Joy, welcome back to my blog. The Mermaid Riot is quite a change from Writer Wellness. What was the genesis of this novel?
Hi, Loretta! Thanks for the invite. I’m thrilled to share a little about the backstory of The Mermaid Riot (FireandIceYA, 2024).
https://www.fireandiceya.com/authors/joyeheld/mermaid.html
I write steamy adult historical fiction under a pen name and have a couple of books published there, and I’m always watching social media for trends and ideas in publishing. Firstly, because I want to know, and secondly, because I teach creative writing online at Southern New Hampshire University and need to stay current so I can share what’s new in genre fiction with students. As for being a departure from Writer Wellness, the principles of WW kept me in working order and healthy during the writing of The Mermaid Riot. For example, I practice most of the key concepts of Writer Wellness just about every day year-round, and I journaled a lot about Mermaid for literally years before I had the time to plot and write it.
The seed for The Mermaid Riot was planted by a literary agent’s tweet that I happened across in 2015. I was in graduate school and teaching English and yoga at a local college at the time of the tweet, but I filed it away because the article shared in the tweet captivated me hook, line, and sinker LOL. Here is the article “Two Little Known Charleston Legends That Time Has Nearly Forgotten” that led me to the research and discovering that I wanted to write my first young adult historical fantasy novel:
Why YA?
I chose to write in the young adult area because it is a new challenge for me as a writer. Also, the protagonists Serena Robinson and Tobias Doyle needed to be young and energetic with vivid imaginations in order to believe in mermaids for the story. My research into The Reconstruction period that followed The U.S. Civil War provided tons of good ideas for characters, setting, politics, religion, economy, and everyday life that a younger set of characters seemed better suited to handle. One of the themes in The Mermaid Riot is hope. I aged Serena and Tobi as eighteen and nineteen respectively because I wanted them to represent the hope for a better future after the devastation of war. By the way, the mermaid riot legend comes from Charleston, South Carolina. I created a fictional city in the novel called Kingston, SC modeled after Charleston’s efforts to rebuild and prosper after the war.
Your young protagonists, Serena and Tobi, have a dramatic backstory. How did you envision them?
Serena and Tobi grew up living next door to each other along the bank of the Ainsley River, a fictional version of the Ashley River in Charleston. They have been best friends for over 15 years when something happens to cause a feud between their families, and the teenagers, who had intended to spend the rest of their lives together, are forbidden by their parents to see one another. (I’ve attached images below from my research that I kept nearby as I wrote the story.)
Link to my Substack blog about the images of Serena and Tobi
https://joyeheld.substack.com/p/inspiration-and-images-for-serena
1867 Charleston was post civil war, and there was more mingling of races at that time. How did this affect the historical event and your story?
You’re absolutely correct, Loretta. I represented this truth in the story as a time of transition for the newly freed black Americans who were also working to regain dignity, forge a future, and contribute to the rebuilding of the South while holding onto their culture. In the story, I write about the African heritage of the simbi also called “Mami Wata” which translates to mermaid as this water spirit was fundamental to their belief system, cultural identity, and understanding of how the world works.
One of your reviewers puts your novel in the historical/fantasy genre, despite real people having demanded the release of the mermaid so the sea would go back to where it belonged. Historical/fantasy is a genre I’m just beginning to encounter through colleagues’ work. Can you talk about how you create a world of time, scents, sights and place so palpable that readers accept and emotionally engage with the fantasy being?
This is an awesome question, Loretta, and could be answered with an entire thesis, which I’m not opposed to writing, but for pithiness’s sake, I’ll try to explain how I did this.
You hit the nail on the head with the conundrum of blending real people (characters) with fantastical story lines. I agree with story structure gurus such as Lisa Cron (Story Genius) and Alexandra Sokoloff (Screenwriting Tricks for Authors) who agree that the “things that happen,” as Cron calls them, in a story are essential to telling a story, but it is the internal and external struggles of characters that readers want to read and care about. The “things that happen” in a story are not worth a twit without the involvement of characters whose internal desires conflict with their outer situations. The plot action is the bridge between the inner needs of the characters and the outer obstacles that get in the way of the character achieving their wants, dreams, and desires. Without this struggle, Cron calls a story, “…an impressive stack of pages in which a bunch of things happen, but none of it really matters because that’s all it is–a bunch of external things that the reader has no particular reason to care about” (4).
I created two young lovers like real people with big plans for a future together who are torn apart through no fault of their own then found a magical way to “realistically” bring them back together at which point they confirm that, once the mermaid thing is resolved, nothing will ever keep them apart again. Ahem, until book two.
The need for myth is eternal. Do you have thoughts on why?
I agree that the need for myth is eternal. I don’t know if my reasoning is rational, but I write about mermaids, so…
Mythology is what we call it today. In civilizations past, it was part of everyday discourse and culture because they didn’t have the advancements to explain things that we rely on today. Legends keep the stories alive and give us somebody and something to believe in outside of ourselves but that makes us more self-aware of our choices. A good thing. Myth helped explain the unexplainable to our ancestors, and it also keeps us wondering in the present if alien beings inhabit the worlds we haven’t yet reached.
I have always admired the crisp elegance of your writing style. What are you working on now?
Thank you, Loretta! The follow-up story to The Mermaid Riot is in the works where the bread crumbs dropped in the first book serve as the seeds for learning more about why Serena Robinson thinks she hates water.
Thanks, Loretta!
~Joy
