Magic Thursday: Some muses are not there to help with Rhyll Biest!

 

I have a secret.

People often ask where fiction writers get their ideas from and, like most authors, mine comes from the muse occupying my vestigial tail. (Next time you go to an author convention or book signing, ask to see the author’s vestigial tail. They won’t mind.) Where it gets weird is that my muse is not there to help.

Somehow I’ve ended up with a muse who’s the sort of sewer-mouthed tramp prone to scrapping over the last pack of Quilton three ply during a pandemic lock-down. Proud of her Bukowski-like appetite for vulgarity, she sports the impulse control and attention span of a toddler, and has never met a bad decision she didn’t like. If she were an organ she’d be a diseased liver. I call her Rude Jude (among other things, behind her back) and blame her totally for derailing progress on my current novel. And I share with you here the results of following her down a were-rabbit rabbit hole for several hours. 

I innocently googled “rabbits in folklore” and came across the tale of English woman Mary Toft who, in a gloriously successful medical hoax in 1726, convinced the medical fraternity (including an attending doctor) she was giving birth to rabbits. After a scientific paper was published about bunny-birthing Mary, she became a hot topic throughout England and Europe, leaving quite a trail of documentary evidence for historical researchers. (If you’d like to join me and Rude Jude in the were-rabbit rabbit hole, you can read an interesting Atlas Obscura article about the hoax, a socio-historical analysis in the non-fiction book The Imposteress Rabbit-Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England, or the historical fiction novel Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen. 

Mary Croft. Source

Then Jude and I discovered that even before Mary Toft, rabbits and hares had a bad rep. Seeing a rabbit or hare was considered an ill omen for travel, and it was thought that if a pregnant woman saw or ate either it would result in her child being born with a hare-lip. Rabbits and hares, along with various other creatures such as cats and crows, were also believed to be witch familiars, and folklore abounds with tales of milk-thieving animals, including (you guessed it) milk rabbits who were either witch familiars or witches in disguise. 

They might steal milk from livestock as well as nursing mothers, which meant that no sheep, goat, cow or lactating woman was safe. And since the loss of milk could mean the difference between life and death back then, ‘milk theft’ was A Very Big Problem. Poor nutrition and disease control were probably to blame for low milk yield (in both women and livestock) but without the benefit of science, who better to blame than witches and those odious servants of Satan—the milk bunny and were-hare? 

And if it wasn’t rabbits stealing your milk, it was troll cats. Not familiar with troll cats? (Shame on you!) Troll cats are, according to Scandinavian folklore, witch familiars that suck the milk from cows so they can later spit it out into a witch’s milk pail. They were also known to creep into homes to lick up cream. Apparently witches could create these troll cats from a bit of human hair and some nails and wood shavings. (Note to self: Next time I run out of milk, I won’t bother going to the store, I’ll just whip up a troll cat and send it out to steal some milk from my neighbour’s cow.) 

For modern witches who don’t like pets and are prepared to go to a little extra effort (i.e., following a complex procedure for creating a milk-thieving golem-like creature) a tilberi for milk theft is another option. However, the downside of creating a tilberi (besides it not being as cute as a cat or a bunny) is that if you get knocked up and lactate, and the tilberi manages to reach your milk-filled breast, you’re at risk of being suckled to death by your own witchy creation. But modern gals who live on the edge by regularly attending botox parties and taking overseas cosmetic surgery holidays will likely be comfortable with this small risk.

milk hare

So, there you have it. That’s the crazy were-rabbit journey I was led on by my frenemy-cum-muse Rude Jude. While all that reading might one day come in use for a story, it hasn’t so far, but I think the take-away message for me was that I’m glad I live in the twenty-first century and don’t have to worry about pesky were-hares, troll cats, tilberi and milk rabbits draining either me or my cow dry. And that I should resist the temptation to tell people I’m giving birth to rabbits (because Mary Toft went to prison for that shit).

Refuge

Book 2, Shelter

Widow, workaholic vet and card-carrying curmudgeon Stacey prefers pets to people and surgery to socialising. To rally the town to save her animal rescue shelter, she’ll need a charismatic campaign spokesperson—someone like her popular, lumbersexual colleague Nick.

Addiction, secrets and Stacey’s marriage to his best friend forced Nick to keep his distance from the passionate, potty-mouthed Stacey. Now she wants his help but as a recovered addict he’s reluctant to become the face of her campaign. 

However, as opposition to the campaign turns violent, Nick and Stacey find themselves increasingly turning to one another.

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Rhyll Biest

Like the creepy Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, I’m trying to transform myself. Since I’m a little squeamish about skinning, I’ve instead opted to transform myself from a weasel word-sproutin’, passive sentence-luvin’ government hack into a paranormal romance writer happy to sit down at the computer and wait for the keyboard to sprout hair. I’m a genre ‘swinger’, also dabbling in erotic romance, but would consider a long-term committed relationship with an alpha hero sporting suitably long fangs.

A reject from the world of academia since my PhD scholarship ended and no one would keep paying me to write made-up stuff, I spent years working for the Army of Darkness (Australian Public Service) writing articles about diseased animal innards while longing to recapture the lost paradise of writing in my jammies all day long. 

You can find Rhyll on Substack (@beastlyauthor) or at website at biestbooks.au