Tag: The Animals We Became

At the end of February, I submitted my line edits for The Animals We Became, my next book — a queertrans retelling of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi (the story of Blodeuwedd) exploring gender, trauma, and compulsory heterosexuality through assorted nonconsensual animal transformations and all the other fascinating horrors of medieval Welsh literature.

Line edits are never a fast or easy process for me, but these took me five and a half months, which is considerably longer than I’ve ever spent on a similar edit — with my YA books, I don’t think I was ever given more than six weeks to turn around an edit, and sometimes it was closer to four. In hindsight, I don’t know how I ever managed that, save that I would put my entire life on hold while working on it; part of the problem this time was that due to health issues and academic deadlines, there were large chunks of time during that period when I was unable to work on my edits at all. When I did finally come to rewrite the book, it took me less than a month to do so… but it was getting there that was the hard part, as we’ll see.

I have an unconventional approach to editing, perhaps, and tend to tackle structural edits by opening a new document next to the old one and writing the book again, because to work within the same document feels stifling. I find myself too limited by what’s already there, unwilling to make radical changes, and the result is always worse. When I write in a new document, whole chunks of text will survive, but they’ll be retyped word by word, because if it’s not worth retyping then it’s not worth keeping. I’m sometimes quite aggressive in my edits, cutting whole chunks of the book and reworking major plot points, but eventually, I’ll wrangle things into shape. It’s labour intensive, but it works.

Still, by the time I get to line edits, I’ve usually set aside the separate document and embraced the world of tracked changes. My usual approach is to read the book aloud, checking for unintentional rhyme or repetition, refining the rhythm and style of each sentence, making sure that syllables fall where I want them to and alliteration is deployed where most effective or avoided where awkward. Line edits are a time for nitpicking and accuracy, so elements may get rewritten or reworked, but these are usually sentences rather than paragraphs, details rather than scenes.

I began like this in the autumn, but something was wrong. I could tweak and polish each sentence all I liked, but I wasn’t happy with The Animals We Became, and I couldn’t pin down why. It was a strange time to be working on it, with reviews coming in for The Wolf and His King before and after the UK publication in November, and I found myself experiencing a kind of Second Book Dread that I’d never experienced before. Although this will be my fifth published novel, it’s my first time having to write something that is both similar enough to a previous book to have some overlap of audience while also being very different in tone and not a direct follow-up, and the pressure of expectations and the knowledge that I would inevitably disappoint some of them started to get to me.

It was the positive reviews for The Wolf and His King that were troubling me the most, because many of the things that people seemed to like were things that were not in The Animals We Became. Some were never intended to be — this was never a romantic book, and I’d resigned myself to disappointing those who thought I was going to write romance from now on — but others nagged at me, because I didn’t quite like that they weren’t there, either. The depth of academic research and historical detail was far less visible in this book than in TWAHK, for example, and while that didn’t mean it hadn’t been part of my writing process, I began to feel increasingly less confident in the choices I’d made that were rendering it so much less obvious.

What I was missing, I realised eventually, was constraints to work within. Rules to push back against.

My books thrive on argument, little as I enjoy it at the time: I have problems with authority, and I need something to rebel against, a constraint to struggle within. With my YA books, these constraints were usually editorial: tight word limits, things I was told I couldn’t do in YA, requests to clarify more while somehow not adding any words, etc. My editors would give me a series of seemingly impossible and incompatible instructions and I would argue with the ones I disagreed with and then do what I could to reconcile the compromises with the text. Very often, suggestions I received weren’t directly actionable, but they revealed a problem that did need fixing somehow, and the compromise on how to do that would lead to a better result. The struggle to enact those changes within the word limits and while conforming to the expectations of category and genre would often produce scenes and details that were better than the version I created on my own.

With The Wolf and His King, the constraints were more self-imposed. One of the main constraints I imposed on myself was in the use of language, and my attempt to avoid anachronistic concepts in an attempt to immerse myself more fully in my characters’ worldviews and perspectives. In general, the historical setting provided most of the rules I found myself pushing back against: how could I make this work in the setting? What did this mean in the setting? What were the implications of this action, how would this emotion be expressed, what would characters fear or desire about this in the setting?

The rules weren’t so tight as to become stifling, because I knew that I could, at any point, escape. I’d promised myself that anachronisms were permissible for narrative reasons, and my author’s note at the beginning gave me a Get Out Of Jail Free card with regard to using them. If I did so, though, it would need to be with intention — I would need to genuinely think it was worthwhile, that it made the story better, rather than simply being easier. And I didn’t want to resort to them, because avoiding them was more useful.

A sidenote: my author’s notes always claim less fidelity to the rules than I actually aimed for while writing. I am actually much more precise and nitpicky than I pretend to be, but if I tell you that, you might nitpick me right back. But it’s also that the nitpicking at my end is, ultimately, a means to an end, not the end in itself. It’s not about whether the book is Historically Accurate For The Sake Of Being Historically Accurate; it’s about whether striving for historical accuracy helped me enter more fully into my characters’ minds and the world they lived in, in order to create something that rang true.

