Originally hosted at Bookworm Blues as part of a “Disability in Fantasy” series.

In her review of Songs of the Earth, Sarah picked up on a theme in the book that intrigued her enough to invite me here to discuss it further: most of the principal characters in my debut novel are physically impaired in some way.

This was intentional, but not in the way you might be imagining.

Genre heroes and heroines have a tendency to be clean-limbed and strong. Physical disability rarely gets a look-in, and scars are usually sexy rather than disfiguring, or else they’re lazy-writer-shorthand that a character’s a real badass. Now I didn’t write the book to address this, or even with any kind of disability-awareness agenda in mind. In 1997, when I started writing what eventually became Songs of the Earth, I simply had a story I wanted to tell.

The savage scar on Gair’s hand was a deliberate choice: I wanted him to have an ugly, lasting reminder of his trial at the Motherhouse, and I wanted it to be something that couldn’t always be easily hidden, that through carelessness or inattention could get him into trouble.

Similarly, I gave Ansel, the Preceptor of the Suvaeon Knights, arthritis and a chest complaint. To have risen to that position he needed to be a grizzled veteran, but men of action don’t always age well, so I made him unable to sit, stand or move without pain. This meant he had not just plot-related obstacles to overcome, he also had to contend with the nagging awareness of his own mortality.

Gair’s friend Darin has a chronic illness too: diabetes. It made him especially vulnerable to another character’s manipulation that affected his awareness of the passage of time, when eating regularly was important to his continued health. I rather downplayed the impact of this (you’ve got to make the reader do *some* of the work!) but for me it added a satisfying extra dollop of tragedy to Darin’s arc as a character.

And then there’s Aysha. It made a delicious twist, I thought, to have the hero’s love interest be, not some unattainably perfect virgin princess, but an older woman, and a foul-mouthed, selfish, sensual and crippled one to boot. Of all of the characters, she was the one I identified most closely with. She was me on my best day: confident, independent, and always ready with a snarky comeback of the sort I usually think of only after the argument’s been well and truly lost.

At the time, I didn’t think holistically about what I was doing. I didn’t think any farther afield than each character’s arc, and what felt right for them. Some of the characters just sprang onto the page fully-formed, impairments and all, like Athene from the brow of Zeus. Their genesis happened on an entirely subconscious level, a kind of creative cron job running overnight on the servers in my brain (please forgive the computer analogy–-21 years in IT tends to leave its mark on a girl).

She was me on my best day: confident, independent, and always ready with a snarky comeback of the sort I usually think of only after the argument’s been well and truly lost.

It’s only now, looking back at how the book evolved over the 12 or so years of its gestation, that I can see all this and make sense of it. At the time, it just felt like the right thing to do–I do an awful lot of my writing on feel and gut instinct. I am not a natural planner, and find the idea of writing character summaries on index cards then pinning them to the wall above my desk about as attractive as a root canal.

Anyway, long after these characters were established in early drafts of Songs, and years before I ever dreamed that I might one day find a publisher for it, I became disabled myself: in 2004, I was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. I now walk with a cane, and I am unable to stand unsupported for very long. I fatigue easily, which leads to a lot of stumbling and occasional falls.

How strangely prescient of me, then, to have written a novel in which physical impairment is so prevalent, and in which my favourite character resembled a future me more closely than I ever would have imagined. A cosmic joke, perhaps – or a case of life imitating art.

If only I could have predicted the lottery numbers . . .