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Revisit, re-assess
I just looked at the date of the last post I made here, and I’m fairly embarrassed. I’d love to say I’ve been wonderfully busy and productive and just haven’t had the time to update… Read more…
Like!Characters with magic are so difficult to put in peril
Seriously.
Here’s the situation. Saeli, Raphel, Mora, and Kaladan are on a world that is, due to a series of unfortunate events involving three jealous goddesses, one naive god, and a very angry angelic…well, doomed. Said goddesses created an extremely infectious disease that eventually rendered every single female on the planet unable to bear children. The last generation has reached their mid-50s or so, and they’ve essentially lost hope.
Enter Saeli and Mora, two young women of childbearing age who, due to their not being born on Dheu, are immune to this disease. You can see how this might interest certain parties. The two women get kidnapped, and are currently trapped in a cave surrounded by twenty or so men who are so desperate to not be the last generation that they’re willing to rape female strangers and force them to live out their lives on Dheu bearing children.
Saeli and Mora are both trained in the art of using their qi to do all sorts of extraordinary things, like fire and ice and wind and teleportation spells. None of the men who have captured them have any such power. (Although half of them are what they call “spirit walkers”. They can essentially thrust their spirits out of their bodies and travel about the “spirit realm”, where they receive guidance from the angelics who live there. This is, of course, of no practical use whatsoever against someone who can lob a fireball at them).
The first obvious question: how did a couple of magically inclined characters get captured by a bunch of non-magically inclined characters in the first place? Read more…
Caught an art bug
They happen. Sometimes I go through stages where I just have to draw something before I can write again. Anyway, I’ve started something of a series. I’m (maybe) going to do a shot of every hero and heroine from each of my story ideas paired together. I finished Saeli and Raphel this morning, and have put together the guide for Caleb and Fayna (Briar Rose).
So here’s the one I finished. Keep in mind I did this really fast. For some reason, the skin color I used for the shadows in Saeli’s face came out really dark on the web…makes her look kinda dead or something. 
Oh well.
Saeli / Raphel
In other news, I’ve been line editing…slowly…and also creating a basic overarching plot for my Grimms concept. Oh, and wrapping presents. And making presents. Speaking of…I should probably get to that at some point today.
Abusive personality
This is something, thankfully, that I know nothing about firsthand. I don’t think I’ve ever spent a significant amount of time with anyone who would fall under that category (if I have, they hid it really well). But alas, that means everything I know is going to come from reading the experiences of others, and reading the sort of official literature on the subject. Which, on one hand, is by far the closest I want to get to dealing with an abuser…but on the other hand, there will always be that voice in the back of my head saying, “You aren’t qualified to write this…you don’t really know what it’s like to be taken in by someone like that.”
I say all this because Raphel has what I’d call an abusive personality. In this, the first book, he’s very, very subtle about it. But in a way, that means this is the book where I have to walk the finest line between dark hero and villain. I don’t want Saeli to know she’s dealing with an abuser, but I do want the reader to start wondering. One of the things I find myself pulling out of this edit is the tendency of abusers to blame their actions on the victim. “Look what you made me do.” “It’s your fault I had to do this.” Raphel does this to Saeli a lot in “justifying” his kills. “I wouldn’t have had to kill this person if you had done *this*…” I haven’t even had to bring it out except in one scene…I was putting it in there all along without realizing it. He doesn’t outright blame her; she wouldn’t stand for that, not yet. But the implication is clear.
Raphel does it for control. If Saeli is too busy blaming herself for all the bad stuff that happens, she won’t think to blame Raphel and she won’t question him. Late in the second book, things will probably get to a point where Raphel doesn’t even have to make excuses for himself anymore; Saeli will just automatically cast Raphel as the victim of her own incompetence. She’ll start seeing herself as directly responsible for Raphel’s morality; she’ll start thinking in terms of being good enough and pure enough to save him from his own dark side. Thus, when he “fails” and kills someone, or whatnot, Saeli fails. Bad mental place to be. Especially since Raphel is the one who orchestrated that mindset in the first place, and will actively use it to his advantage.
