The Scorpio Races

AUTHOR’S NOTE

As a teen, I was always intrigued when I read articles about authors mulling over story ideas for months or years before they knew how to write them. As a teen writer who scribbled down novel ideas as soon as they came to her, this seemed quaint and foreign. How could you not know how to write your own story? I thought, as I dashed out another terrible novel in a month.

Well, here I am, being one of those authors. I have wanted to write about water horses for a very long time. I’ve actually attempted it several times. First while in college, then again right after. I’d almost given up, but a few years ago – after I’d published three novels and really should’ve known what I was doing – I threw myself at the legend one more time. And failed again.

The only difference to this failure was that it was not a bang, as before, but a whimper.

The problem was that the myth was both complicated and plotless, with no inherent narrative to guide a daunted author. There were rather a lot of variations: a Manx version called glashtin; Irish versions called capall uisge, cabyll ushtey, and aughisky; Scottish versions called each uisge and kelpies. Apart from being nearly universally impossible to pronounce (the name I went with, capall uisce, is pronounced CAPple ISHka), the main feature of each was a dangerous fairy horse from the water.

There were many magical elements that appealed to me: The horses were associated with November; they ate flesh; if you lured them away from the ocean, they made the finest mounts imaginable… unless they touched salt water again.

But then there was also an eerie shape-shifting element to the myth. Some versions involved a water horse turning into a handsome young man with chestnut hair. The newly minted young man would wander by the waterside, luring maidens closer – because of course there is nothing more irresistible than a strange redheaded boy who smells vaguely of fish – and then drag the victims down into the water to devour them. Lungs and liver would wash up later.

It was this second half that slayed me. Every time I tried to work in the creature both man and horse, I realized I was telling a story I didn’t want to tell. It wasn’t until I wrote the Shiver trilogy with its rather corrupted version of the werewolf legend that I realized I didn’t have to take the water horses at face value. I could be as choosy as I liked with my mythology.

I threw out absolutely everything that I didn’t need about the water horses, and ended up with The Scorpio Races, a story that isn’t really about water horses or fairies at all, now that I think about it.

Now, if you’d like to find out more about the creepy redheaded water boys with kelp in their hair, I urge you to hunt down a copy of Katharine Briggs’s An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures, which is an excellent starting point for all things fairy.

I suppose it’s still possible I might one day write the other half of the legend.

No, actually. No, it’s not.