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by Sèphera Girón

Writers are always asked, "Where do you get your ideas?"

Most authors, including myself, have a variety of serious and smartass answers to that question. It's not that we're being mean or snide or secretive. I think that it's just we don't know how these things pop into our head and why we throw some out and hold others close to our heart. Readers have tapped into this elusive concept but it's nearly impossible to pull it from the dream realm to examine under a microscope.

Ideas just are.

Ideas are everywhere. Ideas make the world go round. Ideas are what send us to the moon, keeps us questioning our existence, keeps technology expanding, keeps modern civilization accelerating at a rapid pace whether we want it to or not.

BORROWED FLESH evolved from a combination of ideas, as did the previous books. I wanted to examine women aging in a youth culture, which is why the witches take great pains to retain their youthful looks. My older son is into the rapper scene and I was listening to Eminem a lot at the time, so I incorporated some teenage rappers into the book. Relationships and the "Secret Handbook on How to have a Good One and Keep It" is a constant mystery to me, so Vanessa, my main character, spends some time looking for love and reflecting on the idea of it.

I have written about Vanessa before over the years. She came to me when I was in University, appearing as a twenty-something-year-old university student just getting into witchcraft. I workshopped Vanessa and some other characters at various writing workshops in university. I wrote a couple of books about her over the years. One was published by Darktales, ETERNAL SUNSET. I always saw Vanessa as part of a series, after all, she has eternal life. Vanessa, obviously, was an extension of who I thought I wanted to be at that time.

As a young witch, she was everything I was not. Beautiful, strong, thin, blue eyed with no glasses, not worried about what people thought, going for her goals no matter what the cost, able to act out revenge on people that did her wrong, able to successfully attract the men she desired, able to be like Scarlett O'Hara and not dwell upon the wrath she brought into other people's lives.

Vanessa never dies for me, though, as a character. She haunts me a lot and I know that she has many more stories to tell. She wanted me to tell her story as a forty-year-old woman, as someone who has learned a bit of self control but still wants things her way. So BORROWED FLESH evolved.

From a young lady in the eighties to a middle aged woman in 2000s, Vanessa has changed, of course in some ways. Nothing ever stays the same or we'd all die of boredom.

The world has changed. Women ARE more aggressive now then even twenty years ago when Vanessa first came into my life. Who are the women role models of today for the young girls? Martha Stewart? Oprah? Britney Spears? Madonna? J.K. Rowling? Anne Rice? Barbara Walters? Demi Moore?

It is this odd society we live in right now, that has no clear mentors, no controlling religion for the masses, people openly mock the President and Prime Ministers and live to tell about it, laws about drugs and marriage and basic rights are constantly changing, which gives a sense of unease and chaos for the average person. We learn rules are made to be broken. We learn that money talks, that looks must be preserved at any cost, for saggy tits and wrinkles are ugly, not badges of knowledge, and that teeth must be white, eyes must be lasered, (guys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses....) money must be saved for retirement, and that at any moment some portion of your life could end up on some Reality TV program.

How things change, and will continue to change is the one constant in life, as far as I can tell.

So where am I going with these thoughts on society? It is these ideas that rattle around my head, these ideas of society and expectations. THIS is where I get my ideas. From life. From living it and observing it. From watching the patterns of relationships, of child rearing, of consumerism, of music trends, of sexuality, of dreams.

I thought it would be fascinating to see what happens to Vanessa when she hits forty. Vanessa has eternal life which she obtained through a grisly spell back when she was in university. It came at a huge price, including being physically destroyed. When we meet her in BORROWED FLESH, she is constantly battling with her body to keep it from aging and to keep the scars of her desperate journey hidden. She discovers that patching virgin flesh to hers helps for a while, but not long enough. When she meets David, a kind, handsome, younger man, she has to decide if he's really her true love and if she is going to tell him her secret.

But can David ever really be her true love when visions of her old lover, Demian, keep intruding on her thoughts? When does one give up on an old love and old feelings?

Click here for more about Sèphera Girón.

Since I am a tarot reader as one of my jobs, I made Vanessa a tarot reader. This gave me the opportunity to incorporate more characters, as we meet a couple of her clients. I examine the theme of betrayal in a couple of different ways in this book. Men are disappearing and wives want to know why.

Why do people do what they do? What will they do to survive? What is power, really?

My teen rapper, Ashley, spends time in the book looking for her friend, Alex, who has mysteriously disappeared. Since I live across the street from a Catholic high school, I am always intrigued by the school uniform idea. The skirts are short, even the knee-length ones lift in the wind to expose anything from white panties to thongs. Now the girls in Ontario at least, are starting to wear grey slacks instead of the skirts, but I still wonder about why in this day and age, especially when internet porn is so rampant, that these skirts are still uniform. So, in BORROWED FLESH, these rapper girls go to Catholic high school and wear their fetish magnet kilts by day and big baggy body covering rapper gear by night.

I play with the ideas of poetry, through spells and songs in BORROWED FLESH. Ashley is an aspiring rapper so some of her pieces are in the book. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to put the lyrics right in the book. It's fun to rap at readings!

Ideas are everywhere. There is no shortage. Most authors will tell you it's not the idea that is the hard part, it's finding the time and energy and publisher to turn the idea into a book to entertain others.