Laird Stevens's Blog

Sometimes I spend a whole year not having a single good idea. To be honest, it's pretty depressing. I don't create my ideas. I create supper. I toss around a few food combinations, pick one that looks good, and I make it. But ideas come out of nowhere. I turn on my mental radio (which I do every day, of course) and usually there is nothing, just dead air. But every once in a while, something happens.

And then I have to listen like crazy, because I have to write it down while it's still there. And then I have to decide if it's any good. It often isn't. But sometimes, it just grabs onto me, and I know that if I don't make something good out of the idea, I have somehow failed.

As I said last time, the whole book wrote itself in a two hour walk. I had wanted to write a vampire novel, specifically a novel about a female vampire. But Stephenie Meyer blew the lie off that idea. I knew that I had to invent a new monster. So death fairies were born in Rome. Maybe it was that in Rome, two thousand years of history live side by side. Maybe it was that in Rome, I didn't have to wear boots or a jacket or gloves, and so I wasn't dominated by the body, but was free to let my imagination travel where it wanted. I don't know, and I will never know. Writing, as Plato said, is a divine madness. That's what inspiration is for me: a divine madness.

In the beginning was the snow; there was just too much of it. It began on December 3, 2007 and by next April, over twelve feet of the stuff had fallen on Montreal. I shoveled like a demon for four months. Often I shoveled our car out of its spot (so the plows could clear the road), and then shoveled a second spot for the car to go in. I was so traumatized by the winter that in August 2008, I began to look for holiday accommodation in Italy for the Christmas holidays. We wound up staying in Rome and Florence for a month. And the second place we rented in Rome was on the Piazza Adriana, right down by the Tiber, just behind the Castel Sant'Angelo. And one morning I took a walk, and the entire plot of The Death Fairy arrived in my head, like a train arriving at a station.

I don't know Rome at all well. I was there for two or three days when I was thirteen years old, and then I returned in 2008 for a couple of weeks. We stayed on Piazza Adriana, which is why Asia and her father stayed there in The Death Fairy. It was the only part of Rome I knew enough about to include in the novel.

In spite of being a short walk from Rome's biggest tourist draws (Castel Sant'Angelo and the Vatican, to name but two), Piazza Adriana is very quiet. If I lived in Rome, I would live there. Rome is a kind of human hurricane: it doesn't believe in traffic lights (they exist, but there aren't very many of them), it has far too many cars (so the drivers are cranky), and the (Roman) pedestrians are oblivious to traffic. They cross the road without looking.

There must be some kind of a law that says that if a driver hits a pedestrian, that is the end of the driver's days as a driver. But it's clear that the Roman drivers don't like that law, because they play chicken with you. If they can get by, they will, even if this means missing you by only six inches. But Piazza Adriana was calm, and pedestrians and motorists were normal.

For views from the Rome apartment go to http://photobucket.com/asiasromeapart...
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For more information, go to http://www.thedeathfairy.com.

I moved to Paris when I was twelve years old. I came from an English suburb of Montreal which had been built a couple of years before I was born. The main street had a train station, a supermarket and a pharmacy. There was a restaurant of sorts: in the rear of the convenience store was a counter with eight revolving stools. It served hamburgers and fries. It didn't go further than that, but that was all anyone expected.

Then I moved to Paris and life suddenly became spectacularly full. There were one or two things they didn't have, like corn, either on or off the cob, and peanut butter, but I think it's fair to say that what they did have more than made up for that. I ate in restaurants often, and every meal was a discovery. I simply had no idea that food could be so delicious. There's a movie where Meryl Streep plays Julia Child: her reaction to the food in Paris was exactly mine. It was impossible that anything could taste so good.

And, of course, there was everything else as well: the widest streets you've ever seen, as well as the narrowest; the uniformity of the architecture, and all (or almost all) uniformly beautiful; in most streets, traffic chaos; in the large parks, real serenity. That's why I took Asia (Asia McPhee, the main character in the novel) and put her in Paris. I wanted to make at least part of her life happy.

Paris Again

When I lived in Paris, I was in the 6th arrondissement, south of the river. In some ways, the area is staggeringly grand, with many buildings fit only for demigods or higher. But in other ways, it is the most human environment I have ever met with in a city. People shop every day. Nothing is far, and everything is good. You can't survive in the 6th if your goods or services are poor. You have to be competitive, and the competition is stiff.

When I returned to Paris many years later, I stayed in an apartment on boulevard Raspail in the 6th. That is the apartment I put Asia in for her first summer in Paris. We could indeed see the Pantheon from the living room and the Eiffel Tower from the kitchen (as I say in chapter 1 of the novel). And yes, the walls were indeed covered in tan-colored cloth.

For pictures, you can go to photobucket.com/Asia_on_Raspail