The real value of those constraints, I realised, was that they cut me off from the path of least resistance. They closed the door to cliché and to generic choices. They forced me to act with intention, rather than out of convention; they made me interrogate what I was doing, and decide what I valued about it. Arguing with editors or myself about whether to keep a detail that didn’t follow the Rules helped me realise if that detail mattered — or if there was one I could come up with that would satisfy me and follow the rules, potentially forcing me to do something more original and more creative in order to make it work.

These were not constraints that could be imposed at the start of writing. They worked because they happened at the editorial stage — and more, because they happened late in the editorial process, when tearing it all up and starting again from scratch wasn’t an option. The struggle to improve a scene became the effort to reconcile what was on the page with the rules I wanted to follow, and it was in the reconciliation that I would usually find a better version of the scene, one that felt fresher and more interesting than the more generic option that preceded it.

And the trouble with The Animals We Became was that I didn’t have any constraints.

Editorially, the book had had far less intervention than anything else I’d written. I drafted it in February 2023 and it was this first draft that my editor read, with no earlier beta readers, feedback, or redrafts before it entered the publishing process. Structural edits were reasonably light, at which point I sought out some beta readers, because I realised I needed more perspectives to wrestle with, more questions to answer, more misinterpretations to help me realise when I’d been unclear. I needed readers who didn’t know the story it was based on, too, so I could tell whether it made sense without context.

My first attempt at line edits, following this beta reader feedback, resulted in more than twenty thousand words being added to the book, so I asked for a second round. This I got, but I fear my editor likes my writing too much: she left 83 revisions on the document, promising me that it only needed some fine tuning. But something was wrong, and the more I tried to fine-tune it, the more I thought I might have strung it with completely the wrong strings.

The problem, I realised, was that there were no rules. I had added thirty thousand words to the book since the first draft, and it hadn’t been a problem; I wasn’t frantically trying to cut them. My editor’s 83 revisions did not provide a great deal of significant resistance to grapple with. I hadn’t set myself linguistic restrictions — I had deliberately chosen not to — so I didn’t have the same vocabulary constraints. And I’d set the story in a semi fantasy world (geographically Wales, chronologically non-specific, as in the original tale, and culturally fictional) which meant there were no rules there either: I didn’t have to worry about historical accuracy. I even had magic to help me escape any overly difficult questions about technology.

I could do whatever I wanted. And I had. But without anything to fight against, without resistance, with no specific paths along which to channel my creativity, it had began to slip along the well-worn tracks of easy answers.

Left to myself, I had created something generic. Not entirely generic, nor entirely without value, but something that lapsed more often than I liked into conventional patterns and ideas. Everything from architecture to household structure was just a little bit… uninterrogated, owing as much to modern pop culture ideas of The Past to any genuine world. And it was not, to my mind, anywhere near as Welsh as I’d wanted it to be, despite having known since I set out that this was a priority. (I’m not taking eight hours a week of Welsh lessons for no reason!)

I’ve been haunted throughout the writing process by the thought of my academic colleagues reading this book: several of them have been kind enough to read The Wolf and His King, but, well, if I’m honest with you, my main anxiety is that there’s considerably more sex in The Animals We Became and I have to go to conferences with these people. 💀 I realised, though, that my prudishness was fading beneath a greater and far more important concern about how this book would read as an interpretation of the text, and as a way of engaging with medieval Welsh literature, and as the latest instalment of English-language textual reception of the Mabinogi, etc.

And, okay, you can’t think about this too much. You’ll go mad. A novel is not an academic thesis; my narrative interpretations are not necessarily my academic ones; what makes a good modern fantasy novel is not necessarily what I think a medieval author intended; the themes I am using the Fourth Branch to explore are not necessarily ones I think are present in the same way in the original text, and so on. While I do find fiction a valuable way of exploring and understanding medieval literature, I am ultimately writing my story using an older narrative, not analysing the one that exists. Moreover, this is a queertrans book about gender and trauma and there are going to be those who are hostile to that because the field of Celtic Studies can, at times, be fairly conservative; these are not people it is worth trying to please.

But. It wasn’t that I wanted to please them. It was just that I wanted to be able to stand behind my own work. To say, yes, I did that on purpose. Yes, this was an interpretative choice I made. Yes, I had to decide how to handle that and this is what I decided to do. I found myself reaching for author’s notes, justifications, lists of Further Reading, as though this might prove I’d done my research. It was, I realised, insecurity, because I didn’t feel those things were visible in the text, and I wanted to prove I knew them anyway.

