Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

  The idea screamed for a take on a “fish out of water” story. I wanted outsiders coming to Pittsburgh and the natives having to deal with the fact that the newcomers don’t know how to deal with the local dangers. (Basically I cycled back to the seed idea of Tinker and Oilcan’s explanation to Ryan.) I decided the Pittsburghers were doing a gardening show a la Elfhome and that the incoming crew was doing a more rarefied animal documentary.

  Mind you, most of this was at a subconscious level and happened in the course of one afternoon during the conversation with June.

  Nigel came from June telling me about Nigel Marven and Chased by Dinosaurs. She mentioned a segment of Nigel letting a poisonous spider walk across his face. I decided to name my naturalist in tribute to Marven, but I decided not to watch any video featuring him so that my Nigel wouldn’t be a copy of him. I think Monty Python was more of an influence on my vision of Nigel. Riffing on the name Chased by Dinosaurs, I decided his show would be Chased by Monsters, which suggested a natural end to the story.

  Just as I was working on the story, I happened to see the video of Aimee Mullins doing a TED Talk. Aimee was born in Pennsylvania with a medical condition that resulted in her lower legs being amputated when she was an infant. Despite this, she went on to be world-class athlete, actress and fashion model. She really inspired me. I decided that Nigel would have the same condition. It was only later that I decided to make use of his lack of feet: evil writer that I am.

  With all that in the mix, I sat down and wrote the two obvious scenes. The first one establishes the PB&G crew, its show then unnamed, filming one of the monsters I’ve mentioned in the books but hadn’t shown. The strangle vine had to be aggressive enough to warrant heavy weapons, thus the whole octopus plant on LSD came into being. Jane gets the phone call informing her of the babysitting job, and then in the next scene, she meets said newbies.

  Originally I wanted Jane to be working on a show whose name was a riff on a real television series. The first one that leapt to mind was Victory Garden. I went off and researched it and decided it was totally not what I thought it was. So I went with Pittsburgh Lawn and Garden. While typing the show name for the twentieth time, I decided to abbreviate it. By changing “Lawn” to “Backyard,” I could make it sound like a PB&J sandwich.

  By the very nature of Pittsburgh on Elfhome, the arrival of Nigel and Taggart had to be on a Startup day. I couldn’t bring them in after July since July was the last Shutdown. Bringing them in prior to July meant they wouldn’t be struggling with the big world problem of the war between elf and oni, and that seemed pointless. Anything they discovered about the oncoming war would have caused problems with information already stated in the books. So obviously, Chased by Monsters arrived in July.

  It meant that the biggest news story was Tinker’s kidnapping.

  It set up a “you’re a genius” in terms of plot since I established that Mercy Hospital was the only human hospital in town and it’s right beside where Tinker takes the nosedive during her kidnapping. By hurting Hal, I gave him front row seats to everything. Wow. Cool. The story just flowed out.

  This triggered a problem though. By seeing Tinker kidnapped, why wouldn’t this be the news story that the crew followed? Yes, it was out of their field, but a woman’s life is at stake. As the author, however, I couldn’t have them focusing on it because they couldn’t influence the events. But by the same token, I wanted them to learn something big that justified doing a story from Jane’s point of view.

  I stalled around the Neighborhood of Make Believe scene, struggling to figure out how to make it a big story without stretching the fabric of the published book’s universe. Eventually the “ah ha” light went on and I realized that Tinker’s kidnapping had to be a catalyst for Jane to cope with the angst of a similar event in her life. Thus Boo was born. It was a kind of have your cake and eat it too setup.

  Blue Sky

  In Wolf Who Rules, I wanted Tinker to talk with Tommy Chang prior to saving him from the Wyverns. I had in my mind that he would be a major player in Pittsburgh but I had the problem that he’s not the sort of person Tinker normally would interact with. I made him the race promoter to give them a common element. Tommy seeks Tinker out to find out how much her being made into an elf changed her mentally. Like Maynard, he wanted to know where she stood in the political landscape. He couldn’t, however, just ask her flat out like Maynard could, because that would indicate he was part of the conflict. The conversation about racing, then, was all just a cover.

  At the time, I was ordering promotional materials through an online printing site. Their e-mails for proofs came from the address of Team Big Sky. It seemed too perfect not to use. In a throwaway line, I set up that Team Big Sky was John Montana and his little brother, the half-elf, Blue Sky.

  Later I got to thinking about these two characters. Obviously they shared a mother. Who was Blue Sky’s father? Did he know about his son? Did he care? It seemed likely that if the elves had so few children, they wouldn’t be indifferent to a half-breed bastard. The two castes that created the most conflict for the world were domana and sekasha. Since Windwolf was the only real candidate for a domana father, I decided to go with sekasha. I wanted Tinker involved in the story, which she wouldn’t be if the sekasha was alive, so I made his father be the male killed in the backstory told in Tinker.

  Peace Offering

  I had wanted to do a story where Forest Moss found redemption in a human female. Originally I imagined that he would get mixed up with a woman that ran a brothel. She was a ruthless businesswoman and the arrangement was strictly for profit alone. I couldn’t find a story in it; nothing to hang my hat on.

