by Linsey Hall
I think that’s it for the history and mythology in Gods of Magic—at least the big things. I hope you enjoyed the book and will come back for more of Rowan, Maximus, Ana and Bree!
Gods of Magic Acknowledgments
Thank you, Ben, for everything. There would be no books without you.
Thank you to Jena O’Connor and Lindsey Loucks for your excellent editing. The book is immensely better because of you! Thank you to Richard Goodrum, Eleonora, and Aisha Panjwaneey for you keen eyes with spotting errors.
Thank you to Orina Kafe for the beautiful cover art. Thank you to Collette Markwardt for allowing me to borrow the Pugs of Destruction, who are real dogs named Chaos, Havoc, and Ruckus. They were all adopted from rescue agencies.
Hunt for Magic Author’s Note
Thank you for reading Hunt for Magic! If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably read some of my previous books and know that I like to include historical places and mythological elements in my stories. Sometimes the history of these things is so interesting that I want to share more, and I like to do it in the Author’s Note instead of the story itself.
Hunt for Magic was so much fun because I got to include quite a few places that I love. Edinburgh Castle, for one, though I did make some adjustments to the architecture. I added a tall crenelated tower to one side of it, as well as the toilet chute through the wall. This is a common type of toilet in medieval castles and I added one to Edinburgh Castle. I don’t believe they have one exactly as I described it, but it was too good not to include.
On Dartmoor, when Rowan is running down the hill toward the haunted house, she notices a huge ring of large stones. This is meant to be Grimspound, a late Bronze Age settlement that was built and occupied around 1450–700 BC. It consists of a circular stone wall surrounding twenty-four smaller stone circles that were once houses. Dartmoor is full of amazing pre-history, and I wanted to include a little bit when Rowan went to visit.
The other main historical element in the book is the Colosseum in Rome. It is a fascinating place, but also a tragic place. Though I love the two places mentioned above, I don’t actually love this one. The history is just too awful (and I’m fairly certain I made my feelings clear in the book). I invented the crazy rooms underneath the stadium seating, but the real Colosseum is also full of corridors and passages, some of which even go underneath the main fighting arena.
I think that’s it for the history and mythology in Hunt for Magic—at least the big things. I hope you enjoyed the book and will come back for more of Rowan, Maximus, Ana and Bree!
Hunt for Magic Acknowledgments
Thank you, Ben, for everything. There would be no books without you.
Thank you to Jena O’Connor and Lindsey Loucks for your excellent editing. The book is immensely better because of you! Thank you to Aisha Panjwaneey, Erin T., Richard Goodrum, and Eleonora for you keen eyes with spotting errors.
Thank you to Orina Kafe for the beautiful cover art. Thank you to Collette Markwardt for allowing me to borrow the Pugs of Destruction, who are real dogs named Chaos, Havoc, and Ruckus. They were all adopted from rescue agencies.
Clash of Magic Author’s Note
Thank you for reading Clash of Magic! If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably read some of my previous books and know that I like to include historical places and mythological elements in my stories. Sometimes the history of these things is so interesting that I want to share more, and I like to do it in the Author’s Note instead of the story itself.
Clash of Magic was chock full of mythological elements. That’s one thing that’s easy about having a Greek Dragon God—we have so much information available about the Greeks and their religion. Many of the mythological elements were as I presented them in the story. For example, Atlas and Prometheus were the two titans who did not end up in Tartarus, while the Hesperides were in fact daughters of Atlas. Ladon the dragon was said to guard the golden apples in their garden, though some sources state that they were actually oranges. In this story, I wrote them as oranges.
The Amazons were said to live by the shore of the Black Sea, though I did invent the bit about them almost being thrown into Tartarus. Though they were frequent the enemies of the Greek heroes. I decided to give them a more modern spin and put them in the nearest large city to their ancestral homeland. The drink Raki that Prometheus and Rowan shared is the traditional Turkish liquor that you would find in many bars. I have not had it myself, but my Turkish friend says it is quite the intense beverage.
The location of Atlas’s hideout is based upon the crazy rock formations at Meteora, in Greece. In present day, there are monasteries built on top of the rocks, but for the purposes of the story, Atlas was out there all on his lonesome.
The Oracle at Delphi is one of the most famous oracles in history. She was generally an older peasant woman from the nearby village, and she gave her prophecies from within a small round building at the temple site of Delphi. Some people believed that she spoke the words of Apollo himself.
I think that’s it for the history and mythology in Clash of Magic—at least the big things. I hope you enjoyed the book and will come back for more of Rowan, Maximus, Ana and Bree!
Clash of Magic Acknowledgments
Thank you, Ben, for everything. There would be no books without you.
Thank you to Jena O’Connor and Lindsey Loucks for your excellent editing. Thank you to Aisha Panjwaneye and Richard Goodrum for spotting errors. The book is immensely better because of you!
Thank you to Orina Kafe for the beautiful cover art. Thank you to Collette Markwardt for allowing me to borrow the Pugs of Destruction, who are real dogs named Chaos, Havoc, and Ruckus. They were all adopted from rescue agencies.
Threat of Magic Author’s Note
Thank you for reading Threat of Magic! If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably read some of my previous books and know that I like to include historical places and mythological elements in my stories. Sometimes the history of these things is so interesting that I want to share more, and I like to do it in the Author’s Note instead of the story itself.
