Tír na nÓg Notes and Credits
Notes and Credits
*Deep breath* Ahhhhhhhh. My favorite time of year! Big bang posting time! It gets harder to wait every year, I tell ya (especially when the week before you post LJ falls apart and you start to freak out that you won’t get to post it at all. . . .)
Anyway. So, first up, there’s some amazing people who must be acknowledged for, well, being amazing people right here. The mods of the spn_j2_bigbang challenge, of course, thehighwaywoman and wendy, who somehow manage to keep this sucker going every year and cheer me on despite the fact that what I suspect what I write is not really their favorite fic style. You both do amazing work, thank you so much!
There are also my amazing betas, maisfeeka, who pitched in a few “actually, the fae lore I know says this”es here and there along with her usual beta duties (what would I do without you, hon? Probably leave in a lot of homophones), and missyjack, who provided the more lay perspective on the fae and their ilk, and assured me that, yes, you could still read this even if you weren’t a little amateur Irish folklore nerd in middle school. And I absolutely could not forget to thank the incomparable butterflykiki, who doesn’t so much beta-read as, like, alpha-read as I go along, putting up with me doing things like pasting random paragraphs into the IM window to see what she thinks.
Okay, so. Once again, this was not the fic I thought I was going to write for big bang this year. I’ve come to accept the fact that I will never end up turning in in May what I think I’m going to in January on this thing. This year, I had this whole epic journey arc of pre-series Dean striking out on his own to go after a mysterious monster -- but I’ve actually decided that I’m going to replace Dean in that fic with a pair young women in love and make it a young adult novel, so that’s okay.
But, really, I’m kind of amazed it took me this long in this fandom to really start in on the fairies. I’ve been a huge fan of fairy- and folklore since I was a tiny little girl stealing my dad’s fantasy reference books. My biggest struggle on this one, I think, was to limit my fairy world primarily to the traditions of the British Isles (the Wild Hunt gets a little Germanic, but there’s a fine tradition of them in England, too, dammit!). The lore and descriptions used in this fic are primarily inspired by the works of Brian Froud, whose fairy illustrations are haunting and gorgeous and just might invade your head if you look at them too long. His descriptions of Cornish pixies were just too much fun to pass up, and if I tried to branch out too far into too many different traditions, I’d have been writing this fic for the next twenty years. In my mind, if Dean had gone further afield Underhill, he’d have eventually crossed the border into Slavic fae territory and beyond, where the sidhe had less influence. . . .
But that’s another fic for another time, I’m sure.
Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed! And if you haven’t yet, please be sure to hop on over to let 79chevyimpala what you think of the art!
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