I have to plant the seeds in this first book, or no one will believe it when Raphel gets worse later on. I’m working to make those seeds as subtle as I can, because I know from hearing people’s stories that abusers are really difficult to spot early on in the relationship. Raphel has to be particularly careful with Saeli, because she could at any moment hide herself inside Aschamon and be out of his reach forever. (Which is why one of the first things he does is start undermining her faith in Aschamon’s defenses. Part of the reason she decides to hear him out at all is because she’s afraid the school can’t protect her if she refuses.) He can’t afford to scare her off, so he’s cautious and gentle with her. But if a guy slaps you across the face within five minutes of first meeting you, he is not a nice person. (If he later confirms that he’s not a nice person, you might want to listen.) If he starts making you responsible for the deaths he could cause, unless you do what he says, he is manipulating you. If he kills people and then tries to make it sound like he wouldn’t have had to if you had done something different, he is manipulating you. If I can get readers to recognize the signs in this story, I hope it will help them recognize those signs in real life.
I imagine there will still be readers who will be upset with me for not redeeming Raphel in the end, but I don’t want that to be because the clues weren’t in place for them to see his downfall coming. Part of the overall theme of Shades is the inherent tragedy one faces in cutting oneself loose from someone you love who is abusing you. (And recognizing the fact that they are, in fact, abusing you.) You cannot help a person who refuses to be helped, and staying with them does not help them. It enables them to keep abusing. You have to get yourself out, even if that means abandoning them to their own darkness. That’s what Saeli essentially has to do.
I’m a little more than halfway through this second pass of this edit. My word count is essentially unchanged…I guess I’ve been taking out more or less the same amount of words I’ve been adding. The next edit will be a line edit, which will be loads of unfun, I imagine.
Finished a chapter (finally)
Delved a little deeper into Raphel’s heart than I really meant to. Hey, not my fault. It actually worked as something of a distraction for Saeli, preventing her from thinking too hard on the fact that he just killed someone. Again.
Yesterday I listened to a Writing Excuses podcast about first person POV, and a lightbulb kind of went on in my head. Third person limited, which is what I wrote the first two drafts in, is too honest for the story I’m trying to tell. The only way to have a strong female protagonist fall for the villain, and to have that love survive several instances of betrayal, all the while keeping the heroine from looking like a moron, is to be in her head. I need that bias. I need that distance from Raphel. I’m trying to deceive the reader into falling for Raphel, too, and he’s *just* villainous enough that nobody will buy it unless they see him directly through Saeli’s eyes.
I worry, sometimes, that I’m writing Raphel too sympathetically this time around. If the line between a dark hero and a villain is a knife’s edge, Raphel is going to be cutting his shoes through the entire trilogy. It’s like when you hold an object close to your face. If you look with just one eye, it appears one way. But when you look through the other eye, it appears to be in a completely different place.
In a way, Saeli sees Raphel with one eye shut. Sure, there’s darkness in him, but he’s still a hero in that eye. But others in the story keep urging her to look at him with the other eye and see his cruelty, his ambition, the way he manipulates people, his lack of true empathy. In the end, Saeli will learn to look at Raphel with both eyes open, and that’s really the cruel part. If she only viewed him through the eye that sees his villainous side, the decision to destroy him would be justifiable (if not easy). But she has to destroy him knowing he’s at least partially a hero inside. Add that to the fact that she loves him, and saving her world will quite possibly be the agonizing choice she’ll ever have to make.
Not something I could do without a narrator bias. Thank you, Writing Excuses.
Slow scene
Maybe it’s because I’m on vacation. (Um, yeah, btw, we’re in North Carolina for the week with the hubby’s parents…) Hard to get any solid writing done.
Or maybe it’s because I’m writing a Saeli/Brendan conflict scene, and that’s harder to do from Saeli’s head. I dunno. It ought to be easier, because I’ve got a solid pipeline to Saeli’s internal state of mind. But for some reason, I’m having a hard time generating the necessary emotion to make this scene work. The scene needs to happen, and it needs to happen onscreen. It escalates the tension between Saeli and Brendan, so that Brendan’s later drug experimentation and subsequent explosion at Saeli makes sense. Otherwise, Brendan is going to look like he’s overreacting, and the reader isn’t going to have a clear idea why.
However, maybe I’m trying to milk it too much. Maybe it needs to be extremely short, and maybe Brendan actually holds back a lot of what he’d like to say. I was going to have this fight undermine a lot of the confidence Saeli has just gained in Raphel…but reading that just now, I’m realizing that I can’t do that. I mean, we’ve just had a big reveal in the story. I’ve turned Saeli’s world upside down, and she needs to ride that for a while. Her thoughts need to marinate before I dump the next big thing on her.
