Tag: retellings

Queer Werewolves, Traumatic Shapeshifting, and Doomed Heroes

I have been waiting a very long time to write this post. Months at the very least, but really it feels like the culmination of several years of work and waiting and more work and more waiting, and now — now at last the news is here:

Gollancz snaps up three-book deal from Finn Longman in six-figure pre-empt
The Bookseller, 29th Feb 2024

That’s right. I’ve got more books coming. Adult books, specifically, and fantasy, which makes a change! Not just one, not even two, but three medieval retellings being published by Gollancz over the next few years, and I am SO EXCITED to be able to tell you about them at last.

First up is The Wolf and His King, coming in 2025. This is a queer retelling of Bisclavret that, yes, is focused on the homoerotic possibilities of the relationship between Bisclavret and the king, but is also about chronic pain and illness, the mortifying ordeal of being known, and being an exile in your own home. There is a lot of yearning, and some of that yearning is romantic, and some of it is about desperately wanting to be something your body seems determined not to let you become.

I’ve talked before on this blog about how this book uses werewolfism as a metaphor to explore chronic pain, and that’s definitely at the heart of the story — but there’s a lot more than just that in there. It’s about love and feudal interdependence and needing to be understood and trying to build peace. It’s partially in second person and partially in verse; it’s the weird medieval book of my heart, and it felt at times like it would never sell, but it did. And next year, you’ll be able to read it. In fact, you can even pre-order it right now… [edit: or imminently, the links don’t seem to be up yet, but REALLY SOON]

In 2026, I’m bringing you The Animals We Became [working title], which is a queertrans retelling of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, looking at gender, compulsory heterosexuality, and trauma, via nonconsensual shapeshifting. The Fourth Branch is not a nice story, nor a kind one, but it’s been one I’ve been wanting to retell since my first unfinished attempts at doing so back in 2012. It’s a tale that I think has a lot to say about our modern anxieties about gender, autonomy, and category crisis — as well as about the difference between justice and punishment, something I keep finding myself coming back to in my writing.

This book is a newer one, because I sort of sold it on proposal, except that I got carried away writing the sample chapters for Gollancz last year and ended up drafting the entire book. I wrote a post last year about how this process helped me develop new academic ideas about the story as well as new ways of understanding it as a narrative. I’m excited to get back to it and turn that first draft into something more polished and nuanced, but if nothing else, I can promise you that my tagline of “t4t shapeshifting and trauma” remains… very accurate.

And finally, in 2027, I get to share with you To Run With The Hound [working title]. Long-term readers will know that I wrote a book with this title way back in 2018. The book I’ve sold isn’t exactly that book — it’s a proposal for how I intend to completely rewrite that book from the ground up. But yes, this is it: my Cú Chulainn novel, which is sort of a Cú Chulainn/Fer Diad novel with vague Song of Achilles vibes, except it’s also so much more than that. I haven’t written the new version yet, but the plan is to use a nonlinear narrative to explore why Táin Bó Cúailnge is actually a tragedy, and what it means to be doomed by the narrative (but not in the way you thought you were). It will feature a great many feelings about Fer Diad, Láeg, and Cú Chulainn himself.

Obviously, all of these books draw very heavily on my academic background as a medievalist, but TRWTH is the most directly related to my PhD research. Which is just as well, because yes, I am juggling writing and editing these books with a full-time PhD, and I’m not entirely sure I’d recommend that as a state of affairs, but at least the overlap means I can research them both simultaneously.

In the spirit of providing as much information about these books as I can at this point of time, I have anticipated some possible FAQs, and will endeavour to answer them:

How long have you been keeping this secret?

FOREVER. Or, more specifically, since May 19th 2023, which has been killing me. I have not been particularly good at it. I think everyone who knows me IRL has heard the news at this point. But they’ve been strictly instructed to pretend they’re surprised on social media.

When do these books come out?

The Wolf and His King is scheduled for “Spring 2025”, with a holding date of March on the pre-order pages. As soon as that’s actually pinned down, I’ll let you know. The others should follow in 2026 and 2027, as long as there are no hurdles along the way, but I can’t promise there will be no PhD-related delays 🙈

Are these adult books or YA?

Adult. Definitely. I feel this is worth emphasising, especially when we come to Animals, because honestly, Gwydion is awful. I mean, he is the ultimate poor little meow meow, and he is terrible. The Wolf and His King would probably be fine for most teenage readers, but since it’s not aimed at teens, they might not vibe with it so much. The others (especially Animals) are heavier, and deal with darker themes in ways that aren’t particularly suitable for younger readers. (Full content warnings closer to the time, although I recommend googling the Fourth Branch for the general vibes…!) But, you know, I’m not the book police, so use your own discretion.

