. From the music to the culture and creatures, there was something different about the stories that I couldn’t put my finger on. Then I found the Slavic (and both Celtic and Germanic) inspirations behind it and was fascinated.
I had always been a massive fan of mythology ever since the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, but I had always seen Greek and Roman myths as a saturated market. Finding a less known mythology connected to my Polish heritage had me excited, so I tried to find more, reading books such as Leigh Bardugo’s Grisha books, which draw many inspirations from Russian folklore, and more. What I quickly found, though, was that while many of these stories were both fantastic and drew heavily from Slavic folklore and myth, they were just elements. Nothing could quite seem to be entirely based on the Slavic myths, unlike the plethora of Greek, Roman, Norse, etc. mythology books. That’s not a criticism of those stories, since I love all of them. But I found myself craving more.
My interest reached its peak when I was just finishing writing my The Prism Files series, so I decided maybe I should try to write what I wanted to read. But I soon found that’s a difficult task. The first thing you’ll find if you do any research on Slavic mythology is that there are no real primary sources and there is an incredible amount of regional diversity. This means there’s debate on what the beliefs of the (especially) early Slavs were, and you can be quickly left scratching your head.
Part of this is why I’ve been trying to compile many of the stories onto my Slavic Saturday posts as little chunks to interest people, but even I can’t claim to have a grasp on all or even most of it. With so many regions in Slavic myth and so little in writing (especially in English), it’s a mountain of a task. I truly understand now why so few people implement Slavic myth in their writing.
I think the research has been half of the fun, though. Digging through articles and books has brought me back to my original goal of finding more about my Polish/Slavic heritage. Inherently, mythology and folklore are married to history and culture, so the more I’ve learned about one, the more the other has become clear.
So, despite the work, I’ve loved all of it. I’ve meant many great people from Slavic countries who have passed on the bits of information they know, and I’ve found so many other people of Slavic ancestry, American and not, crave that connection to myths from their culture as well. Stories are powerful. We need ones that we can connect to. And bringing in the folklore and myths that have been forgotten from many Slavic countries has been a joy already.
The first book itself still needs a lot of work to live up to the high bar I want it to be at. In a way, I want to give the stories and myths the respect they deserve while putting my own spin on it. That takes time. And I’m thankful for everyone who has encouraged and supported me so far.
There is so much in the works with the writing itself, editing, the adding of a second point-of-view character, illustrations by a wonderful Ukrainian illustrator who’ll I’ll talk more about later, the final cover design by Serbian company Deranged Doctor Design, and the constant research for my Slavic Saturday posts. I don’t think I realized how much of a challenge this would be when I decided to start this journey of writing Slavic fantasy, but I love a good challenge. And soon, I hope to be able to present the first book in the series as an exciting adventure full of ancient Slavic myth and culture. Until then, I hope you enjoy my Slavic Saturday posts and videos. More information about the book is coming soon, so be sure to subscribe to my newsletter to be the first to learn more.