Ellyllon by Debbie Bennett

Emily likes to make an entrance. Had she been born in the time of grand balls in stately homes, she’d have waited to be announced on arrival – Lady Emily Coombs – and she’d glide into a room and capture everyone’s attention. I’m more of a sneak-in-the-back-door girl; I like to feel my way around an atmosphere, gauge the room, watch from the shadows until I know who is in charge – who are the leaders and how will things play out. Because no party is simply a get-together of friends. There are friendship groups, power-plays, things that might happen and things that will never happen. I don’t expect it’s any different in the adult world and us teenagers are simply learning the rules of the game early, so we can figure out how to bend them when we need to. Tonight, the worst that will happen will be bruised egos – maybe a fight – but it’s all practice for the real thing. 

Or so I tell myself as Liam strolls over to us in the hallway, his hand brushing my bum in a gesture I suspect nobody saw. 

“Hey, Emily. Looking good!” 

I might as well have not been there at all. Invisible. But the touch of his fingers says it all and I know that despite what I said to him two days ago, it’s still me he fancies. But I’ve done what I can. I can’t make Liam fall in love with my best friend – I can only set up the circumstances and I’ve done that for her. The rest is up to them.

Writing new stuff is hard. When you've spent several years developing a series and you know your characters better than you know your friends, it's not easy to step away and change genre completely. So many of my writer friends have gone from fantasy to crime - maybe I'm bucking the trend by going back to my roots of dark fantasy after a life (many years, anyway) of crime?

Where else could I go with my six-book, double-trilogy that started with Hamelin's Child? I dragged my poor characters to hell and back again. To go further wouldn't be right and in any case I'd ended on just a hint of a maybe-possibly happy-ever-after for my bad-boy Lenny - to carry on would have meant deciding one way or the other, and that's not my decision to make! So I leave it there and move on.

Moving on in every sense of the word. Moving house, change of life (cliche, but oh-so-true) and yet I'm going back to fantasy in an attempt to weave something together that says everything about my literary tastes and the things in life that have always drawn me in fascinated me and made me wonder if there really is more than we know out there.

My guilty secret has always been faeries. Not Cottingly fairies, or Brian Froud fairies, but the darker version, the fey. I adore Melissa Marr and Julie Kagawa's early stuff, although I'm less enamoured by more recent books - perhaps for the same reason I've finished with my Hamelin characters. You can have too much of a good thing and after a while, you just can't stomach any more. Leaving people wanting more is always a good place to stop.

I also grew up on Alan Garner and Susan Cooper. Celtic mythology has always been a favourite playground and rich source of stories and the Irish sidhe have been done to death. So I'm playing with Welsh mythology now, mixing with faery legends and adding a sprinkle of music to the mix.

I wrote a short story many years back. Called Daughter of Lir, it placed in the top 3 of the Hastings Writers Festival and I was invited to the presentation in Hastings (funnily enough) where the prizes were to be presented by David Gemmell. Sadly I couldn't go - 200+ miles while heavily pregnant didn't seem like a good idea. It was published in several anthologies and eventually finished up in my collection Maniac and Other Stories. You can read it for free via the link as it's in the first 10% sample on Amazon's Look Inside feature. It's a re-imagining of the legend of the Irish King Lir, whose daughter(s) were turned into swans by his jealous second wife Aoife. Lir is the Irish equivalent of the Welsh Llyr and we're into Mabinogion territory now and I could just drown in all this mythology ...