What genre label would you put on these books?

I think I would describe them as literary fantasy. I don’t know if this is how they would be “officially” labelled. Their fantastical elements — werewolves and shapeshifting and whatever is going on with Cú Chulainn — are crucial parts of the story, but I’m not interested in explaining them, or particularly in developing a magic system for them to exist within. The focus is on the themes and the ways that the stories are told, often with experimental POVs and stylistic choices. Hence the literary part, I guess. But some would probably describe them just as fantasy. That makes sense, too. Historical fantasy almost fits, except that the history we’re dealing with is pseudohistory, and deliberately ambiguous in its exact dates.

Does this mean you’re only going to write adult books now, or will you write more YA?

I don’t have any more YA books contracted once Moth to a Flame comes out in May. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to write any more. I think I’m probably going to take a little break from it, though (juggling these + the full-time PhD is more than enough, honestly), so it might be a couple of years before I have something else lined up on that side of things. I’ve got a couple of ideas I might pursue: a contemporary novel set in a secondary school orchestra, featuring the world’s most codependent string quartet, or a queer pacifist sci-fi Robin Hood retelling that might well be summed up as ‘be gay, do crimes’. Or I might write something else entirely. But we’ll see.

What formats will they be published in?

I believe it’s hardback first, with simultaneous e- and audiobook, and then paperback later. I’ve never had a hardback before, so that will be a novelty.

Will they be available in [x] language?

I have no say over translation rights but I very much hope these books will be picked up and translated into as many languages as possible! If you are a publisher and you want foreign rights, I guess now is the time to talk to Gollancz — hit them up at London Book Fair or something. Especially if you want to translate them into Celtic languages. I would absolutely love to see Animals in Welsh or TRWTH in Irish… listen, I know the market’s small, but it’s worth it. Let’s do it. I believe in us.

How much romance/sex is there in these books?

[ETA: A brief explanatory note, because the response to this book announcement has been fabulous and this post has spread much further than I expected, and therefore beyond my usual readers — The Butterfly Assassin trilogy contains zero romance, and this has been something I’ve been keen to emphasise in my publicity, not least because it’s unusual in YA. So existing readers might be curious whether I’m continuing in the same direction on that front, and that’s why I picked out this question to answer. (Not because I think it is the most important piece of information about any book in general, or anything like that!)]

The Wolf and His King is significantly focused on yearning, although mostly of the unfulfilled variety for the majority of the book. There are some sex scenes, largely poetic rather than explicit. I have told my mum that she’s allowed to read this book, if that helps. I don’t think you could describe it as capital R Romance, or really as romantasy, but it does technically have a HEA, so I guess if you really wanted to stretch your definitions, you could.

The Animals We Became has some sex, and very little romance. It’s a bit more explicit than The Wolf and His King, and I haven’t decided if my mum’s allowed to read it yet. Given the plot of the Fourth Branch, issues surrounding assault, consent, and bodily autonomy are quite central. It’s not what I would call a romantic book.

I really can’t tell you much about To Run With The Hound at this point, because I haven’t written it. I think it will deal a lot with the blurred boundaries of friendship/sworn brotherhood/attraction/enmity. I don’t think romance in the modern sense will be a focus, but it is substantially about complicated relationships between people, and, yeah, also about heroic masculinity and combat/war as a form of intricate ritual.

How much murder is in these books?

Substantially less than is in The Butterfly Assassin trilogy, with the possible exception of To Run With The Hound.

How much am I going to suffer as a reader?

The Wolf and His King is the least angsty, and has a happy ending. The Animals We Became is somewhat more angsty; it has a hopeful but complicated ending. To Run With The Hound is a tragedy, and you’re going to suffer. In other words, it’s a steady run downhill from here to 2027.

How do I get an ARC?

Absolutely no idea, it’s still early days, more edits to do before that’s on the cards, but I imagine you go and ask Gollancz very nicely. When I know more, you will know more.

Do I need to know the original stories to enjoy these books?

No, I have been meticulously testing them on beta readers who are unfamiliar with the original stories, mostly to watch them yell at me when something terrible happens that was absolutely not my idea. However, if you want to do background reading, I’m happy to provide a bibliography.

The Bookseller says it was a 6-figure deal. Does that mean you’re rich now?

