I'm rereading the four Fallow Sisters novels I discovered last summer. They're better with each rereading, and here's great news from Liz Williams in an article, How Running a Witchcraft Shop Helps Me Write Fantasy Book: "The Fallow sisters contain elements of me—they are not me, but they are also like people I know. The house in which they live, magical Mooncote, is not my house—but its orchard is my orchard, its beehives are my beehives. I'm definitely not done with it just yet." More to come? Yea!
It makes sense. I keep noticing incidental threads that could lead to new stories as well as the big mystery of What is Alys up to?!?
Many of us who invent fictional worlds keep jotting down notes about characters, settings, and incidents, even after we finish a writing story. It's like getting news from friends or relatives. A novel requires a plot, not just information or ideas; but it is stimulating to reread your own old notes—and wouldn't I love to see Williams's notebooks!
This photograph of a path in Worcestershire, via Geograph, seems to me to invite the viewer to travel imaginatively into a version of England in which folkloric elements and magic happen to co-exist with the world we know. Who is headed for that obelisk? Why? What may happen on the way? And what will happen if it is reached?