For my short story, I decided to create a contemporary adaptation of The Iliad, taking the themes of love and loss, honour, fate, and supernatural beings to create a story about a forgotten muse. I took inspiration from the beginning of The Iliad calling upon the Muse of Epic Poetry, Calliope to help tell the story and also took the religious and supernatural themes of Greek Mythology. Another parallel between The Iliad and my story of The Forgotten Muse is that I used Prometheus’ character to act as a stand-in for the Oracle in the Iliad, warning of death.
What I found, from reading about Greek mythological figures such as Io (who Hera turns into a cow), is that it’s very dramatized and sometimes, and maybe accidentally, humorous because it is so departed from reality, for example, the attempted murder of Seraphineia. I was also inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth when writing about the ‘haunting’ inflicted upon Zeus while he grieved, wanting to drift further from the typical grief depicted in stories and make it more theatrical. My reasoning is, that I don’t want the readers to humanise Zeus, because then his actions would be too outlandish. So, if they know they’re reading a piece of fiction about a mythological being, his character’s decisions, with reverse psychology, would come across as an acceptable reaction.
I used fantastical phrasing and language to depict a fairy tale, for example, the sentence ‘Zeus was unravelling--hurling his weight around Seraphineia’s chamber to match the violent scene in his mind’s eye.’

I will admit it was very difficult to tell this story with the cap of 2000 words, going over 10% to 2200. I had to go through and shorten sentences, or scrap some altogether, panicking when I only had so few words left before Seraphineia had reached Earth. I need to work with my pacing, and it is something that I can do even as I write this, however, knowing I also had to write 100 lines of poetry and create a bigger project, like the website, I decided to make the poetry a continuation, delving deeper into events of the story, such as; ‘The Childhood of Seraphineia’, ‘The Internal Struggle of Zeus’ and the longest poem, as that period of the story was shortened, ‘What Could Have Been for Seraphineia…’.

To make the portfolio for a contemporary audience, I took note of the movie ‘Xanadu’, also about muses descending to earth in the modern day. For the portion of the story that took place on Earth, I wanted to drift from fantastical phrasing, to root the audience in the setting, which I also did for the last poem in the series.

For the website, I designed it so that you have the story on one page, and then an index for the poems, which are titled so that you can easily find more information on the part you’re most interested in learning more about. The original idea was to hyperlink names and passages in the story to connect straight to a new page within the website to take you there while you read, however, I didn’t want to take people out of the story format, get lost in the poem and have to return to reading the story. I think the index gives it the book feel that I wanted and it doesn’t mess with the order in which I wrote the story and the information I allow people to know at those given times.

The artwork I have gone with is digital, which is very contemporary to me. I took imagery from the story and turned it into a piece of art, close to where the story references it. I think illustration is super important for stories, it gives the audience a starting point for their imagination to run wild, and that’s the reason why the artwork is so vague because I don’t want to control where people take the story in their minds, but I did want to give the website something unique to look at.