  As I had wrapped up Elfhome, anti-abortion sentiments began to sweep the nation. It was tied tightly to people who wanted no sexual education in the classrooms and no birth control given to young women. It triggered something in me and I felt I had to write my response to it.

  My biggest problem with these purity pro-lifers is that they want to create school situations and laws that address only the perfect setting. In their perfect setting, girls don’t need sexual education, birth control pills, and abortions because all they need is to say “no.” In a perfect world, these purity pushers would be right. The world, however, is far from perfect. Horrible, terrible things happen. Things beyond a young woman’s control. The most innocent event is that a massive wave of unfamiliar hormone-driven impulses get the best of them and suddenly they’re faced with utter ruin. This gives them no Plan B except to spend the nine months carrying a child that they didn’t plan, might not want, and have no way to care for.

  In the United States, one in every five women has been raped, with forty-four percent of those rapes happening under the age of eighteen. In a high school class of three hundred students, thirty of the girls will be raped or sexually assaulted. Look at a graduating class (if the girl is so lucky to graduate) and in any cluster of ten seats, there sits a girl whose life is potentially destroyed by her attack. Add in the lack of morning-after pills and abortion, plus a society that tells her she’s impure if she’s not a virgin, and it’s nearly sure that the life she wanted is over.

  This purity-only mindset is like sending out warplanes without weapons or parachutes through enemy territory in broad daylight. Any intelligent person can tell you that is a stupid plan that will wipe out your military. Yet this is exactly what is being pushed for young women—go out among men with no knowledge or means to protect themselves and no way to save themselves if attacked.

  I decided to write a story about a girl who lost the war. She fought hard but still found herself pregnant and on the run from an abusive man. She is the good girl who has been pushed to the edge of the cliff and is now out of options. Once I knew what I really wanted to address, the story wrote itself.

  Price of Peace

  I left Olivia on a cliffhanger of being homeless with an insane elf in the middle of a war zone. I really wanted to get her to the point where she actually h
ad someplace to live. I had fun running Olivia all over Pittsburgh, followed by mobs of elves. Perhaps too much fun. Eventually I started to wonder what the point of the story was. Originally Olivia ate at the O, went to the real estate agent’s office and ended up at Phipps. Only after Forest Moss was called back to combat did she go downtown with Jewel Tear in tow. All interesting events but originally without a focus and thus not with a whole lot of building conflict.

  Eventually I realized that I wanted to focus on two things, the first being Olivia’s growing realization of all the strings attached to the deal she’d struck. The second was setting up what would be the bigger conflicts ahead for her. I shifted the order of the scenes and inserted all the scenes at the University of Pittsburgh and the shopping trip at Giant Eagle.

  Threads that Bind and Break

  This story does a lot of heavy lifting in that it was written to tie together Elfhome and Wood Sprites and several of the earlier Project Elfhome stories and sets the stage for the next book, Harbinger. That’s a lot of work for a novella.

  I’ve discovered that fans refuse to acknowledge that characters lie or see events through different filters. For example, Windwolf states that he was “stunned” by the saurus and Pony states that Windwolf was “knocked unconscious.” Fans claim this is a mistake, ignoring the fact that unconscious people don’t realize they’ve been out of it for more than a few seconds and Pony couldn’t actually have witnessed the events, else Tinker would remember a second sekasha at the scene. I didn’t realize readers wouldn’t follow this logic, or I would have made it clearer when Pony makes his claim. Having learned this lesson, I realized that the twins couldn’t interact with any of the known characters prior to the end of Elfhome without fans calling it a mistake on my part.

  This created a huge timing problem. I wanted the twins in Monroeville to witness the orbital gate crash and Earth’s reaction to it at the start of August. If the Skin Clan had a back door to Elfhome, they would use it as quickly as possible. The elves had realized that oni forces were in Pittsburgh. Unless the Skin Clan reconnected their supply lines, their troops would be stranded without Earth’s resources. The nestlings, however, would be killed shortly after the Skin Clan took them to Elfhome.

  All these factors meant that the twins had to cross worlds immediately. It left me with a gaping hole in my timeline. Where were the twins during the entire period represented by Wolf Who Rules and Elfhome? Because of the nestlings, if they’d gotten anywhere close to Pittsburgh, the tengu would know where the children were.

  I either had to make the timeline unclear at the end of Wood Sprites or leave the nestlings’ fate still in the balance. I wanted the twins to beat the oni decisively after everything they suffered, so I decided to be very vague on how long things took in the last chapter.

  After Wood Sprites advance reader copies came out, fans started to piece together a timeline showing when certain events happened. They started to contact me wanting to know how the book fit into Elfhome. This got worse when I posted the first scene of Harbinger.

  It became clear that I would need to firmly pinpoint events.

  Sigh.

  Hopefully this short story explains everything. If not, here is a timeline that more clearly spells it out.