Tragically not. There are a lot of misconceptions about how much money authors make, and a lot of assumptions get made based on flashy headlines. Turns out when you spread low six figures over around five years, and pay taxes and agent commissions and things like that, you still end up earning less than minimum wage. On the flip side, though, it’s a very nice supplement to my PhD stipend, and the combination of the two means I can almost afford to have the heating on for more than five hours per day in winter. Almost.

For real, I am extremely grateful for this opportunity and it’s more than I’ve ever earned for my writing before. I don’t want to belittle that fact: I know how it feels to be the writer with a substantially-less-than-six-figure deal watching more financially successful authors complain about how it’s hardly anything and wishing they’d catch themselves on, lol. But writing is still definitely not the business to go into if you want a living wage, so unfortunately I won’t be buying a house any time soon, and I will continue to wince whenever my bike needs yet another pricey repair.

How’s it going, balancing this with the PhD?

It’s going. Sometimes it’s fine. Sometimes I’m very stressed. I think balancing these and also Moth to a Flame was not ideal, but that will all be wrapped up soon, so then I’ll only have two jobs. It helps that these books overlap so much (in content and also thematically) with my PhD research, so everything I learn as part of the PhD helps add depth and colour to the books themselves. The hard part will be holding myself back from adding a bibliography at the back of each book…

Can you tell me more about medieval werewolves?

Yes. Start here.

But what about the accidental vampire novel you were talking about?

The accidental vampire novel is not contracted. Yet. Paranormal romance publishers, hit me up if you’re into incredibly niche romance novels about desperate postgrads and the things they’ll do to a) get PhD funding and b) convince their vampire housemate to suck their blood.

When can I preorder?

For The Wolf and His King: right now! At least in the UK! Still waiting on more retailers, including more who ship internationally, but I highly recommend you go bug them to make it available because I think theoretically they can do that. All the links I’ve got so far are on this page.

For the others, ask me again in a year or so. If that’s too long to wait, remember that Moth to a Flame comes out this May, so you should go grab that in the meantime, and the first two if you haven’t already read them.

I think that is everything, but if I have not answered your question, then please ask it in the comments and I will endeavour to do so!

In general I am just really excited to share this news with you, extremely grateful to my agent Jessica Hare for being willing to take on my weird queer literary adult fantasy novels even though she signed me for The Butterfly Assassin which is really not that, and very glad to have found an editor like Bethan Morgan who is willing to spend three days going back and forth with me about the nuances of words like ‘myth’ and ‘folklore’ when dealing with medieval literature. The future is ahead of us and it is a queer medieval future — and isn’t that glorious?

Storytelling and Scholarship

Today, I wanted to talk in more detail about something I tweeted last week:

Recently, I finished the first draft of new book. Provisionally titled The Animals We Became, it’s a literary fantasy retelling of Math fab Mathonwy, the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi — perhaps more familiar to most people as the story of Blodeuwedd.

My first exposure to this story was, not unusually, Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, which I read when I was probably eight or nine. I had a fever at the time and became utterly convinced that Blodeuwedd was inside my (flowery) curtains, since when the light shone through them — as it did during the day, something only somebody ill and home from school would have noticed — some of the flowers clustered to look like a person. This obviously had an irreversible effect on my psyche and I’ve had a particular affection for this story ever since.

Most of my engagement with the Fourth Branch has been creative rather than academic. In 2012, I was trying to write a steampunk retelling of it. In 2014, I had an owl carved into my harp and named the instrument Blodeuwedd. In 2019, I started exploring queer interpretations of certain elements and wrote a poem called “Gwydion” that first expressed some of the ideas I was working on this novel. I knew I wanted to write it as a novel (I still have all the messages I sent my friends yelling about it, and rereading them having written it was fascinating, because I absolutely did what 2019!me wanted me to do), but it wasn’t until recently that external factors prompted me to take the concepts I’d been playing with and get on with making a book out of them.

But although I have a non-academic love of this story, I’m always coming at it from the point of view of a medievalist and a Celticist who did study medieval Welsh at university and has written essays about the Four Branches. That background informs my writing — and my writing informs my academic approaches, and helps me better understand the source material.

I am not a medieval Welsh expert and would never claim to be. I have long joked that I write creatively about this story because I don’t feel qualified to express those same ideas in academic articles, and this is a different way of presenting my interpretations. But I have learned so much more about the Fourth Branch from writing Animals than I could have expected, and the conversations it has prompted with one of my closest friends (who is a medieval Welsh expert) have been incredibly rewarding.

