I Say Gryphon, You Say Griffin - Mythical Creatures of the Sky

Welcome to my third instalment about mythical creatures. The first two are here, on dragons and fantastical horses. Today we’re looking at the fearsome beasts populating our fantastical skies. 

If you’re a fantasy writer you probably spell this ‘Gryphon’. 

Is there a fantasy writer alive who can resist the lure of replacing an ‘i’ with a ‘y’ or an ‘f’ with a ‘p’? It just looks so much more mystical! I’m guilty as charged, so I am here to introduce you to the gryphon (or griffin, maybe griffon, if you’re not a fantasy writer!).

The gryphon has the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The gryphon inherited a certain amount of status from the traditional belief the lion was king of the beasts. As such, the gryphon was considered powerful and majestic and itself a king of creatures. It was also the symbol of divine power and a guardian of the divine.

Traditionally, gryphons were found guarding treasures and priceless possession. That’s some heavy duty guard dog! 

Gryphons appear in a number of fantasy books but the only one I can think of off the top of my head is Mercedes Lackey’s ‘Valdemar’ books. Oh yeah… and those weird War of Power books. That was possibly a genre confusion between ‘fantasy’ and ‘erotica’. 

Sphinx – Greek not Egyptian!

In the Greek tradition, the sphinx is part lion, part woman and part eagle. Yep, always a woman. Sorry guys, you lucked out on this one, no lion and eagle bits for you! The sphinx has the head of a  woman, the body of a lion, and the wings of a bird and was the guardian of the city of Thebes. Visitors were only permitted to pass after they answered this riddle:

 "Which creature in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?"

If you didn’t give the right answer, the sphinx strangled and devoured anyone who couldn’t answer the riddle. Eww! Certainly discourages hasty answers. I wonder how long you could think about it and if you could just decide to leave instead of answering?

The riddle was ultimately answered by Oedipus. Apparently devastated, the sphinx threw herself from a high rock and died. Seems a bit strange for something with wings, but it’s preferable to the alternative ending, which is she devoured herself. Double eww!

The death of the sphinx was followed by the rise of the new Olympian deities.

I can’t think of a book I’ve read with a sphinx, but I’ve got one featuring in my book The Blood Infernal. They also cropped up in some of the really old Dungeons & Dragons computer games, the Forgotten Realms ones I think. True to form, they asked riddles!

Phoenix – Holy Smoke!

The phoenix is a bird described with colourful plumage and a tail, most traditionally, of gold and scarlet (like Fawkes in the Harry Potter movies). Some legends describe the tail feathers as blue, green or purple, but really red and gold makes more sense. It fits with the fire theme, yeah? It’s so important to make an impact! The phoenix also has a beautiful song.

The phoenix lived anywhere between 500 – 1000 years before bursting into flame. OK, it builds a nest first, and then ignites. Close enough! It burns to ash and a new phoenix is born (or reborn) from the ashes (or sometimes an egg). I'm not sure why the nest is important. Legends differ as to whether the new phoenix is the offspring of the old phoenix or the old phoenix itself reborn. If the latter, this is one immortal bird!

The phoenix appears in Egyptian and Greek legends, but is described differently. To the Egyptians it was a stork or heron type bird, to the Greeks a peacock or eagle. In Greek tradition, the phoenix lived next to a well (in Phoenicia... surprise surprise). Each dawn it would bathe in the well and the Greek sun god, Helios, stopped his chariot to listen to the phoenix sing. Naturally, his chariot was the sun... your preferred vehicle of choice is the sun too, isn’t it? No? Time for an upgrade, Helios style!

Fawkes of Harry Potter fame is likely the most well-known phoenix currently, but phoenixes also appear in many other fantasy books. 

Hippogriff – Is That A Hippo Griffin Hybrid?

Actually the hippogriff has nothing to do with hippos! Supposedly it was the offspring of a gryphon and a mare (female horse). That tends to make it a little rare since gryphons look at horses more as, well, lunch than lover! Interestingly, it’s been suggested this gave rise to the expression  "to mate griffins with horses" – or in modern language, “pigs might fly!”. 

It probably comes as no surprise, then, to know the hippogriff was a symbol of impossibility and love. Oh... how sweet.

Hippogriffs do all right for themselves, apparently being faster, stronger and smarter than their fathers (sorry guys, looks like Mum holds all the cards in this one!) and able to travel at the speed of lightning. On the other hand, hippogriffs were easier to tame than gryphons, I guess because they were half domesticated animal to start with. I want me a hippogriff!

The most well-known hippogriff of the moment is Buckbeak from Harry Potter. I can’t think of another book featuring a hippogriff, but they also appeared in the Dungeons & Dragons computer games. 

What mythical creature would you like to see in future instalments? Or do you have a burning, unanswered question about a mythical creature? Let me know in the comments!

 

Photography by Erin Janssen Photography © 2012

You can find other posts in mythical creatures series here - Dragons, Fantastical Horses, Mythical Creatures of the Sea - Part 1 and Part 2, and Spirits of Inland Waterways. 

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Six Sentence Sunday: Unspoken Love

A quick look at the perspective of Jeharv in Deathhawk's Betrayal. 

