Inspiration for The Shield of Light

Inspiration for The Shield of Light

The image of an indolent prince flipping through a stack of portraits of beautiful young women in his pursuit of a wife came to me sometime in the 90s, long before there were dating apps that one could swipe through.

My early prince was spoilt but not evil. His parents were guilty only of overindulging him as parents of single children sometimes are – especially when the conception of that child has been challenging. My early queen, like the later one, could not conceive and took an apple to the alchemist to transmute into a child, a motif common to fairy tales.

That’s all I had – a lazy prince born from the seeds of an apple to goodhearted - if overindulgent - parents. No Aurora, no antagonist, no story.

Fast forward to early 2020. I was managing a naturopathic clinic at the time. When it became apparent that Covid was not the Black Plague or the Spanish Flu, I, like many other people, was astonished to see our world change in ways that were unprecedented and alarming.

In Canada, we were told to stay home and our cell phones were tracked. Masks were deemed alternately helpful, useless, helpful, and finally mandated if you wanted to buy a loaf of bread.

Then, the unthinkable happened: people were forced to take an experimental drug if they wanted to work, go to school, travel, play sports, or visit their family. Trust “the science,” we were told. What science? The science was one-sided, a narrative that was repeated verbatim and ad nauseam in mainstream media. Voices of world-renowned scientists and doctors were gagged by a few "experts" who controlled a script that was illogical. If you dared speak up, you were severely punished. An Orwellian nightmare from which there seemed no waking up.

But some people woke up. In fact, many people woke up.

In the fall of 2021, I knew I needed to get back to writing. Our world was changing and changing fast. Getting back to writing wasn't so much a decision as it was a calling.

I was bombarded with images and characters. The girl named Aurora finds herself in another world and meets Little Red Riding Hood and other characters from fairy tales. Missing children coinciding with the arrival of an evil queen from a faraway land. The queen's witless but cruel son. Missing children. An Alchemist with more interest in riches than healing people. Transmorgrification. A plague.

I scribbled down the images, ideas, and bits of dialogue onto loose sheets of paper, shuffled the pages into a semblance of order, and then hand-wrote the first draft in two spiral notebooks, each 150 pages long. Before each session of work, I set an alarm on my phone and meditated for six minutes. Why six? Who knows. It seemed like the right amount of time to get me into the flow. The first draft was very rough. My writing was rusty.

In the spring of 2023, after numerous drafts and about eighteen months later, I published The Shield of Light, a fairy tale very much for our times.

I hope you enjoy it.