Here’s the second installment in my collaboration with my husband on “words and music”.

This passage for COLD HILLSIDE is the most description-heavy of the excerpts I chose for this project.  It’s the first introduction to the fey and I wanted to try to capture their elusive, unreal qualities before the later part of the book introduces their more “human” characteristics (such as cruelty, corruption, boredom, and politics).

I’m very fond of writing description, no matter what the writing advice books say on the matter.  Sometimes I end up cutting it, but in this case I felt that, with the fey, “more is more”.  

I hadn’t been able to find any good images to accompany this reading until I remembered I’d done a mosaic based on some of my mental imagery for Lushan. I took a photo and sent it to Richard, who found a way to make it visually interesting and evocative of both the colours of Lushan and the mutability of the fey.