Maggie Stiefvater on Phobias, Titles & Blue Lily, Lily Blue

Maggie Stiefvater is the best-selling author of books including the Shiver trilogy, The Scorpio Races, and the thrilling, mind-bending Raven Cycle, continuing next week with third installment Blue Lily, Lily Blue. The last time we saw Blue Sargent and her raven boys, in 2013’s The Dream Thieves, Blue was fighting her attraction to doomed golden boy Gansey; tortured Ronan was letting his dream life take over his reality; and Adam was making a terrible sacrifice. We’re dying to see what Stiefvater has in store for the series’ third chapter—and while we wait, here she is on one (spoiler-free!) inspiration behind the title Blue Lily, Lily Blue:

I’ll admit that I spent about thirty minutes trying to find solid statistics on catoptrophobia—the fear of mirrors—before I began this blog post. I knew this was going to be about mirrors and magic and words, and I thought that if I had some solid statistics or a fun fact about mirrors and magic and words to begin the festivities, I’d be golden. But it turns out no one knows exactly how many people suffer from catoptrophobia, or if they do, they aren’t saying it on the internet.

Unfortunate.

Mirrors are the reason I titled the third installment in the Raven Cycle Blue Lily, Lily Blue. It’s a departure from the first two titles: The Raven Boys (where our boyish heroes meet our girlish hero and they set about trying to find a magical Welsh king buried inexplicably in the Virginia mountains) and The Dream Thieves (where our heroes discover that dreams and hit men can be dangerous). When I announced the title of the third book was to be Blue Lily, Lily Blue, readers asked, “Why the change? Why not The Blue Lily?”

I’ll be honest. My editor asked me, too.

Mirrors.

For starters, the book is full of them. There’s quite a lot of supernatural happenings and psychic activity in the series in general, and the third book focuses on scrying in particular. Scrying, in case you haven’t polished up on your new age divination techniques lately, is the old practice of gazing into a mirrored surface until one sees…something. Anything other than the mirrored surface. Sometimes scrying is used for fortune telling. Sometimes it’s used for meditation. Sometimes, if you are Adam Parrish from The Raven Cycle, you use it to find out what the giant supernatural entity you bargained with wants from you.

So, actual mirrors are important in the book. But there’s another sort of mirror that I personally enjoy playing with, and those are the ones inside the characters.

On the surface, this series is about Welsh mythology, fast cars, boarding schools, and benevolent psychics performing daytime drinking. But in its soul, it’s a story about what makes a hero. What does it take to overcome difficult circumstances? What does it take to live up to heroic expectations? Why do some people excel at life while others get crushed under its heel? I love to mirror characters—to give them similar circumstances, similar personalities, similar choices—to explore what makes one person take a noble path and another an ignoble. More than ever, mirrored souls are present in Blue Lily, Lily Blue. It seemed very fitting to mirror the title along with everything else.

Which brings us back to catoptrophobia. Man, I really wish I had found statistics for it. I suppose there aren’t many support groups for it, though there ought to be: it’s been around forever. For as long as we’ve had mirrored surfaces, we’ve suspected that one day we will look into them and they will show us…something else. And in Blue Lily, Lily Blue, they do.

24%. Is that a good number? I just made it up. Let’s go with that.

Blue Lily, Lily Blue is available now for preorder.