You’re My Inspiration with Sara Wolf

One of the most common questions authors face is a deceptively difficult one to answer: “Where do you get your ideas?” Yet, the answers to that common question can be almost as interesting as the resulting story. Welcome to You’re My Inspiration, a new column dedicated to discovering what inspires a particular author and their work. Whether it be a lifelong love of mythical creatures, a fascinating bit of history, or a trip to a new and exciting place, You’re My Inspiration is all about those special and sometimes dark things that spark ideas and result in great stories.

This week, we bring you guest author Sara Wolf, who joined us last year to share her Favorite Things. Today, we’re celebrating her latest release, Find Me Their Bones, came out yesterday, November 5th, from Entangled Teen!

Krikus reviews says of Find Me Their Bones, “A seriously fun concoction of tragedy and melodrama.” What inspired Sara Wolf to concoct such a story? Let Sara tell you….

Fear, Faith, and Ferros, aka: Life, and How Everyone In History Seems To Lose Their Head Over It

Inspiration is a tricky thing. Unlike the bags under my eyes, it isn’t always there. It comes and goes, with its own tide separate from your wants and needs and literary demands. So a lot of times, more frequently than I care to admit, I’m forced to ‘make up’ my own inspiration — the trees, the birds, my own roiling emotions. To draw it from wherever I can, whenever I can. Sort of a mercenary, opportunistic inspiration is how I get a lot of writing done, but for Find Me Their Bones, a couple specific things lingered in my mind while I was writing, which made it a whole helluva lot easier!

Alchemy

Okay, so stick with me here. Back in the day, alchemists were pretty much Chemist-lites, stomping ahead on the forefront of science and chemistry in an attempt to do two primary things; 1. Turn base metals into gold, and 2. Discover how to make people live forever, most often for a king’s benefit and no one else’s, of course. In Find Me Their Bones, there’s a lot of discussion and talk of what it means to live forever, really and truly. It means watching the people you love die, it means never being able to rest yourself. The quest for immortality is pretty universal, in the sense all living things fear death. So of course the animal with the biggest brain decides to try and circumvent that! My most driving inspiration was the fanatical pursuit of immortality of the alchemists of old — they were so convinced that immortality was a good thing. Most people are, in fact. If you asked a stranger if they wanted to live forever, chances are they’d heartily say yes, first out of a natural fear of death, and second out of the idea that life will always be good, as long as you’re alive. I wanted to explore what being alive forever really, truly meant. It means powerlessness over your own state, it means suffering, it means questioning the point of life, it means never being able to attach to any one person or any one place. Far be it from me to say it’s all misery, but I wanted to grapple with the miseries that came with it, and whether or not that cost is worth the endgame. (If you can’t tell, this is me staking my flag firmly in the werewolf camp when it comes to werewolves vs. vampires.)

Snakes

I guess this also sort of ties into alchemy! (The symbol of eternity is an ouroboros snake eating its own tail, after all!) I absolutely adore snakes. Not quite to the point where I’d have one, but the idea of an animal being made entirely of muscle with no legs enchants me pretty much constantly. Most people are absolutely terrified of them, which is pretty understandable, considering a lot of snake imagery — especially in the west — is the negative sort, (thanks, the Bible!). But all over the world snakes represent a smorgasbord of different things. Everyone seems to agree, though, that they’re sort of mystical. I’ve had the idea of a fantasy monster in my head since I was a kid that was just a giant white snake, maybe with a few whiskers and manes and things. This is where the valkerax from the Bring Me Their Hearts series come in to play. I love the idea of a massive snake, the sort that ends up eating at the roots of Yggdrasil. Dragons are small time. A giant snake would have a million times more muscles than a dragon. And, PLUS! It can coil up and strike super fast. PLUS! Venom! Super cool. Just imagining the dragon vs. giant fantasy snake fight has me excited.

Religion

This is probably the most obvious if you’ve read Bring Me Their Hearts, and especially if you’ve pre-release read Find Me Their Bones. I’m utterly fascinated, like most people are, I think, by the way belief shapes our lives and our perceptions, for better or for worse. Religion is a massive component of human history, and historically, it’s been used by people as a tool to control the masses via fear, awe, them vs. us, etc. Any fantasy world that doesn’t include a lot of religious politics, in my opinion, doesn’t feel very real. On the flip side, religion’s importance to humanity as the Only Source Of Answers has waned as science advances, and the struggle of people to meld the two in their belief system is what really gets my gears going. Hence the humans vs. the witches in Bring Me Their Hearts. There is truth, and then there is belief, and between that war humans kill and maim and fight each other to keep things exactly the way they are. I wanted to explore that, and how societies come to turn on each other when objectivity meets subjectivity, which is how the world of Arathess in Find Me Their Bones was born. Arathess faces a massive turning point, and the people best equipped to steer it in another direction are the young, the hurt, and those who’ve suffered and don’t want others to suffer. Compassion, then — compassion separate of religion — is the heart of all improvement. It opens us up to truth, and to divine love, which really seem one and the same. Compassion is what drives Zera and friends forward to make a new world.

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