How I Ended Up Writing The Malpais Bride

I am part of a siren anthology that will be coming out later this year.  It still feels a little bit like being invited to sit at the cool table in the cafeteria.

This is how most of my stories start...not with a plan, but with two completely unrelated ideas that meet in a dark alley and decide to cause problems.  Kind of like the English language.

When I first joined the project, I did what I always do when I am trying to be a Serious Writer.  I had come up with several ideas.  I jotted down a total of six ideas.  I opened up word documents with my ideas.  I gave them dramatic working titles.  I wrote my notes and made outlines.

And every last one of them refused to cooperate.

Sometimes ideas are like that.  They look promising as they tease you.  Buuuuut, the moment you actually try to build a story around them they wander off, sit down, and announce "Now I'm not doing it!"  As much as you might want to you can't force a story into existence.  You can only follow after it and hope that it eventually decides to speak to you.

While all of this was happening, I had bought and was reading a nonfiction book about mail order brides in the old American west.  It showed real advertisements, letters, and women who agreed to marry men they had never met.  They would travel hundreds of miles to live in a place they had never seen before.

We tend to make this sound romantic, but when we really think about it, it's downright terrifying.  Brave, absolutely, but also so lonely in a way it's hard for us to imagine now.

At the same time, I was supposed to be writing about sirens.  It wasn't to be the friendly, singing, animated variety we're often familiar with but the older kind.  The dangerous kind that were feathered, finned, and cruel.

And somewhere, in the middle of all of it, those two ideas found one another and decided to become a story.

The Malpais Bride takes place in a world where magic is real, but greatly hidden.  Most people will never see it, and if they do, they often explain it as something else.

But the sea does not particularly care whether we understand it or not.  There are old things in the water and there is a sea goddess who rules the waves and everything in them.  Including, sometimes, those who steal her children from the sea.

And once those two ideas mashed together, the characters started showing up, and the story began doing what stories sometimes do.  It started walking ahead of me and it expected me to keep up.

I am very excited for this anthology because sirens are such strange, beautiful, and dangerous creatures I have the opportunity to write about.  

And that is how I ended up writing The Malpais Bride.  Because two completely unrelated ideas met each other, and I was lucky enough to be there when they did.