  Louise called the gossamer to the cave shortly after Oilcan was kidnapped. Tinker does not see the gossamer go because she’s dealing with the chaos at Sacred Heart. When she finally pays attention to the airfield, the Wind Clan gossamer is already gone and only the Stone Clan airships are moored. Because of the Kryskills’ connection to the tengu, they’re some of the first outsiders involved. The phone call isn’t Team Tinker enlisting Alton’s help but the tengu asking him to contact Team Tinker and anyone else he knows that is trustworthy. (If you need a political reason for this, humans are considered neutral and thus could confront the Stone Clan elves without triggering a clan war. The tengu are firmly Wind Clan. They could only watch from a distance once Oilcan was found. Tinker had made it clear that she didn’t want the tengu engaging Forge and Iron Mace on her behalf. Team Tinker is Riki’s Plan B.)

  As the gossamer heads out, Gracie is leading the tengu chasing after it. She knew via a dream that she was needed in Oakland. When the airship bolts, she knows that this was why she was in Oakland. Jin and Riki are caught up searching for first Oilcan and then Tinker. While the males are in Pittsburgh, they are out of contact with the people in the tengu village (which doesn’t have a cell phone tower). When Gracie finds the twins, she decides that this is news that needs to be told face to face to Jin, not trusted to a phone that might be tapped. (And trust me, there’s no code words to cover the twins and the babies and Joy.) It is Jin’s place to tell Tinker, so the tengu settle the twins at the village and wait.

  Meanwhile, all the elves are distracted from Tinker’s side by the train on the South Side. Because of the bad cell phone connection with Alton, the wrong information is spread through the tengu. They believe that the oni planned to collide the inbound train full of elves with an empty outbound passenger train. Riki doesn’t know what really is going on when Oilcan calls him, looking for Tinker. All he knows, from piecemeal reports, is that the domana are nuking the hell out of South Side and there’s at least one derailed train.

  Shortly after that, Tinker blows up Neville Island. Wind Clan elves show up to serve their domi and talk with one pissed-off Tommy. They don’t tell the half-oni squat.

  Tinker, being Tinker, ignores everything that doesn’t connect to what she’s focused on at that moment. Yes, she knows that the Harbingers have showed up; she doesn’t think about them in the last chapter. Yes, she knows Jewel Tear was rescued by Tommy and is living with Oilcan; not a word about the battered female. She also knows that something happened involving the trains at Station Square. She doesn’t think about that either. (To be fair, she didn’t know that Oktoberfest was being held there and that loads of humans were in danger. She will freak once someone finally connects the two for her.)

  Harbinger starts shortly after tea with Oilcan at the end of Elfhome. Jin has flown home and discovered the mess waiting for him.

  HARBINGER

  1: Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night

  “What? Wait!” Tinker cried, cutting off the flow of Jin’s explanation. She’d been awakened in the middle of the night to be told that the tengu’s spiritual leader needed to speak with her immediately. The household staff had set out a formal tea in the dining hall and made themselves scarce but they were probably lurking in the deep shadows nearby, just in case she needed more tarts or, more likely, another pot of strong tea. A thunderstorm was rolling across Pittsburgh, flashing the courtyard garden into brilliance and then darkness. Rain drummed comfortingly on the dining hall’s roof; the lightning was being generated from a non-magical source.

  “I have what?” She was sure this would make sense if it weren’t some ungodly hour in the middle of the night.

  “Twin siblings.” Jin looked exhausted. Since she’d seen him late in the evening, he must have flown to his village and back without stopping. “Six of them.”

  Tinker squinted at him. Maybe she was still asleep. “You’re—you’re kidding. Right?”

  “No, I’m not.” His great black wings rustled with his nervousness. “I know that technically they belong to Esme, but Gracie would love to adopt…”

  “Back up. Back up. I have what?”

  Jin sighed. “Twin siblings. Six of them.”

  “How can I have six twin siblings? Wouldn’t they be six-something? Sextuplets?” No, that sounded like a porn video. “No, um, if I have six siblings then we would be seven. Seven…seven…seven…”

  The conversation was in English, so only Stormsong was following her muttering. The tall warrior leaned over her shoulder to pour her more tea. “Septuplets, domi.”

  “Are you sure?” Tinker spooned several teaspoons of honey into the tea before gulping it. “September is the ninth month.”

  “It was the sev
enth month, but it changed to the ninth…” Jin sighed again and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “It’s a naming convention. I don’t understand why they use these words, but when multiple eggs are fertilized, and then used at different times by different women, then the resulting children are considered ‘twins’ even though they have different families and are different ages.”

  He was talking about how she’d been conceived in vitro ten years after her father died. She vaguely knew the mechanics; Lain had explained them to her when she was very young. She’d alarmed Lain by talking about having a brother that lived far away. Only after Lain went through all the biology, Tinker confessed that she confused “brother” with “cousin.” Lain had kept referring to possible siblings as “theoretical” until Tinker thought that the word meant “imaginary” because Lain indicated that it was quite impossible for such siblings to exist.

  But Jin wouldn’t wake her up in the middle of the night for imaginary siblings. Since Stormsong was quietly translating the conversation to the others of her Hand, Tinker switched to Elvish.

  “Wasn’t all that material stored at some place in New York City?” Tinker asked.