This is not the first medieval retelling that I’ve written. Most similar to this one is my 2019 novel, The Wolf and His King, which has recently been languishing on submission: a queer literary fantasy retelling of Bisclavret, one of the lais of Marie de France. Before that, I drafted To Run With The Hound, a retelling of Táin Bó Cúailnge, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between Cú Chulainn and Fer Diad from their training together until their final encounter. (This one has been waiting over four years for me to figure out how to edit it into something I like, and I think I’ve finally figured out a way of doing that, but lack the time to do so at present.)

These are all fairly ‘close’ retellings of their source material. They aren’t transplanting the story to a modern setting, but take place in a semi-fantastical pseudohistorical version of the real world (Ireland, Wales, Brittany), like the original tales. Generally speaking, I haven’t changed the plot. I have filled in gaps, expanded on details omitted or referenced only in passing, and dug deep into character emotions and motivations to change the emphasis placed on plot points, but I have kept the story itself almost the same as the original.*

I have written more creative retellings before — Bard, one of my YA projects that has been shelved and unshelved and re-shelved again multiple times,** is a sci-fi Arthurian retelling set in a former prison colony in space, and merges details from half a dozen different medieval stories rather than retelling any particular tale directly. I had fun planting Arthurian Easter eggs throughout it, some of which are reasonably obscure, but the plot is largely my own, albeit taking inspiration from broader Arthurian themes.

I really enjoy the creativity involved in transplanting those details in a ‘loose’ retelling like that. There’s something extremely rewarding about exploring how I can reference them within the setting and context so that they make sense but are identifiable for those who know the source material. But I don’t find it informs my academic interpretations in the same way, so I’m going to focus on the ‘close’ retellings today, and specifically, Animals and TRWTH.

(I think it’s funny how all of these retellings are very concerned with bodies and beasts, and their working titles give it away. It’s all just Creatures over here.)

I drafted TRWTH in late 2018, which meant it was only a few months after handing in my undergrad dissertation, which was on Táin Bó Cúailnge. As a result, I went into it fairly confident that I knew my source material about as well as I was ever going to know it, and certainly well enough to write the book.

But of course the book immediately starting asking me questions that I’d never had to worry about in my academic work. My academic focus wasn’t on dindshenchas (the lore of placenames), so I’d never had to worry too much about the geography; now I had to know where events took place, and how characters got from one to the other. I hadn’t been particularly concerned with the timeline of events, because I was looking at themes instead; now I needed to know how long everything lasted, and when it happened. I’d been looking at individuals; now I needed to know roughly how many people were in the armies, and that meant doing maths.

Practical questions, questions I’d never asked myself, but questions that taught me something about the scale of the story I was working with.

Then there were the character questions. I wanted Láeg to narrate most of the second half of the book, because he was the only viable candidate other than Cú Chulainn himself, and I wanted the slight distance from him. But I didn’t know anything about Láeg. I didn’t know where he was from. I didn’t know how he’d ended up being Cú Chulainn’s charioteer. I didn’t know how old he was, or whether he had any Otherworldly traits of his own, or what his relative status was…

As soon as I started writing Láeg, I needed to know those things about him. And once I started looking for answers, I realised they were a lot more complicated than I would have anticipated, and also that Láeg was a lot more fascinating than anybody seemed to have realised, given how little had been written about him. Which is how I ended up doing an MA about Láeg mac Riangabra, because, well, somebody had to do it.

A photo of Finn (a white person with a shaved head and orange tinted glasses) holding up their thesis in front of an ivy-covered wall.
That moment when you research a novel so hard, you end up with another degree.

With TRWTH, then, it was mostly a case of my needs as a writer requiring academic research to back them up. Yes, my writing certainly informed my academic work — I began to notice doubles and parallels I might not have paid attention to if I hadn’t been wondering how to make certain scenes less repetitive, and I had a much better sense of the text as a story rather than as disconnected parts to be used for analysis — but on the whole, the two threads remained reasonably separate.

The Animals We Became has been slightly different, but I’ve learned at least as much from it.

I knew a lot less about the Fourth Branch going in than I knew about Táin Bó Cúailnge (although there is also less to know, it being a much, much shorter text). I wanted to keep it that way to start with. One of the reasons I haven’t been able to edit TRWTH is because my academic feelings about the text have been interfering with my creative processes — I knew the pacing was wrong, but didn’t know how to fix it without deviating further from the source material than I wanted to; I knew certain interpretations were academically dubious, but I was resting a plot point on them and didn’t know how to change it, etc. So I decided to do things differently with Animals, and put my creative intentions first.

