Question of the Day--Why is the moon purple?

Three more days till Keepers goes Live!

FAQ--What's up with the moon being purple? 

Good question!

One of the most difficult aspects of making a different world is finding a way to infuse fantasy into reality. Readers must have familiar images woven in the story so they can anchor the imaginary to the real. It makes the world believable and allows the setting to add to the story, not smother it. When a balance between reality and fantasy is maintained, the reader wants to go to that world. And so when creating Kailmeyra, I had to find distinctive traits that would identify the land without being overpowering. Something that could be a constant and yet not get in the way of the story itself.

At first, I was overwhelmed. Edna's mountain seemed perfect to me. How could I improve on that?

I decided to go back through the first half of the book and take a look at the environment as a whole. The thought was to contrast the two worlds in such a way that the reader would naturally pick up the difference between the two lands without an abundance of descriptive passages.

Color is one of the simplest, yet most powerful, ways of changing someone's perception. Purple is symbolic for royalty. It is the product of mixing a warm color and a cool color, and in most societies throughout the ages was used only on the finest cloth. The fact that the moon is often described as an "Amethyst light:" is no accident. Amethyst was believed in mid evil times to control evil thoughts, quicken intelligence, and keep demons away.

For me, though, the most important aspect of including amethyst as a descriptor of the moonlight is the religious connotations of the stone. It was one of the twelve stones that adorned the breastplate of Aaron (Exodus 39), and it is the last stone laid on the foundational wall of the new Jeresulem in the book of Revelations.