Threat of Magic was full of mythological elements because we have so much information available about the Greeks and their religion. Many of those elements were as I presented them in the story, but some were modified.
The most obvious modification is the Titans. In the myths, they aren’t inherently evil as I present them to be in this story. And likewise, the Greek gods weren’t necessarily good. In fact, in many cases, the Greek gods were jerks. For example, Daphne’s story of how she ended up in the tree is accurate to myth. In fact, there are many stories where the women get the bad end of the deal.
Anatlia, the realm of the Greek gods, is total fiction. I invented it for Nix’s series. However, most of the qualities of the realms within Hades were taken almost directly from primary sources.
There are no sources that I could find that reference the Stryx as worshipping Hecate. Though Hecate does dwell in the underworld alongside Persephone, she does not have her own horrible realm as I presented it.
When Rowan and Maximus entered Hades through the bottomless Alcyonian Lake at Lerna, they spotted a three headed Hydra underwater. This was a reference to the famous Hydra that Hercules fought during his famous labors. The Alcyonian Lake is considered to be one of the entrances to Hades, and the Hydra lived in that lake until Hercules killed it. The Hydra that Rowan and Maximus encountered was a descendent, and I like to think that it was a younger one as it had fewer heads.
I think that’s it for the history and mythology in Threat of Magic—at least the big things. I hope you enjoyed the book and will come back for more of Rowan, Maximus, Ana and Bree!
Threat of Magic Acknowledgments
Thank you, Ben, for everything. There would be no books without you.
Thank you to Jena O’Connor and Lindsey Loucks for your excellent editing. The book is immensely better because of you!
Thank you to
Orina Kafe for the beautiful cover art. Thank you to Collette Markwardt for allowing me to borrow the Pugs of Destruction, who are real dogs named Chaos, Havoc, and Ruckus. They were all adopted from rescue agencies.
Power of Magic Author’s Note
Thank you for reading Power of Magic! As with my other books, I like to include historical places and mythological elements.
Rowan’s series has been super fun to write because we know so much about the ancient Greeks and their religion. Many of those elements were as I presented them in the story, but some were modified.
One of the modifications in this book were the Echidna. According to written record, there was only one Echidna, and she was called the Mother of Monsters. Her famous offspring (with Typhon, the most fearsome monster in all of Greek myth) include Cerberus, the Sphinx, the Chimera, and the Lernaean Hydra. I chose to have three Echidna in Rowan’s story simply because it’s fun.
You may have recognized Medusa from one of my other books. She was only briefly mentioned in Nix’s series, but she had the same origin story in that book as well. Nix identified that Medusa wasn’t actually an evil character, but the story didn’t take her as far as rescuing her. However, the treatment of Medusa in Greek myth has always bothered me, so I thought it would be a good for Rowan to tackle the issue.
As I mention in the book, there are multiple origin stories for Medusa. One of the most famous ones is Ovid’s, in which Medusa is raped by Poseidon and then punished by Athena, who gives her the snake hair and ability to turn men to stone. Where’s the logic in that? Honestly, it just sucks. To make matters worse, the famous greek hero Perseus made it clear in Ovid’s tale that he thought Medusa deserved her fate. He then killed her in order to complete the tasks given to him by King Polydectes. Doesn’t sound like a hero to me. Since I loathe how Medusa was treated, one of the highlights of the book for me was getting to write Rowan as a true hero who saves her.
In fact, one of my favorite elements of Rowan’s story is that she rescues the women who were wronged by the gods. First Daphne and Lotus, who were trapped in trees to “save” them from lusty (rapey) gods, and then Medusa. Even Arachne, who chose to stay in her spider form, was given the option of help. I’m sure that if I did a little more research, I could find plenty more women (and a few men, too) that Rowan could rescue.
That’s not to say all of the gods were bad—they are fascinating and cool in many ways. I’ve really enjoyed writing them. But there are some elements that I was happy to rewrite in Rowan’s story.
I think that’s it for the history and mythology in Power of Magic—at least the big things. I hope you enjoyed the book and will come back for more of the FireSouls and Dragon Gods’s worlds.
Power of Magic Acknowledgements
Thank you, Ben, for everything. There would be no books without you.
Thank you to Jena O’Connor and Lindsey Loucks for your excellent editing. The book is immensely better because of you!
Thank you to Orina Kafe for the beautiful cover art. Thank you to Collette Markwardt for allowing me to borrow the Pugs of Destruction, who are real dogs named Chaos, Havoc, and Ruckus. They were all adopted from rescue agencies.
About Linsey
Before becoming a writer, Linsey was an archaeologist who studied shipwrecks in all kinds of water, from the tropics to muddy rivers (and she has a distinct preference for one over the other). After a decade of tromping around in search of old bits of stuff, she settled down to started penning her own adventure novels and is freaking delighted that people seem to like them. Since life is better with a little (or a lot of) magic, she writes urban fantasy and paranormal romance.
This is a work of fiction. All reference to events, persons, and locale are used fictitiously, except where documented in historical record. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright 2020 by Linsey Hall
Published by Bonnie Doon Press LLC
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form, except in instances of quotation used in critical articles or book review. Where such permission is sufficient, the author grants the right to strip any DRM which may be applied to this work.
ISBN - 978-1-64882-007-6
[email protected]
www.LinseyHall.com
https://twitter.com/HiLinseyHall
https://www.facebook.com/LinseyHallAuthor
