Filip Filatov's Blog - Posts Tagged "mythic-fiction"
The Making of Fionn: The Secret of Immortality
Every story begins somewhere, but Fionn didn’t begin where I expected.
It wasn’t meant to be an epic.
It wasn’t meant to be dark.
It wasn’t even meant to be a novel for adults.
I originally started writing Fionn: The Secret of Immortality as a simple tale for children—something light, something playful, something that fit neatly into a bedtime ritual.
But stories have their own will.
This one refused to stay small.
The farther I followed it, the older it became.
The deeper I went, the more it pulled me toward a world that felt ancient, wounded, and waiting to be heard.
Rebuilding a Forgotten World
European Celtic mythology is filled with cracks and empty spaces.
The Romans burned much of it.
Centuries of Christianity silenced even more.
What remains today is a handful of names, fragments of legends, echoes of something far older and far wilder.
I didn’t try to reconstruct what was lost.
Instead, I tried to fill the silence.
I built something new from the fragments — a myth that might have existed, a world shaped by wind, stone, blood, and memory.
A place where gods are flawed, immortality is a burden, and destiny is something you fight for, not inherit.
The Influences That Shaped the Journey
As Fionn grew beyond its original shape, it absorbed the things that shaped me personally:
• Philosophical Taoism
The idea that strength comes from stillness, not force.
That water can conquer stone.
That destiny is not chased, but aligned with.
• The I Ching
The belief that all change follows patterns—cycles of rise, fall, chaos, order.
In Fionn, time and fate move like tides, not timelines.
• The quiet conviction that love is the real fire
Not romantic love alone, but loyalty, sacrifice, devotion, the ancient bonds that make humans dangerous to gods.
These influences didn’t appear as lectures or symbolism—they became the emotional skeleton of the book.
They shaped the characters, their choices, their fears, and ultimately their destinies.
A Different Kind of Fantasy
So Fionn grew into something strange:
neither classic high-fantasy nor modern YA, neither Celtic retelling nor historical myth.
It became warmer, darker, more mythic—and, I hope, more human.
It became a story about gods who bleed, heroes who doubt, and a world where immortality is not a blessing but a test of the soul.
It became a book that started as a children’s tale… and transformed into the beginning of a much larger saga.
I’m not Tolkien.
I’m not trying to be.
I simply wrote the story that insisted on being written—
a story about courage, destiny, love, loss, and the quiet moments between battles when a character reveals who they truly are.
If any part of this world touches your heart,
if any line stays with you longer than the page it sits on,
then this long journey was worth every hour of it.
— Filip Filatov
It wasn’t meant to be an epic.
It wasn’t meant to be dark.
It wasn’t even meant to be a novel for adults.
I originally started writing Fionn: The Secret of Immortality as a simple tale for children—something light, something playful, something that fit neatly into a bedtime ritual.
But stories have their own will.
This one refused to stay small.
The farther I followed it, the older it became.
The deeper I went, the more it pulled me toward a world that felt ancient, wounded, and waiting to be heard.
Rebuilding a Forgotten World
European Celtic mythology is filled with cracks and empty spaces.
The Romans burned much of it.
Centuries of Christianity silenced even more.
What remains today is a handful of names, fragments of legends, echoes of something far older and far wilder.
I didn’t try to reconstruct what was lost.
Instead, I tried to fill the silence.
I built something new from the fragments — a myth that might have existed, a world shaped by wind, stone, blood, and memory.
A place where gods are flawed, immortality is a burden, and destiny is something you fight for, not inherit.
The Influences That Shaped the Journey
As Fionn grew beyond its original shape, it absorbed the things that shaped me personally:
• Philosophical Taoism
The idea that strength comes from stillness, not force.
That water can conquer stone.
That destiny is not chased, but aligned with.
• The I Ching
The belief that all change follows patterns—cycles of rise, fall, chaos, order.
In Fionn, time and fate move like tides, not timelines.
• The quiet conviction that love is the real fire
Not romantic love alone, but loyalty, sacrifice, devotion, the ancient bonds that make humans dangerous to gods.
These influences didn’t appear as lectures or symbolism—they became the emotional skeleton of the book.
They shaped the characters, their choices, their fears, and ultimately their destinies.
A Different Kind of Fantasy
So Fionn grew into something strange:
neither classic high-fantasy nor modern YA, neither Celtic retelling nor historical myth.
It became warmer, darker, more mythic—and, I hope, more human.
It became a story about gods who bleed, heroes who doubt, and a world where immortality is not a blessing but a test of the soul.
It became a book that started as a children’s tale… and transformed into the beginning of a much larger saga.
I’m not Tolkien.
I’m not trying to be.
I simply wrote the story that insisted on being written—
a story about courage, destiny, love, loss, and the quiet moments between battles when a character reveals who they truly are.
If any part of this world touches your heart,
if any line stays with you longer than the page it sits on,
then this long journey was worth every hour of it.
— Filip Filatov
