Inside Random Magic: The Garden

[Tour host info: A quick write-up on some of the subtexts in the Garden of the Muses. If you'd like this for your post, please leave a comment below, send an email, or msg via Twitter. Trying to make sure there's a nice selection of additional content to post alongside reviews, interviews, trailer, etc. If you already have your completed interview, you might not need additional content, but if you don't have your interview, yet, and would like to include some useful info about the book for your readers, then just speak up -- the additional content is for use on the tour, just trying to match up a particular post with whoever's most interested in including the topic!] Images available for use: Text: The Garden of the Muses is a visual explosion of color. The garden is vast and nearly limitless, and literally overflowing with flowers. The purpose of the depicting the astonishing palette of colors in the Garden of the Muses is to give the reader something really wonderful, colorful and magical to enjoy. But it’s also to give readers a sense of just what the Nine Muses actually are. The Nine Muses are nine sisters, who inspire great works of art. The very air they breathe is, literally, magical. Henry notices, when he first enters the garden, that the air is alive with color, and everything seems to be freshly painted, as if an artist is painting the scene on canvas. It's an accurate observation. The Muses don’t just inspire or create art -- they are art. They’re the living embodiments of poetry, or music, or dance. So, of course, if there are flowers in their garden, they will have a nearly limitless palette of colors. They don’t have to choose between red or white or pink or yellow roses, because they have every single color from any part of human history at their disposal. Any color and any combination of colors. The flowers that spring up around them, too, aren’t just something to look at. Humans look at a flower that’s been created, and enjoy the beauty of a temporal thing. The Muses, on the other hand, breathe creative energy into the entire world. So, they not only enjoy the flowers around them, but they're actually part of them. (On a side note, you might consider that in later Judeo-Christian tradition, there was also a very important garden mentioned as both the place of divine creation and the scene of the downfall of the human race -- the Garden of Eden.) Flowers are beautiful, as the Muses are, but flowers aren’t something that they’re given for their birthday. Flowers are something they actually breathe into being, the same way they’d breathe a painted picture, or a new book, into being. The flowers, to the Muses, wouldn’t be objects, as much as they would nearly be living thoughts. Gardens are a metaphor for life, but the Nine Muses -- and their garden -- are more than the metaphor. They don't paint with pigments, they paint with life, itself. [Additional info you'd like to add: URLs, next tour stop info, related links, your review link, etc.]