This meant that during all my planning, all the notes I was writing to myself about the themes I wanted to explore and the characters’ motivations and emotional arcs, I didn’t reread the story. And I didn’t read anything that any academics had said about it. I let my intentions guide me, and only when I knew what I wanted to achieve on a narrative level did I go back to the text itself, and start looking at the details.

But once I started looking at the details…

I mentioned above that I have a close friend who specialises in medieval Welsh. She’s also one of my beta readers, and generally gets live updates whenever I’m writing, well, anything, and this has meant I have been constantly in her DMs this past month Learning Things About The Fourth Branch. Fortunately for everybody involved, she has also been reading up on them recently for teaching purposes, and as such, we Learned Things simultaneously — and that turned out to be the best possible way of learning them.

A Discord message reading "hello I have a welsh question". It is the first message to be sent on 23 February 2023, showing that it's out of the blue.
It’s really useful to have nerdy friends who will explain grammatical mutations in Welsh on demand, I’ve gotta say.

For me, coming to the story from the point of view of somebody trying to write a book about it, my focus has been fairly broad, but often practical: how does this story work? Which aspects of its fundamental themes support the fundamental themes that I am exploring? How do I want to interpret [ambiguous element] in order for it to work, narratively, within this new context? The result is that I find myself paying attention to things that aren’t necessarily academically significant, and which I might not have noticed before, but which are going to be important to my retelling.

Some of these were on a macro level, looking at the structure of the story itself. My plans for this book developed in part out of an observation about the circularity of the story (Gwydion, a man who was punished by being turned into animals, is the one to punish Blodeuwedd with transformation into an owl) and from there I only noticed more circularity, more parallels, more events doubling back on themselves and repeating over and over again. It is a story where everything in it gives birth to everything else in it: consequences and doubles, all the way through.

Other observations were on a micro level, tiny details. The hair colour of a character, and what that implied about kinship. The fact that the only sentence in the entire story where we see what Lleu is thinking is when he is a small child, and we learn that he loves Gwydion, because he has nobody else. The importance of pigs. (Okay, honestly, this is a macro level thing, considering how pigs are one of the running themes in the Four Branches and they show up so much. I did not really notice the pigs before this. I now comprehend that the pigs are very important.)

Discord messages between two users whose usernames have been blacked out with coloured squares. Green user says: "i'm thinking about little baby lleu at court who loves gwydion more than anyone else because gwydion is the only person who acknowledges him and like. actually looks after him". Blue user says: "NOOOOOOO" with a sobbing emoji. Green user responds with the same sobbing emoji.
We might both be unduly emotional about this one.

And some were simply practical questions: what was the difference between two spellings of a character’s name? Where was a certain place? (This is where having a friend who knows the recent scholarship well is helpful — they can quickly tell you why some use Arianrhod and some Aranrhod, and what interpretations each of those spellings support, and then all I have to do is decide which one better suits my purposes.)

Breaking down a story into moving parts so that you can reconstruct it as a novel is a great way to notice what those moving parts are — details you might otherwise have dismissed, or ideas you hadn’t realised showed up more than once, or even new ways of interpreting plot points.

And when you know that your friend is building something academic out of those parts… well, many times this month I’ve brought a piece to my friend and said, “Hey, what would you do with this?” or “Would this support your argument that X is Y?” or “How does Z fit into everything?” and the resulting discussion has not only helped me decide how to write the book, but helped her with an article she’s planning, which has been awesome.

Screenshot of Discord messages reading "FUCK. FINN CAN I BORROW THAT. I WILL CITE YOU IN MY ARTICLE I PROMISE."
I very much look forward to this article’s existence.

Because that’s the joy of working creatively with a text that you also know academically. The creative work prompts you to break it down in ways you wouldn’t when analysing it, and put emphasis on things you would otherwise overlook, and in doing so, offers a brand new way of looking at it — one that isn’t counter to academic readings, but which helps inform them.

And that’s also the joy of collaboration: creative questions prompting academic answers, academic questions prompting creative answers, different perspectives on the same story resulting in breakthroughs in both directions.

Academically, I suppose what I do with texts is ask questions of them, and look for the answers within the text. Creatively, what I do is create the answers, and I’m not necessarily asking the same questions. But it’s part of the same process: it’s about trying to understand the story on a deeper level.

