Hello Dear Readers!
Amanda here and back from the dregs that was 2024. Last year kicked my butt, but this year is starting off a little better? I made sure to open the front and back doors of my house at midnight on New years to let the old energies out and the new energies in, and I think it worked.
As part of a life-refresh, I started asking myself why I do I write. Why do I stay up late and dream up characters and world? Why do I write paranormal? Why not romance or high fantasy? Why Shifters? Why not Elves or Angels?
And just to add to my imposter syndrome, why do I write about a creature that has been written about a million times before? Especially when you’re working with the supernatural. Both my book series deal with primarily with shapeshifters (and maybe a few fairies and demons stuck in there too).
When I started writing, I wanted to call them Shifters partially because there was something sexier about calling them shifters, and partly because saying were-panther tends to get a snicker in response. It’s all the same trope of magic. So in my mythos, the shifters are humans who harness magic to shift into an animal. Their animal is mostly determined by who bit them OR, fun turn of events, sometime called a soulshift when the animal matches their spirit and not their bloodline. The moon pulls at them and heirloom silver is their weakness.
But it all sounds pretty familiar, right? It’s hard to get something original about a creature that appears in every single culture across the world. So something about them must be appealing to our deeper self, right? Why do we find shapeshifters so damn alluring?
There's only one reason, right? We like the danger. Even with a human consciousness, those are still some damn big claws. That edge keeps us on our toes, ready to fight or flee. We like that it’s a wild animal trying to get out. We like that they can smell our fear. We like that they have basal core temperatures of 100 degrees (at least mine do) because it means for a lot of no-shirt time. It is a simple and universal attraction.
But if you want to go deeper, I guess we could also look at this through a Jungian lens about seeking to understand the animal side of ourselves. Our myths about were-creatures stemmed from a fear that our animal selves will take over and expose who we really are. In Diaries and Truth, the animal only exposes who they really was, even if they wasn’t ready to be that yet.
So, if our animal selves expose who we really are and our attraction to them is based on our fear of knowing the truth about ourselves and others, what would your animal be? I know you’ve thought about it. Would you be the proud lioness who guards her pride fiercely? Would you be a black lab who is loyal until the moment of death? Are you a Panther?
Author of Diaries of an Urban Panther series and The Merci Lanard Files
1 comment:
The world needs more 'shifters -- looking forward to more on your 'shifter 'verse & your writing, Amanda. :-)
Post a Comment