Archiv rubriky: Bless the Child: English version

Bless the Child is a novel — or rather, a saga. But above all, it’s fanfiction: a work derived from an original work, or rather, from several original works. I pick up Harry Potter where Joanne K. Rowling left off (or, as some ill-tongued critics would have it, where she should have left off). Since Bless has been in the making since 2011, I couldn’t take into account her later work, or work written by others with her blessing — though where it doesn’t conflict, I’m happy to borrow the odd motif from Fantastic Beasts, and I daresay I still will. Throughout, I’ve tried to honour her conception — down to the details — in terms of facts, characters, and style alike. For my own purposes, though, a few small things needed changing.
To some extent I also draw on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, since his mythology, as gathered by his son in The Silmarillion, forms the „history“ behind the reality of this story. In my world, however, The Silmarillion was never published; it exists only as a set of secret, ancient scrolls. Tolkien himself is a real character here — the author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit; those books were published, but they don’t constitute „reality,“ only a distorted echo of it, reworked by the „character“ of Tolkien. The story of the Fellowship of the Ring is real here only insofar as it was handed down in the legend of the War of the Ring, as recorded in the old scrolls of the Silmarillion. Knowing that world is an advantage, though not, I think, essential to understanding. Well — sharp-eyed readers may spot a few small borrowings from other works, and nods toward them, but those are meant as small tributes rather than as a use of other worlds; I’m afraid that really wouldn’t do.
And what is Bless the Child about? It’s a story of love, a story of hatred, of friendship and betrayal, a story of fate and predestination of courage and the willingness to sacrifice oneself. These themes keep returning, repeating themselves in analogies, in circles — the way they did in the works I draw on, and, indeed, the way they do in life.
Songs, too, are an essential part of Bless. I know it’s a little unusual, and I don’t fool myself that every reader will always play them. You really don’t have to. But if you want to get a sense of the atmosphere that shaped me as I wrote, put them on. A chapter and its song are a single whole — they’re in harmony, and they shape one another. Don’t deprive yourself of that — you’d only be shortchanging yourself. It’s the songs, in fact, that are the reason some chapters — and indeed the story as a whole — have English titles: the songs‘ titles always double as the chapters‘ titles.
The whole saga was serialized from September 2011 onward, from September 2011 onward at fanfiction.potterharry.net, which sadly closed down some years later. And now I’m moving Bless here. I hope you’ll find your way here too.
Your Richenza