After drafting this book, I understand the Fourth Branch and its themes in a way that I would never have done without writing this book. I even have opinions about academic discussions of it that I wouldn’t have had if I were purely engaging with it as an academic. And I’ve been able, because I’ve been thinking about it creatively and almost coming at it sideways as a result, to offer new insights to friends focusing on it academically, connections they might not have drawn.

I don’t know if I’ll ever feel like I know enough about medieval Welsh to write or collaborate on an article about it to present some of those insights academically, but I certainly feel like I understand it on the level of story in a way that I didn’t before. And the academic insights offered by friends have given depth to the book, too, allowing me to tease out connections and themes that would’ve been easily missed.

And that’s one of the reasons I love writing retellings: because it allows me to bring together my creative and academic identities, my medievalist interests and my writing experience, to enhance both. I don’t have to choose between them, because they are aspects of the same thing. They are both ways of understanding stories, of getting inside stories to figure out what makes them tick, of figuring out what makes them what they are. If there’s a difference, it’s that academic analysis goes from the outside in, and a retelling is more like working from the inside out.

Academic, creative, and transformative approaches: all of them are about breaking down a text into its moving parts, and then figuring out how to put them back together again.

And, yes, sometimes my creative work leaves me with deep-rooted though minimally supported textual interpretations that I will not budge on (for example: Gwydion is ginger). But frankly, I’ve read enough 19th century scholarship to know that people have made far wilder claims for far worse reasons, so I don’t intend to stop doing this any time soon, either.

I don’t know what the future holds for The Animals We Became — nor, indeed, for To Run With The Hound or The Wolf and His King — but I hope, one day, to share these stories with you, and in doing so, offer a new way of looking at these texts, this time from the inside out.


*One exception to this is that I chose to keep Gronw alive at the end of The Animals We Became, because it better served the themes of the story I was telling. This is the only actual plot change I made, although I made other additions, expanding on gaps in the narrative. [back]

**I haven’t decided if I’ll go back to this book. In some regards, it would make a good follow-up to TBA: it has its dark moments, but it’s a more hopeful book, and might provide a good bridge to lighter-hearted YA. But I don’t know if it’s where my passions lie these days, and it would require a LOT of editing. Only time will tell, on this front. [back]


You can find out more about my research on the ‘Research‘ page of my website, which includes links to any of my published articles that are available online. But if it’s my creative work you’re here for, you want the ‘Books‘ page. Neither The Butterfly Assassin nor The Hummingbird Killer have anything to do with medieval literature, but I still wrote them, so you might enjoy them.

Retelling The Details

I like writing retellings. I joke that it’s because the plot is already done for me: I’m very much not an outliner, because I’m unable to see my way to the end until I’ve got there, but a retelling offers me a ready-made framework and an end already in sight. That is, if I actually stick to the original plot. Some of my ‘retellings’ over the past few years have been looser, ‘inspired by’ their source material more than directly retelling it: Bard, for example, or the chaotic gay orchestra novel that I have yet to finish (or title).

That isn’t to say I only write retellings (The Butterfly Assassin isn’t one, by any stretch of the imagination), but they’ve certainly dominated my output over the past few years, with The Wolf and His King (a retelling of ‘Bisclavret’) being my main focus recently. In that one, I kept most of the original story intact, extrapolating backstory and secondary characters but leaving the plot framework in place. I can tell you something, it made writing a synopsis a lot easier.

There are many different ways of approaching retellings, and the term gets used to describe everything from a direct reworking to something that only borrows a few names or plot points or vibes. All of these are totally valid approaches (although going into a book expecting it to be one kind and getting the other can be a major disappointment), and have their own challenges. I’ve had fun with both, but recently I’ve been thinking about the challenges specific to retellings that stick close to their originals.

There’s a lot to consider. How do you find the balance between something that feels accurate and authentic, and something that works well as a modern novel? The further removed your source material is from that format, the more challenges at play — a novel’s story structure, pacing, and sensibilities can be very different from a medieval prose tale, an ancient epic poem, or a Greek tragedy. How do you write characters that reflect the values and ideals of the society who created them, while also being sympathetic and interesting to modern readers with modern expectations of what a protagonist will be like?

And the closer you stick to the original story, the more the divergences stand out. Why include X, and omit Y? Will your readers notice? Will they know the story as well as you do, and wonder why you chose to privilege one version over another? How do you decide which details matter, and which can be abandoned for the sake of making good art?

