A while back, someone asked me what an elemental was and why my Spider’s Bite is the first book in the Elemental Assassin series. (He was wondering about the name of the series). Well, here’s the answer.
Basically, in Spider’s Bite and the other books in the series, an elemental is someone who can create, control, and manipulate one of the four elements — Air, Fire, Ice, and Stone. (And yes, the letters are capitalized because I thought it would make things clearer for readers).
Gin Blanco, the heroine of the series, is an Ice and Stone elemental, which means that she can control not one by two elements. For example, her Ice magic lets her make small shapes, like cubes, crystals, and the occasional knife. Her Stone magic lets her make her own skin as hard as marble and hear the vibrations of the stones around her. In my world, people’s actions and emotions permeate the environment around them. So for instance, Gin can tell if someone has been murdered inside a brick home and that sort of thing. And she can do other things with her elemental magic besides what I’ve mentioned here (powers to be revealed in future books). 😉
The Elemental Assassin series also features vampires, giants, and dwarves, because I wanted to include a variety of folks/creatures/magic users.
So how did I come up with a book about elementals? Read on.
Several years ago, when I was first getting serious about writing, I wrote a pretty crappy epic fantasy novel. Seriously, it was all kinds of bad — your typical farmgirl-with-a-great-destiny plot. I shudder to think of it now. Shudder-shudder.
But one of my secondary characters was an assassin — and I eventually realized that she was much more interesting than my farmgirl heroine was. So I decided to write another epic fantasy with an assassin as the main character. I tried and tried and tried … writing a couple of different drafts/chapters with different plots and different characters, but I could never get it just right. So eventually I moved on to the Bigtime series, among other things.
But I kept thinking about writing an assassin story and during a lull in between my work on the Bigtime series, I finally decided to forget the epic part and go with a modern, urban fantasy. And finally, the character and story started to click for me.
But the assassin needed magic, since this was an urban fantasy. All along while writing the various drafts/chapters, I’d had a half-formed idea of having the assassin be able to use some kind of Stone or Ice power. (I also thought about putting golems in there too based on a really strange dream that I had one night).
But if my assassin could use Stone magic, then I wanted my villain to be able to use some kind of Fire power (because who isn’t afraid of being burned alive?). However, having only two kinds of powers seemed a bit limiting (you never want to limit your magic too much). So somehow, somewhere along the way, I decided to put two more types of magic in there — Air and Ice — because they were the opposites of Stone and Fire (there’s a lot of duality in my magic system). And thus, the magic portion of the Elemental Assassin series was born.
Now, elementals are not a new idea. I’ve read fantasy books over the years where folks can control the weather or water or whatever. But I thought it would be cool to have an elemental as my main character simply because of the powers that I could give her. I also think it helped to make Spider’s Bite more marketable because elementals aren’t in every book — and they’re certainly not as common as vampires and werewolves these days. Agents/editors are always saying that they’re looking for something fresh and different, so I tried to give it to them.
So there you have it. Some of my inspirations for Spider’s Bite and the Elemental Assassin series in a nutshell. Frightening, isn’t it? 😉
Got questions? I’ll answer them in the comments …
When it comes to work, Estep’s newest heroine is brutually efficient and very pragmatic, which gives the new Elemental Assassin series plenty of bite. Shades of gray rule in this world where magic and murder are all too commonplace. The gritty tone of this series gives Estep a chance to walk on the darker side. Kudos to her for the knife-edged suspense!