The Unbecoming Genesis of The Môrdreigiau Chronicles

(it wasn't pretty, even if the washi tape was very pretty)

(I revealed the title of this series last week, so we have a new look today!)

It all started with a stationery supply.

That in itself is not unbecoming, after all, story ideas come from the strangest of places. This particular supply was from Notebook Therapy¹. At the end of 2022, they announced their new Hinoki line — and I fell in love.

I didn’t need another Traveler’s Notebook, let alone a lookalike, nor the washi or the ephemera or the stamps. But they were so pretty. How then to justify the purchase?

What if it was the journal of a fictional character? And let’s set it in Joseon era Korea. (I love the historical Kdramas: “Mr. Sunshine”, “The King’s Affection”, “Rookie Historian”, oh, there are so many.)

First problem: faux leather, elastic bands, plastic tape (PET tape) are not time period appropriate … but maybe she’s a time traveler?

But there was even a bigger problem …

Yes, you in the back? You got it. Appropriation.

I’m not Korean. I can’t speak Korean. And my knowledge of Korean history is limited to those aforementioned K-dramas and peeks into Wikipedia. I’d be taking Korean culture and my native Western culture and mashing it together and …. Appropriation. Ugh.

But this was, in the beginning, a personal, private project that I was whipping up just for fun. Just for me. Nobody would see it! I wasn’t even thinking about writing a novel. I thought it’d be a cute concept for a mixed media journal.

But knowing I’d appropriated a culture I’d never personally experienced (or researched), I knew I wouldn’t enjoy it. Even if nobody else but me read it.

Sometimes you have to listen to those nudges and do the next right thing. And that was to abandon that story concept.

Was I going to give up on that Hinoki line? No, of course not. I really wanted to do a themed journal so what would the story be instead?

I remembered a scene, an inciting incident, from a long-abandoned manuscript. I dug it out of the an external drive.

As seems to the the thing lately, I surprised myself.

From that old story, I had forgotten the:

• world building (it was an alternate history)

• magic!

• freakin’ steampunk air boats

My imagination came up with this? The hell?

Sadly, the synopsis fizzled, which is too bad because the first three chapters are crackingly good. (If i don’t say so myself.)

I wanted to read the rest of this book!

Initially, the only piece I felt I could recover from that book was the sea dragon in that scene I remembered first. It’s so vivid because I had dreamed the scene before I came up with the rest of the story.

In the end, I borrowed a bit more from it, but you’ll have to wait until book three to see those borrowings.

The setting then if I’m not going to appropriate?

Half of my Mum’s family comes from Wales. It needed to be near the ocean for seadragon purposes. I remembered rocky cliffs from photos of parts of Wales. I’d been back to my great-grandparents’ mining village but I didn’t actually make it to the west coast of Wales. I had spent a blustery chilly week in spring further up the coast. I could channel that.

And so I have.

By the way, I did order from the Hinoki line — the washi tapes. I decided I didn’t need the entire line. But I was off and running when it came to supplies. You can see the hauls and the set up of the ephemera box from the journal side of this project over on my YouTube channel.

The moral to this story?

Listen to your gut, and don’t wait for the anxiety-inducing clue by four that comes right before hitting the Publish button.

When have you had to set aside ideas? Why?

1. Notebook Therapy - Hinoki collection