I cannot escape Frances MacKay, aka Faelyn or Fanny Fae. She is closely based on my ancestor, Frances Moira MacKay, of Clan MacKay in Scotland. As such, Fanny,is one of my akhu or ancestors. That lilting Scot’s brogue of hers has been “in my head” for a while now. Roughly I would say that it has been since about 1998 or thereabouts. And sometimes she has been there more vociferously than at other times. She always has had a clarity that all of my other characters have lacked. That may be due to the fact that she is somewhat based off of an ancestor, as well as being a product of my very active imagination.
Then some time later on a Sunday afternoon, I was listening to the show, “The Thistle and Shamrock,” I heard the hostess of the show, Fiona Richie. To say that they had the same timbre, tone and accent as Fanny did is an understatement!
She started out as more a Wytch than anything else. This was because my ancestor, the real Frances was something of a Cailleach (Scots word for ‘Witch’). The Fae thing came about a little later. I think it was because mainly that fact that many Celtic peoples have a claim to “Faery ancestry”. The Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Conrish cultures are just rife with the stories! And the Isle of Avalon had always fascinated me. I thought, well, so what if I followed Marion Zimmer Bradley’s idea of the Fae being essentially a race of people, probably more French-like in stature and colouring; small, dark, mysterious that most Anglos are. It would not be too much of a stretch of hte imagination to have these people who have this legend about them of being of incredible age, and with access to the hidden realms of existence.
I had a co-writer on another site where we had an idea of the Fae Wars, when humans and the Fae were separated for all of time from each other, and made it so she had some really horrible failures. I wanted to follow the idea that what we think of the Fae now is a cross between a real race of humans and some ideas of elementals into completely different anthropomorphic beings. These are a synchretization of so many different cultures that I believe we have the ancient Romans and the Celts to thank for that.
Fanny is just at this point in the modern era, 563 years old and has seen alot of history. She is incredibly ambitious, frightfully arrogant at times, although the years have made her less so, and she has a very deep, intense affection and loyalty toward those whom she loves and cares about.
Over time she has evolved. Some storylines have gone far better than others and I have had to rewrite some of her history. Fanny has had tragedy in her life, she has failed in spite of her best efforts. Even in the face of those tragedies, she never stops believing that she can somehow have it all; and the one thing that she wants more than anything else is someone to love her and share it with her. Fanny / Faelyn doesn’t need to be worshipped or even so much fussed over. She wants what anyone else in the world wants. She is ambitous, she is fascinated by Power and its study. It isn’t that she so much worships it at all costs, but she likes to observe what it does to the people and things and events around her. That gives her another dimension that at times can produce very unexpected results because when she is on a roll, she can appear quite Machiavellian.
Fanny Fae 