Every so often I get an email or read a review that calls into question some of my choices regarding the mythology of my books (especially in Oh. My. Gods. and Goddess Boot Camp). The two most common questions (or accusations) are:
- the fact that, in my books, there are descendants of the virgin goddesses (Athena, Artemis, and Hestia) and that Hera, goddess of marriage, had offspring out of wedlock
- my grammatically incorrect use of the word smote/smoted
Both are technically flaws in a very literal sense, in a world in which the rules written in the works of Edith Hamilton and Merriam-Webster are immutable and fixed. If you believe mythology is carved in stone and language is inflexible and never-changing, then yes I am wrong.
But there’s this little get-out-of-writing-jail card I like to use. It’s called …
Basically, this means that I get to play around with things in a creative way to serve my story. It’s why authors love to write things like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and West Side Story. It’s why steampunk authors can pretend there was advanced technology in Victorian England, Tolkein could use concepts of Scandinavian mythology to create the fantasy world of Middle Earth, and I can have descendants that shouldn’t exist and use words in a way they were never intended.
The key to wielding artistic license is having a reason for changing things, a justification for departing from the accepted norm. And, guess what? I have reasons.
Mixing Up Mythology
In my mythological world, the stories we know about Greek mythology were written thousands of years ago. There have been no new Greek myths since the Greek empire fell. But, assuming we believe that the gods exists and did not vanish with the culture that worshiped them, then I have to believe they have been … doing stuff in the meantime. We don’t know for certain, so it’s up to our imagination to fill in the gaps. Mine filled it in with supernatural descendants.
Watch Your Language
As for the grammatically incorrect use of the term smote/smoted, well… I’m a wordsmith by trade and it is my choice to use that term in an unexpected way for very specific reasons.* My decision was based on the feeling of the words (saying someone was “smitten to Hades” doesn’t have the same negative ring as smoted) and the uniqueness of the world in the book (for the characters born into mythology, smote, smoting, and smoted are part of their language, not necessarily our).
Hugs,
TLC
* I’m certainly not the first author to do this. In Abundance of Katherines, John Green used the word fug to replace the f-bomb, even though fug really means “to loll indoors in a stuff atmosphere,” a euphemism he borrowed from Pulitzer-winning author Norman Mailer.
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