To some people, the answer to this is simple: do what you want, and anyone who doesn’t like it can deal with it, because that’s their problem, not yours. And it’s true. Your retelling is your retelling. If a detail is incompatible with the story you’re trying to tell, maybe it’s best simply to let go of it, and sometimes, changing the details is crucial to the retelling. This is a story where A chooses B, not C; this is a story where D has the power, not E; this is a story where F survives. Art over accuracy.

But there’s a flip side to that: if the details don’t fit the story, is the story right? Is this the material you should retell to weave this particularly story? Would another character, another fairytale, another text provide a better basis? Fundamental changes to the mood and vibe of the story should be done with intent and thought: details should be changed because changing them does something, makes the story what it is, not because they fell by the wayside along the way. Intent and thought over carelessness.

And figuring out which details are important to shaping the story and which are merely incidental can be harder than it sounds.

Recently, I’ve been rereading parts of To Run With The Hound. For those unfamiliar with this novel of mine, it’s a retelling of Táin Bó Cúailnge, focusing on the bond between Cú Chulainn and Fer Diad from their training together through to their encounter on the battlefield. I wrote the first draft in late 2018, and have been waiting to have the time and brainpower to edit it ever since.

There are many things I intend to change when I redraft the book; I’ve been keeping note of them for years. Some of these changes are about the writing — ways to try and fix the pacing, the prose, the characterisation. Some of them are more academic: Add more Naoise to part I, says one of my notes, and remember that the sons of Uisliu are known for their singing voices. The more I learn about the Ulster Cycle, the more attention I pay to the secondary characters, the ones who were just names to me when I wrote the first draft.

What really struck me, rereading, was that I disagree with my past self’s interpretations of the source material.

This is, perhaps, a risk you take when adapting a text you’re also working with on an academic level. My relationship to the Táin will never be a purely narrative relationship: it’s one fundamentally informed by my academic work. Everything from how I arrange the chronology of the different remscéla (fore-tales) to which recension I choose to follow when details diverge is an interpretation that relies on my academic understanding of the text. The relationships I portray between characters are coloured by the other texts they appear in, and how those stories join up.

It’s a funny thing. At the time that I drafted TRWTH, I knew the Táin incredibly well. Only a few months out of undergrad, I’d been working closely with the text in order to write my dissertation. I’d read it dozens of times in close succession, and knew the plot back to front.

I know it better now, and so I would write this book differently.

See, in most cases it’s not that 2018!me had a completely unrecognisable reading of the major characters. My reading of Cú Chulainn — and of Fer Diad — was informed by my dissertation, a piece of work I’ve continued to develop, turning part of it into an article. I have a deeper understanding now than I did then, but it’s built on the same foundations.

There are characters I would write very differently, with Láeg being the most prominent of those. I knew almost nothing about him when I began writing TRWTH, and it shows; he has very little in the way of a distinct personality. It was writing that book that made me realise he was interesting in the first place, and so my narrative approaches informed my academic research, and sent me down a rabbithole that led to my MA thesis focusing on Láeg.

Mostly, though, it’s the details. It’s the things I didn’t think were important. It’s the scenes I skimmed over, versus the ones I allowed the story to dwell on; it’s the little changes, where a piece of advice is spoken by one character instead of another, or somebody else takes a watchman role and describes a battle. It’s everything that the casual reader, the one who hasn’t spent the last four years immersed in the Ulster Cycle, probably won’t even notice.

Nobody reviewing a retelling of this sort would be likely to say, “Well, I liked it, except that the author made Lugaid the observer in this instance of the watchman motif, and that just doesn’t fit, because he isn’t otherwise fulfilling an interpretative or mediating function.” Nobody would say, “Yeah, the author clearly knows the text really well, but they seemed to misinterpret the significance of this character’s skill at board games.” Because nobody cares.

But I care.

With a retelling like this, one where a significant portion of the book hews very closely to its source material (Part I of the book is largely my own invention, informed by Tochmarc Emire and Oileamhain Con Culainn, but Part II and Part III follow the Táin almost beat for beat), it’s the details that matter, the details that make it my retelling and not somebody else’s. Hell, it’s the details that make it a retelling and not a translation. And currently it’s a retelling that reflects my 2018 self’s interpretation, but it doesn’t reflect my interpretations as of 2021.

Now, as well as being a better academic than I was in 2018, I’m also a better writer, and I know that there’s a point at which faithfulness becomes limiting. The story needs to breathe and change, because no matter how much I want to evoke the moods and images of the medieval text, my audience is not a medieval audience, and wants different things from a story. This inevitably means letting go of some details, diminishing some moments in order to give more weight to others, reshaping scenes to fit the greater whole. But a crucial part of doing that is deciding which details have to be kept — and my past self and I disagree on that.

