I write a lot of characters that are mothers. Many of the women in the Daughters of the People Series are mothers, for example, and several of the short stories in Apocalypse Weird are narrated by mothers or include mothers who play important roles in their respective stories.

Part of this is due to my own state of motherhood; I've been a happy mother of one for more than two decades now. It's therefore natural for me to create characters with whom I share that circumstance.

Part of it is as a response to what I see as toxic notions of motherhood. Too many times, mothers are elevated to saints simply because they've nurtured a fetus in their womb for forty weeks, give or take.

Which is exactly why the mother in "Good Eats" is written the way she is. She's not the only atypical mother figure I've written, but she's the most obvious one.

My son and I are collaborating on a near-future dystopia. We've been developing the underpinnings of the story world for a few weeks: building the story world, deciding which characters inhabit it, and so forth. Creating the foundational rules, much like the rules needed to play Canasta.

During this process, I realized that one of the central characters is a metaphorical mother.

Normally I don't spend too much time trying to figure out which archetype a particular character follows. It formalizes characters in a way that, for me, makes it difficult to flesh them out. There's a certain rigidity to archetypes; too many writers fall into the trap of relying on archetype definitions without digging deeper into the characters themselves. The result is a stereotypical, cookie cutter character that feels flat on the page and functions at a surface level only within the story. I certainly don't want that to happen to my characters.

But as Caleb and I began really looking at the characters in this collaborative project, I noticed that this metaphorical mother does indeed fit a defined archetype.

Or rather, she falls squarely between two, the Madonna and the Mother Goddess.

As the metaphorical mother, this character is beatific, serene, and sinless, and like Mary (the Madonna), she undergoes a type of parthenogenesis (procreating by means of a virgin birth). Unlike Mary, our character gives birth to an entire society (Mother Goddess). There are other archetype criteria we're not following religiously (no pun intended) as well. Our character's children are not all Messiahs, for example.

One is, though, in his own way, and that provides the foundation for the story. Or one of the foundations. It's shaping up to be a complex story, which is half the fun.

This project is still in the early stages and, because of our respective schedules, may take a couple of years to reach fruition. In the meantime, it's interesting to poke around in archetypes, even when we're breaking some of the established rules.