There’s a small-ish detail of the current story that I liked, but wasn’t sure quite why I’d chosen it, so had it on my mental list of things-to-re-evaluate-as-I-near-the-end-of-the-draft.

And then today, during a writing session, a line out of a ballad I’ve long loved drifted into my brain. I turned to lnhammer, recited the line slowly to him, and realized, “This thing I’m doing in my story. It’s canonical.“

It has, in fact, been some small part of faerie lore for centuries.

A small thing, one that, depending what I do with it, perhaps no one but me will even see in the final draft. But it’s like … a bridge between my world and the lore that world comes from.

A thing that makes it suddenly seem like on some level, I knew what I was doing all along.

Or perhaps, like the story knew what it was doing. Perhaps that story has long been here — for all that it happened in another time, another place — and it just happens to be right now that I’m telling it.

This small realization will soon fade into the larger tapestry of the story — and into the day-to-day work of trying to figure out how to weave the rest of the tale, which still has miles and miles (and words and words, and drafts and drafts) yet to go. But just now, tonight, I’m holding on to this bit of story magic, this moment where one small piece of the story clicked into place, and tapped into something deeper.