By the time I’d completed my first pass of these line edits, reading aloud and tweaking individual sentences — which took much longer than planned — I’d realised that I was academically unhappy with the setting and the choices I’d made. I didn’t want an author’s note to be the only place my expertise was visible! And I especially didn’t want the setting to be Generic Fantasy World Superimposed On North Wales — I’d never wanted it to be that, but I’d somehow failed to avoid it, because when I decided against certain constraints (a particular century in the real historical past, for example), I hadn’t imposed enough others in their place.

It was a perfectly good fantasy novel, I guess, but it wasn’t the story I was trying to tell, because it wasn’t engaging with the Fourth Branch on the level that I wanted it to.

Too late, I realised the constraints that were missing, the rules I should have been following, the research I needed to incorporate. Too late, I could see what the book needed to rescue it from sliding into a pit of Uninterrogated Genre Conventions. Perhaps, if the book had had years to stew (as I always prefer), I would have figured this out before I got this stage; perhaps if I’d had more beta readers; perhaps if I hadn’t been suffering from migraine-related brain fog that left me unable to maintain complex thought for months on end… But the circumstances were what they were, and there I was, with a book I suddenly knew how to fix but didn’t have time to.

In my second pass, I rewrote certain scenes and chapters, frantically burying myself in research materials. But it needed more than that, and having finally glimpsed what the book needed to be a decent retelling of the Fourth Branch, rather than merely a decent fantasy novel, I wasn’t prepared to let it go. So despite the knock-on effect this would have on academic deadlines, I found myself asking for an extension. My editor, though she reassured me that she thought the book was in good shape already, granted me the extra time, and then I rewrote the book properly, this time with a much better understanding of my own personal rules for how the narrative and its world worked.

When I finally gave it back at the end of February, there were more like 8,300 revisions in the document than 83, and it crashed my laptop every time you tried to interact with one of those tracked changes. (I’d rewritten it in a separate document, and used “compared changes” to produce a version tracking them — it was the only way it was viable.)

It’s… better. I’m academically much happier with it. I think it’s doing something more interesting; I think it’s engaging more meaningfully with its setting; I think engaging with the setting is more than just interesting background noise but actively contributes to the main themes; I think pulling it apart like this enabled me to see certain other flaws and fix them. There are choices that some people will disagree with, but which I made because they suited my themes, or because they were interesting to me, or because there was simply no Right Answer to a particularly thorny question of interpretation and I chose this one as being the one I could live with. I think I can stand behind them now, because I have thought about why I did them, and I’ve done them on purpose.

It would, however, have been nice if I’d realised two years earlier that this was what I needed to do — or perhaps two months earlier.

Because, as I’m realising, it’s the process of trying to wrestle existing material into shape that often makes imposing rules on one’s world and narrative valuable, far more than trying to write something that fits within them in the first place. It’s the push and pull of having to make it work within an existing structure, when you can’t simply extend the scene indefinitely or completely alter the setup. It’s the way it forces you to question what you value enough to keep, and what can easily be overwritten with something new.

The book isn’t finished yet. We have copyedits yet to go, and I’ve asked that the copyeditor errs on the side of too many comments rather than too few, because I’ve realised I need to be put in a position of defending my narrative choices if I’m going to stand by them. And while I am quite good at challenging myself — I hold myself to high standards, and always have done — I almost failed this time. Not because I couldn’t see that there was a problem, but because both figuring out the problem and how to fix it turned out to be almost too much for me, and I didn’t know what rules I was trying to follow until it was nearly too late.

Too few rules, it turns out, makes it too easy to take the path of least resistance and write the less interesting version of your book. You need something to wrestle with to force creativity, whether that’s a tight word limit or an editorial argument or a strict conformity to historical accuracy or never using the letter E or making every paragraph start with a certain letter of the alphabet or a rhyme scheme or metrical incorporating a particular series of medieval laws or whatever set of constraints you ultimately impose. Yes, in some ways, it’s about making life harder for yourself — but that’s because cutting off the “easy” options is what cuts off clichés and generic choices.

Perhaps, now that I’ve articulated this to myself, it will be easier in future to realise that I need to identify my constraints earlier in the line edits process. But perhaps they’re something that can only be determined through wrestling with the book in the first place, trying to understand why it isn’t clicking.

I don’t know. All I know is that eventually, I hope, I got there. It has been a difficult five and a half months, and I’m quite burned out, for all that I feel I have little to show for it, but while some days produced no words or visible progress, maybe they too were part of the process of wrestling with the book.

Or maybe I was simply wrestling with my brainfog, and should cut myself some slack, because it’s hard enough writing books and doing a PhD while chronically ill as it is.

The Animals We Became will be published by Gollancz on 26 November 2026, and you can pre-order it now (more links to follow as they filter through to other retailers).

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March 15, 2023

Storytelling and Scholarship

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

Can I just say: I love, love, LOVE how working creatively on medieval texts (i.e. writing a retelling) completely changes my academic relationship to them and lets me see layers of the story I would NEVER have noticed if I were only reading them as an academic.
— Finn Longman is mostly on Bluesky. (@FinnLongman) March 7, 2023

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.