« The Backstory: The Runaway by Nephylim »
Austin ZieglerEditor’s note: When we started the Behind Blue Eyes blog, Anne-Marie made an open call for authors, musicians, and other independent artists to submit their Backstory to be published. This is our first guest post.
Nephylim calls her gay-positive books “low on sex and high on pure romance and adventure”. In her latest book, The Runaway, she asks “What if everything you ever dreamed of turns out to be the last thing you ever wanted? What if a life of privilege and ease becomes a gilded cage, crushing the life out of you?”
For her Backstory to The Runaway, she told us how she came to ask these questions.
Nephylim: I have always been an avid absorber of Celtic myth, legend and stories. There’s a particular one that has been told in many forms in many stories, myths and folklore.
A man wandering on the mountains/shores of a lake, sees a beautiful woman and follows her. The faster he runs the further away she gets until he calls out to her, when she stops. She turns out to be one of the fae folk (fairies but not as you know them—not a fluttery wing nor flowery skirt in sight) and she entices him into fairyland.
Here, no one grows old and every day is full of feasting and fun. And yet he pines for his home. He’s a prisoner in a gilded cage and longs to be free.
The king of the fairies calls him to the fae court and gives him one chance to go back to his own home. He can go back to the human world and spend time there. After a time he will be given the choice to return to fairyland forever. If he chooses to remain in the mortal world he will never be able to return. He would give up immortality, a world without pain or sickness and a life of ease, to go back to a bleak world where everyone he knows is dead.
Fairy time is very different to human time and when he returns he finds that centuries have passed in what had seemed to him to be only weeks. He struggles to make a new life for himself, working hard to build a home.
When the time comes to make the choice—to stay in a world where he has to work hard for everything he has, or a world where everything is dropped in his lap—he chooses to remain. For him, it was better to life free in a world where he has to struggle than to be a prisoner in a world where he wants for nothing.
I’ve often thought about writing a book around this story but the opportunity never arose until my friend developed an obsession on a particular male model. To me, his eyes looked sad and it sparked off an interest in the world or the model and celebrity in general which led to the kernel of an idea that it might not be as desirable as we might think it is.
I wondered if this was my opportunity of bringing the fairytale to life and the more I thought about it the more real my model character became. Ciarrai O’Donnell started to talk to me. I made him as perfect as I could imagine him and his life as perfect as I could imagine it. Then I set him loose to try to escape it. I almost lost him in the first chapter, but he managed to survive and went on to find love—in his own way.
In the end, only death could provide him with his true and irrevocable escape. But who is Aaron Carpenter, and why does he have to die?
Buy The Runaway at Smashwords.
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Reader Comments (2)
Thank you so much. This looks beautiful
You're very welcome, and yes, it does look beautiful. I hope you're tweeting this far and wide!