Jeharv remembered the day Astarl changed from girl to woman for him. Already sick, he had aged beyond his years. Would she look at him differently if he was healthy again, if he were young again?

You never tried to learn how she looked at you now.

There was no point. Astarl was... difficult and he was dying.

You can find more Six Sentence Sunday writers here.

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How To Make A Book Trailer

Research on book trailers is inconclusive. Do they help sales or are they a waste of time and money?

I don’t even have a book for sale but I do have a book trailer. Why? For the simple reason it was fun. I did a workshop on making book trailers and had an absolute blast making this one myself. It must have satisfied some inner, more visual creative craving that isn't writing related!

NB: sometimes the video file plays smoothly for me and sometimes it doesn't. If you have a similar problem, I suggest you press play, then pause, and wait for the whole file to buffer before attempting to watch it. Apologies. 

So if you can make your own book trailer cheaply and easily, cost ceases to be so much of an issue – even if, maybe, the book trailer has no significant effect on sales. 

So how does one go about making a book trailer? Here are some guidelines and resources you can use. I am assuming familiarity with the software I refer to, but if you have a technical question, please do ask in the comments.

1. Write an effective script. Start with a back cover blurb (or write a new one) to build your script from. It needs to be specific. In reality, this is going to end up looking a bit like a three line elevator pitch. I know, I know. Tough call. We all hate doing it. Do it anyway. And I stress it must be specific.
2. The blurb needs to be broken down into 20-25 specific phrases. Specific. You want the reader to have a clear idea what your book is about at the end of this. Check out my script in the trailer above. Use sentence-correct capitalisation and punctuation. Don’t start each phrase with a capital. You’ll want the last screen to be information about your book and where it can be purchased. This last screen should stay up a bit longer at the end.
3. Start a Microsoft PowerPoint slideshow and put each phrase on one slide. Don’t use fancy entrance and exit options for text, they’re distracting. Your slide transition should be set to ‘fade smoothly’. You need the slides to transition in the time it takes to read the phrase aloud. You’ll need to test this and adjust the options. Sorry – this is different for every version of Powerpoint so I can’t tell you where to find this but it should be reasonably easy to locate. One version has a nifty feature where you can play the slide show to set the timings. You click when the slide should transition and it saves the timing.
4. Find yourself a nice font. It should be easy to read but not a boring, standard font. If you have a published book, you might aim to match the font on your cover. I get my fonts here but there are other sites you can use. Make sure you choose a TrueType font.
5. Find pictures to match your phrases. You don’t need one picture per phrase. You’ll notice I have some pictures that appear for multiple phrases. I get my pictures from Dreamstime which has the advantage of allowing you to download watermarked images. You can use these in a ‘test’ before settling on final images and paying for them. If you use Dreamstime, you should use the ‘Small’ size when purchasing pictures.I suggest waiting until you have chosen all the pictures you want to use, then buy a subscription package. You'll get more pictures for your dollar. I have dozens of spare ones left over that I can now use for other things.
6. Add each picture to the appropriate slide. You may need to reposition the text, change font colours, sizes and background colours. Keep in mind the overall theme or mood of your novel. If you couldn’t guess, mine is a little dark, yes?
   
7. Find royalty-free music to match the mood of your trailer. I got mine here and it was free, but you can buy music as well. the site I use allows you to search music by theme and mood. I cannot emphasise mood enough. Listen to the music in my trailer. Think about how much it adds to the trailer. We are writers, we move people with words, but don’t forget that music speaks to us in a very visceral fashion. This is why they use it in movies – it’s a very powerful tool.
8. If the music is too long, you’ll need to edit it. I used a programme called Cakewalk for this. I had no idea how to use it when I purchased it but I figured it out. It’s relatively intuitive. There is a small cost to purchase. You can get it here if you’re interested. I had to shorten mine and to be honest the music may need to be shortened a fraction more just to end at precisely the right place but I simply haven't had time to attend to this detail yet. We don’t add the music to PowerPoint, we add it when we convert the PowerPoint presentation to a video file.
9. Once you’ve completely assembled your slideshow, the next step is to convert it to a video file! You can get software here to do this (if you don’t already have some). There are three versions here: a free edition, a free trial edition (which puts a banner on your trailer) and a version you can purchase for $45.00.  I used the free version and it worked just fine but you might choose to invest in the complete version.
   
10. Once you’ve downloaded the program, open it and click ‘Add’ then select your PowerPoint file. Then click ‘customise’, go to the ‘Music’ tab and click on the green music note with the plus sign. Select your music file.
    
11. On ‘Profile’ select the format you want. MPEG 4 or WMV are the most common. Select ‘High’ for both video and audio quality. Output is the file destination on your computer.
12. Click ‘Start’!

And that’s it! Once your PowerPoint has finished converting into a video file you can watch it, upload it, put it on your website, blog, Facebook page and share it with all your friends!

If you are interested in learning more about how to write a script for a book trailer and choosing pictures and music that suit the trailer, as well as more resources for pictures and music and technical guidance on how to use various programmes, I highly recommend this ‘Create Your Own Book Trailer’ workshop. 

Happy book trailering!

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