Author Guest Post with Cornelia Funke

 

When I wrote my first book about MirrorWorld I thought it would be one journey. I should have known better! I thought the same about Inkworld – to find myself still writing that story six years later. To realize that these two worlds are indeed the same, just 500 years apart, bound by a book with silver covers, took me a few years too.

 

Which teaches one thing: stories don’t reveal their secrets easily. They are labyrinths that lure us in with a whisper to then distract and fool us, to lie and trap the writer who tries to find their heart. And the better we get in our craft the bigger the labyrinth grows!

 

I was in Moscow when I realized how big a labyrinth I had stumbled into through a mirror. I stood on the Red Square looking at St. Basil and its otherworldly towers when I suddenly got a glimpse at the Mirrors’ maker – and his involvement with this world. I rushed back to my hotel to write it all down. And then I lay in the dark, with Moscow’s golden roofs outside of my hotel window and thought: ‘Heavens! This will be a fairy tale journey around the world!’

 

When I wrote Book 1 – Reckless, as it is called in the US (I’ll soon re‐publish it under the original title Reckless: The Petrified Flesh) I was still on familiar ground. I wrote about a world inspired by the tales of my German childhood. Most of us associate the Grimms’ tales when we hear ‘Fairy Tale’. I decided to play with their motives in a world closely resembling ours around 1860, a time, when the modern times were born, with no chance of going back. But how would it change the world if there is old and new magic (as they call science behind the Mirrors)? What if all Fairy Tales were historical truth, preserving a long forgotten past?

 

The next step was to take the local origins of the tales seriously. No trolls outside Scandinavia, except emigrants. What are Heinzelmen called in France? Follets. And Hobs in Albion.

You see? I was lost behind the Mirrors as soon as I stepped through them!

 

The second book – Fearless in the US, Reckless: Living Shadows in most other countries – brought me to France. Where I met Bluebeards and learned a few things about giants, mal de mer and puss in boots. Those tales are still quite familiar to us, but the Golden Yarn‐ my third journey behind the Mirrors – led to lesser known tales. My heroes head East, to find creatures and treasures from Russian and Ukrainian tales, from Siberia and Kazakhstan. The tales I discovered for this book were mostly not familiar. They tasted of far away landscapes, of a Shaman tradition almost forgotten, they had powerful women characters in them, who probably once were goddesses….

 

The Golden Yarn is my most exciting adventure behind the Mirrors so far. But the next one is taking shape already in equally exciting ways. I am currently reading fairy tales from Japan and India, which make me feel as if I know nothing about this world!

 

I plan to travel to the Americas in Book 5 and to Africa in Book 6, but let’s see. Only the story knows where this will go. It enchants me with every step I take and every tale I read. It feels like exactly the right journey in a time when we realize every day how little we know about each other and how dangerous this ignorance and lack of understanding is.