THE PALACE

CREATING THE PALACE

When I created The Palace, my intention was to modulate the tone of a fairytale or bedtime story while incorporating my own dark twist. Now, this page exists to answer more questions about 'The Palace' - what it means, how it came to be, and much, much more.

​

​

What inspired The Palace?

The Palace was inspired by my own desire to extract two background characters from a longer project, and tell their story: a love story, a tragedy, and a victory over great evils. Of course, in the process, their story was shortened, and became more like a fairytale or bedtime story than the work I extracted them from. I got to tell the story as if from a great distance, or as if the story had been told through many generations and the details had become...distorted. However, at it's heart, The Palace is a story inspired by its characters, Laurel and Damerin, who have remained very much the same. 

​

​

What does The Palace mean? Does it have a deeper meaning?

Ultimately, as meaning is up to the readers of The Palace, I must first say that whatever meaning you've taken from it is inherently correct and valuable, because it is your own. If you simply enjoyed it because it was a good fairytale, great. If you drew from it some deeper meaning - perhaps about identity or struggle or acceptance, you're also right. 

However, if you want my thoughts, here they are: The Palace is a story about toiling against evil. It is also a story about identity, and struggle, and acceptance, and loss. It's a story that shows that there can be many ways of fighting evil, but that we are strongest when we put aside our own differences to fight evil together. It is no mistake that Laurel, the female lead, is the more monstrous of the protagonists, the less conventional hero, and yet the hero none the less. She has to struggle with being a product of her surroundings while also fighting against the greater evil her surroundings have fostered. She has to persevere, to accept herself, and learn how to leverage the ways in which her surroundings have changed her in order to [spoiler alert] ultimately overcome the evil cultivated in the same environment. None of this (her gender, her appearance, her unconventionality, or her own flaws) makes her less deserving of the title of 'hero', or any less deserving of the friendship and love within the narrative. In fact, I think that it is essential that Laurel is loved by Damerin, who accepts all of this about her. I know some people probably dislike Damerin's ending, but here is my take on it; no loss of another person will ever be 'worth it,' ever - not for the world, not for anything. Nor will any loss of anyone we have ever loved leave us unchanged. What really matters is that Damerin's love, too, can never be taken away, his impact on her can never be changed. Laurel finishes the story alone, because the journey and the story are hers, but to me, the story is one which illustrates the triumph of what acceptance, support and love can do in the face of our hardest, most personal, internal battles, and in the face of the rest of the world. 

If all of this seems too much, then, believe what you may.