And to some extent, I want Brendan’s blow-up at the graduation party to shock Saeli. She needs to know he’s upset, but I don’t think she or the reader needs to know just how much the boyfriend thing has been eating at him until it all comes out. Brendan’s pain is a major consequence of her joining forces with Raphel, and as such, it needs to hit her at the appropriate time.
So this little fight needs to be short and bitter, but not too intense. What needs to be revealed at this point?
-Brendan thinks Saeli has a boyfriend. Because:
-Brendan ran into Cara while looking for Saeli. Cara, concerned because Saeli hasn’t returned to campus yet, and feeling guilty about lying to Brendan in the first place, tells him the truth and sends him after her. This, perhaps, will also create a little tension between Cara and Saeli. Saeli’s going to have to keep lying to keep Raphel a secret, and this will have the effect of isolating her from her Mantle friends.
-Brendan was coming to tell Saeli that he’s earned the gold and white, and that they’ll be Anjahel together. Finding out that she tricked him in order to sneak off campus to meet a boyfriend has completely ruined this much anticipated moment for him. Thus, he is not happy.
However, the crux of his anger is not specifically that Saeli has a boyfriend. Rather, he thinks she had a boyfriend when they talked in the infirmary, and he thinks she deliberately kept it from him. He also assumes that’s why she tricked him in order to sneak off campus. Brendan is feeling like he’s being played by the girl he likes, and that really hurts. I think that’s the reveal I need to save for the graduation party. Let Saeli assume Brendan is mainly mad about the sneaking out, and then let the truth come out later, at the worst possible moment.
I think I know where this scene needs to go now. Note to self…if a scene is going slowly, maybe there’s something functionally wrong with it, and I need to step back and analyze what I’m doing.
Tea and seduction
So I’ve reached the point (again) where Raphel has convinced Saeli to help him overthrow the gods. I had to do it a little differently (again), because her internal struggles are a little different. On the first draft of the story, Saeli was very naive, so Raphel didn’t have to try all that hard to bring her in. In the second draft, she got a lot more shrewd, so Raphel actually had to get a little more scary. This time around, I’ve backed Raphel’s mean streak off a bit, although I think he’s still much harsher than the original version of him. Interestingly, being directly in Saeli’s head has allowed me to play Raphel’s mystery up more. I’m also playing up his seductive nature, and on this draft I’m trying to hold off Saeli feeling outright betrayed by him until the very end, when he goes after Aschamon. That way all the various small betrayals will pile on top of her at once, and she’ll realize just how badly he’s played her.
Shades continues
It will be so gratifying when I don’t have to say that anymore. Five years is a long time for a project, you know?
I think, I think, that the scene I’m currently working on will be one of the last to involve significant changes to the storyline itself. It’s the scene where Saeli meets Raphel in the Sari Cafe…only now she’s already been given her Mantle, she has to sneak off campus in order to meet him at all, she and Cara had to deceive Brendan in order to pull off the escape, and she’s got a two hour time limit to get back (before the school gates close for the night). Thus, the whole dialogue will have to unfold in a different order to accommodate the changes. Plus I’m bringing over a shortened version of the dedication discussion, since the first thing out of Saeli’s mouth is going to be something along the lines of “Uh, they kind of made me a Mantle”…which isn’t going to make Raphel happy.
Fortuitous coincidence
Go me, I even spelled fortuitous right on my first try.
So a month or two ago, there was this author that had been recommended to me, and I kept telling myself I should check her out. Then, at the Cassandra Claire and Holly Black event in Vero, that same author was recommended yet again, by those two no less. I said to myself, “I really do need to look into that.”
Then, of course, I completely forgot the author’s name. Read more…
Brendan surprised me again
Gotta give the guy some credit. He seems like such a simple character: classic Boy-Next-Door, the one who’s perfect for the heroine but she just doesn’t see it. (In Saeli’s defense, I’m not sure Brendan’s actually “better” for her, in terms of compatibility. I do think they could have made it work, and work well, if she’d been willing to give him that chance.) But there’s a lot going on with him on the inside. He’s actually a bit darker than most boy-next-doors; he has some anger management and depression problems, though they’re buried pretty deep. Throughout this story he’s going to be dealing with feelings he’s never had to face before, and it’s going to dredge some of that up. (Seriously. Making Brendan angry is like pissing off a volcano. Bad idea. Unless you’re Raphel. He seems to enjoy watching people blow up emotionally.)
Me, Briefly
Mariah Dennison, fantasy writer and artist. I have finished the first book in a trilogy, and am currently working on the second.
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