Every time I work on the Táin, I learn something new about it. In writing my undergraduate dissertation, I learned how to approach the different recensions, and how each paints a slightly different image of gender and sexuality within the text; I learned how the story interacted with legal concepts of marriage and adulthood and fosterage. In writing TRWTH, I developed an understanding of the story as narrative, and the complex chronology of the remscéla that defied any attempt to put them in order; I began to notice which details the Táin never gives us, and which characters were worth examining more closely.

In the independent research I did between undergrad and my MA, I developed on all of those understandings, and over the course of my MA I’ve learned a great deal more, albeit mostly focused on Láeg: about the interactions between the Táin and other texts, particularly late (early modern) Ulster Cycle tales, and about the fact that there’s never only one explanation for anything. And the details that my past self thought didn’t matter — who wins at fidchell between Cú Chulainn and Láeg; who tells Cú Chulainn about the warriors approaching his camp — now matter to me, because many of them play a pivotal part in my academic interpretations of Láeg.

This could go on forever. Perhaps I’ll find another character to examine at length, or a new obscure late tale to fixate on that will reshape my understanding of everything that went before it, or some other angle of approach that will bring me back to the Táin with fresh eyes to seek out new readings. No doubt if this book is ever published, there’ll come a point, a few years down the line, when I cease to agree with my interpretations and wish I’d done this or that differently.

What I have to decide — what anyone writing a retelling like this has to decide — is which of those details are important not to the source material, but to the story I’m telling. I need to acknowledge that by omitting something on which I hung an academic argument, I’m not deciding that that detail or that argument isn’t important, only that it doesn’t contribute to the book I’m trying to write at this time. And this book can’t be every story at once, can’t be every interpretation at once, can’t be every reading at once. I have to choose.

I can write a Cú Chulainn who was nursed by Láeg’s mother and raised alongside his charioteer, or I can write a Cú Chulainn who was raised by his parents until he went to Emain Macha when he was five, or I can write a Cú Chulainn whose closest bond of fosterage is to Conall because his mother was Cú Chulainn’s nurse, but I can’t write all of them. I can have a Láeg with Connacht connections, a Láeg with Otherworld connections, or a Láeg who is both human and Ulaid, but I can’t have all of those Láegs at once. I can give Fer Diad’s charioteer a name of my own invention to compensate for his namelessness in the early manuscripts, or I can make him Idh mac Riangabra, Láeg’s brother, as he is in the fifteenth-century Stowe manuscript, but I can’t do both.

(It’s a shame, almost, that there’s little room in ‘original’ fiction to write four different, unrelated books about the same character, which contradict and conflict with each other. Fanfic writers have the right of it, where the same writer may offer multiple readings of a character, and nobody expects them to bring the same version to the table every time. I could write a retelling of Oidheadh Con Culainn and focus on entirely different character details than the ones that are important in Táin Bó Cúailnge, but I would struggle to sell both without the world assuming one was a sequel to the other and being perplexed by the perceived inconsistency.)

Academia is about possibilities, readings, offering interpretations. Retellings are about making choices: which interpretation will we go for? Which possibility will we draw to the front? In a good retelling, there are still multiple readings open to the audience, but they may be completely different readings from those the audience would take from the source material, because the characterisation that’s been offered has already been shaped and interpreted. And that, inevitably, means letting go of some of the possibilities that the source material left open.

When I go back to TRWTH, the changes I make will be informed by my greater academic understanding of the medieval texts. Láeg might actually have a personality, for a start, and this time I’ll remember that the sons of Uisliu are singers, able to charm with their voices. And the details I include might shift in response to those changes, placing the focus on different scenes and different moments.

But ultimately, what I have to decide is not which interpretation I think has the strongest manuscript support, but which interpretation makes the best story. Which reading will pave the way to telling the story I want to tell; which possibility I should lean into, to get the strongest emotional response from my readers. It’ll be a novel shaped and directed by my academic research, but it won’t — can’t — shouldn’t be my academic research in novel form.

In a retelling, an author makes choices. We untangle contradictions, close off alternative readings, privilege one interpretation over another, sideline one character for another’s sake, and in doing so, we let go of details. Even the ones we care about.

Accuracy matters, in a retelling like this. But art, it turns out, matters more.


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