Guest Blog Post - Nicole Murphy - Dream of Asarlai #1: Secret Ones

We have a guest blogger! Nicole Murphy has come to our blog to tell us about her world of the Gadda.  

 When I was in teacher’s college, I gained the nickname of Ms Relevant because no matter what the subject we were doing, at some point I would ask – ‘How is this relevant to teaching it?’

There is a reason I mention this – it goes to the basis of why I created the gadda for my Dream of Asarlai trilogy.

I don’t just accept things. I question them, all the time. Is that real? Why does that happen? Why do we need to know this?

As a reader and writer, this means that I can’t easily suspend my disbelief. Not that I have an issue with reading fantasy and science fiction – step far enough from my world and I don’t have an issue at all. 

However, in urban fantasy, it has proven to be a problem at times. There are books – Keri Arthur’s for example – where no matter how much I enjoy them (and I do) there’s always a bit of my brain that can’t just relax into this idea of there now being werewolves, vampires and the like wandering around Melbourne. Whereas in Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse series, because it’s explained at the beginning that the vampires have come out of the closet and that’s why they’re now wandering around the world, I’m fine.

Yeah, I know – it’s a very fine line. But in terms of writing, it was a line that I needed to definitively cross so that I could create a world that I really believed in. If I couldn’t do that, there’s no way the readers would believe.

My inspiration for the Dream of Asarlai trilogy and the gadda came from a dream – I saw a woman, working in a university, beginning a hot affair with a hunky man. Except she was a witch and hiding that from him.

When I started developing the world, I couldn’t just plonk witches and magic into our modern world without a reason for why the witches existed and how the magic worked and why they were keeping it a secret.

My first idea – they came from different ancestors to humans. They weren’t human, but look like us (maybe not completely possible in terms of evolution, but not too far removed, I think). These not-humans, because of the different ancestry, can access the energy of the world around them in ways we can’t and use that to perform what we humans call magic (gadda refer to it as ‘power’).

I wanted them to be from Australia. I really, really did. Except I’ve spent a number of years living and working with Indigenous Australians and I’m very aware of not claiming any sort of ownership over their culture or mythology. I couldn’t come up with a way to have this ancient people develop here and not impinge on Indigenous history. 

So I took a step back. Humans originated in Africa. What would be the opposite of that?

Instantly, I had an image of green rolling hills and one word came to mind – Ireland.

The beauty of this came to me quickly – Ireland has a strong mythology of magic. It’s the perfect place for where a secret race of magical beings would originate. And it meant   that I could beg and borrow things from Celtic mythology and not have to be slavishly correct. After all, that mythology is from the human point of view. From the other side of the story, you’d end up with a different idea.

In fact, that’s where the name gadda came from – it’s an anagram of Dagda, the name of an Irish god, considered one of the father-figures of Irish mythology. I had this vision of him meeting a human and when asked his name, coming up with ‘gadda’ to hide it.

So there you have it – Irish-based secret magical race that live here in the modern world. From there, I had the fun of developing the political and educational systems and how the magic actually worked. The gadda came to life and became a much bigger part of the entire story of the Dream of Asarlai than was originally planned.

The great thing is that in having created this race of people with a history as long (or maybe longer) than ours, I’ve now got thousands of years of possibilities to work with. Expect to see lots of gadda stories in varying places.

Nicole Murphy is the author of the Dream of Asarlai trilogy, published by HarperVoyager. The first book, Secret Ones, hit the shelves in July to a great response from readers and book two, Power Unbound, will go on sale just before Christmas. The third book, Rogue Gadda, will go on sale next July. Nicole also writes as Nicole R Murphy. Twitter  link for Nicole The lovely picture of Nicole was taken by Cat Sparks. Cat Sparks is an Australian speculative fiction writer and graphic designer. From 2002-2008 she and Robert Hood ran Agog! Press, which produced ten anthologies of award winning, new and mostly Australian speculative fiction. Check out some of Cat's artwork here, her Live Lournal here, and Flickr galleryhere.