Update on the witching novel

I have to remind myself what I started this blog for, from time to time.
Besides making sense of a situation that I suddenly found myself in and having somewhere to go to with certain thoughts and feelings, I wanted to document my writing process while working on my novel about a witch in Europe in the 17th century.

As much as I enjoy to communicate in poetry about all the things that never were and in tales about breaking, I feel the need to focus more on the next step of this and use all the expressions that I have found and things that I have read about witches to actually write that novel.

(Okay, in a few days I will probably again erupt in the next wave of verses thinking my existence apart, but still … )

I don‘t want to say that I fully understand every aspect of the life of a person in the late medieval or early modern days, yet, but I have gotten closer to putting certain things into words.

This is how far I got with my witching novel.

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My witch was an ordinary person living the most ordinary life until terrible things began to happen. Becoming a witch is deeply connected to Dystopia. Witches were, after all, an invention by people finding their existence threatened by something beyond their comprehension.
My witch will have been a sister and a daughter, and will probably have dreamed about living her ordinary life behind city walls seemingly too solid to ever be torn down. She will then have had to experience a marriage being functional but completely without love and will have had to bury all the children that ever came out of it, until even her husband died, and all of this when she was in her early twenties.
This is an important aspect of becoming a witch. Not just because „malleus maleficarum“ states that any odd occasions involved in procreating were a sign for bonding with demons, but also because witches are deconstructed human beings.
Having been a daughter, a sister, a wife or even a mother and losing all of these parts of yourself is becoming a witch.
This is not where her story ends. It is where it starts.

But of course, a witch is not only connected to her own Dystopia. A witch is seen as a witch by other people, so the whole city that our ordinary girl grew up in has to face disaster.
In the 17th century, there are a few options. Hard winters and crop failure are one, but also the 30 years war or the plague could always pay a visit.
I had trouble settling on one of these things. A classical witch hunt occurred after incidents like unexpectedly dying cattle (there was a woman in Germany in the 17th century that was executed for having touched a cow that died two years later!), but the plague could end the city faster. Although writing about this in a year like 2020 seemed so lame!
Then again, deciding to have it would make it possible to include another dark figure that had left me sleepless as a child into my writing: a plague doctor.
People with masks are scary, but what hides underneath might be sexy!

I think that my witch will survive her questioning and even her planned execution, because one of these disasters will end the town before they end her, and most likely it will be this dark, masked figure that will find her as a deconstructed human being and will give her back the parts of herself that has lost in all of this.
Or even more than that. After everything that made her the witch she is, she needs someone to teach her how to live with darkness.

He taught her darkness.

These are the important stages of being a witch.
Being an ordinary person, until disaster struck.
Losing everything she ever was, and still surviving everyone else.
Finding love with a very dark figure.

Of course, her time with him is just as fragile as everything else.
He will continue to leave and perform his dark duty, and she will hope and fear for his return, until, of course, one day he will not.

Life is fragile, and witches know a lot about that.

All she has left at this point, is making a living out of all the darkness he has taught her, and actually become that weird and lonesome lady that sells potions and spells to the lost ones that visit her, until someone gives her secret away and she will finally die for the witch that she is.

But what else was she supposed to do now? There is no world to go back into. It had already proven her guilty of its own ending.

When I think of this time, after he had definitely not returned, I see her working herself through empty and lonely days in his house, hidden in the forest, and welcoming dark and weird people with all their petty requests which she tries to answer with his books that she can barely read, because she has no one else to go to or to ever come to her.

This is my current version of being hopeful.
At least somewhere in the shadows there is someone.