![]() Their art and their connection to the dragon are so important that the murder of the craft mistress threatens the social order. So my story about women winning control of a factory had become about women making glass inspired by a dragon. Weight is given to her search by her grief, but also by the fact that since her mother was craft mistress, her murder offended the dragon. Well, I didn’t, but someone did, and seventeen-year-old Emlin decides to find out who it was. I killed the central character’s mother, who is also the glassworks craft mistress. What to do? When a story dragged, Miss Snark, a literary agent who used to give advice online, would urge: “Kill somebody! Set someone’s hair on fire!” Sadly, I concluded that wasn’t compelling enough to shape a whole book. This link mattered because it gave a whole new significance to the struggle to save the factory from a feckless owner.Īt that point, I had a glassworks engaged in dragon-inspired art and a struggle to save it. My characters could be artists in glass whose work was inspired by the dragon, meaning it was sacred. The sleeping dragon could be a visionary who worked through shared dreams. As I thought about that, I realized I could use dragons in a way I hadn’t seen before. Everything should matter in a book, though, so I didn’t want to just toss in a random dragon. The volcano had been dormant as long as people could remember, so what did my characters think was the source of the occasional wisps of smoke from the mountain top? Maybe I’d been watching too much “Game of Thrones,” but I decided they believe it’s a sleeping dragon. As the island took shape in my mind, though, I realized I was picturing it as volcanic. So, the book is set among all women crafters in a glass making factory on an island. More important for the first piece of my idea, glass making requires furnaces and big equipment. I borrowed both those ideas for Glass Girl. Less happily, they were forbidden to leave. Glass making was so important to the city that glass makers were rewarded with high social status. Murano has been known for its marvelous glass for centuries. So, what could I use for my factory? At that point, I remembered a long-ago trip to the island of Murano in the Venice lagoon. In that kind of setting, most work was done in people’s homes. ![]() ![]() It was a beginning I could work with.īut I write traditional fantasy set in a pre-industrial world. I was immediately captivated by the idea of the feminine world inside the factory, and it’s always satisfying to see the underdog triumph. When they made the factory profitable, he, of course, wanted it back. ![]() In answer, he flung the key on the floor and told them they should pick it up and see if they could do better. In a factory somewhere in Latin America, the workers (all women) protested when the owner cut their wages. The first inkling of this book came from a story on NPR. The Big Idea for my new book, Glass Girl, came together in three pieces. Sometimes disparate bits of a book have to be assembled like the parts of a stained-glass window. Winsor knows a little about this, and in this Big Idea for Glass Girl, she puts it all together for you.īig Ideas don’t always (often? ever?) leap into a writer’s mind full-blown. Sometimes, a “big idea” is a collection of smaller ideas, which, when grouped together, are greater than the sum of their parts.
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