Faith Manages

“Faith Manages.”  It’s a favourite saying of the character Delenn on Babylon 5. She’s not talking about religious faith, just so we’re clear, but rather faith in yourself.  There were points where I seriously doubted whether I could bring this story to life – and I don’t just mean the writing, but getting this website up, finding an editor to replace Barb and so on – but  Anna would just say to me “faith manages.”

Who’s Anna?  Oh.  A topic for another time.

So, when I posted chapter one, I talked about the origin of Desa.  So, now I’d like to talk about the evolution of Desa. Those of you who read chapters 4 and 5 will probably notice that the story is moving in a different direction than it was in chapter 1.  For one thing they’re a lot bigger. When I wrote chapters 4 and 5, they were both one big chapter. It was actually Jourdan’s idea to split them in two. So why were they so big? Well,  Chapter one gave you an introduction to this world, two introduced a new character and three set up a conflict. But it was all, set up, set up, set up.

When was it gonna pay off?

I decided it was time to make the stories pay off.

A lot of things changed for me in between chapters 1 and 4. Not to repeat myself, but when I wrote chapter 1, it was a one-shot deal. I really didn’t expect to go any further with it. I started it at the Theoryland website to be a tandem story. I hatched this little fish and sent it off to swim on its own.  I was more than half expecting some other writer to kill Desa.  She pouts every time I mention that.

At the time of chapter 1, I really only wanted to write about three things. 1) I wanted to do a short story about an angry character whose life had been ruined; and how she found empowerment through fighting back. 2) I wanted to make this character female to defy gender stereotypes. 3) I wanted to show that Buffy could defeat a wizard. And so, having armed my character with slayer-like powers, I pitted her against a wizard, finished him off in a clever way and put the whole matter behind me.

You have to understand, I don’t write epic fantasy. I’m a science-fiction writer. My characters have very modern outlooks, they’re very genre-savy and they tend to laugh at me whenever I apply a writing trope to them. “Oh, you’re going to call us that?” Desa says to me. “You do realize Night Shadow is a very cliché name, right?” And until recently, my entire experience with fantasy has been with writers like George Martin, Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind and Tad Williams. (And okay, even a  little J.K. Rowling.)  So, I honestly thought that to write fantasy, you had to write brooding, moody characters that took themselves very seriously.  And I just can’t do that.

So, I wrote chapter one and I created a brooding, serious, typical fantasy character.  Well, Barb wrote chapter 2; and this brought in Marc. Again, a brooding, moody, serious character.  Then Cathar wrote chapter three. So, Barb said to me one night, “No one is continuing the story, you may have to do the next chapter.”

I formed the image of chapter 4 around a western style gunfight in the middle of a town. Morley was gonna shoot at Desa; she was gonna dodge the bullet and shoot back. I sat down to write it in the fall of 2008. Before I got a page into it, Desa grabbed me by the shoulder spun me around and said, “Listen. I am not brooding and serious. You are not brooding and serious.  Neither of us can live with ourselves if you write me that way. So if you write me as brooding and serious, I promise, I will take corporeal form and stick my sai in you…  A vague disclaimer is no one’s friend.”

So, suddenly Desa starts displaying the kind of wry sense of humour you see in chapters 4 and 5.

And then there’s Marc.  I decided that he was going to be the typical, white knight fantasy character. That was the way Barb made him; and that worked because the story really wasn’t about him. So, Marc alternates between being jolly and kindhearted and displaying a strong, serious sense of duty.

Lommy came next. Once again, when I wrote chapter one, I never intended to continue it. So I never bothered to name the “lanky blonde” who attacked Desa.

Marc came off as really incompetent in Chapter 2. (No offense, Barb). So the first thing I wanted to do, when I got my hands on the steering wheel, was to show just what a bad-ass warrior he could be. I brought back the “lanky blonde” from chapter one and had him try to shoot Marc in the back. Marc does his  cool flip move and his “don’t fuck with me” swordplay. Problem solved. But what about the kid?

J. Michael Stracynski said that the art of writing is to ask yourself “what’s the next logical step?” After Marc disarms the lanky blonde, I asked, “what happens next to this poor kid?”  Well he’s kind of unfortunate, he’s often picked on by his brother. No one in the town really respects him.  I realized that if this kid didn’t get out of that village, he was gonna hang himself. So, off he goes with Marc.  And his name becomes Lommy. (Because Lommy is the worst possible name a boy can have. Actually, it’s short for something. Wait til you see what it is.)

Adelle and Selande round out the cast. Now we’ve got a whole party of “good guys.”

Now let’s look at the baddies.  Morley’s resurrection has to pay off. Benworth sent Morley after Desa, but it’s too early for him to get involved just yet, so he isn’t in this chapter. It was Cathar who decided to take the soldier who shot Desa’s family and turn him into Doran.  So, now we have the unlikely pair of Morley and Doran.

The Weaver, I’m proud to say, is entirely my creation. I wanted a character that fought very indirectly through manipulation and subtlety. So, you have a crazy, mind-bending sorceress.  The Weaver is what happens when someone gets too good with the pathos. Since pathos is the magic of emotion and chaos, a master of it tends to go insane.  I’m telling you this here because I can’t really put it into the Weaver’s narrative. She’s just not sane enough to contemplate her own insanity.

So, the Weaver loses her grip on reality but reality also loses its grip on her. That’s why she teleports so much.  She can’t teleport directly to any location; but if she sets off from Los Angeles in the morning, she’d be in New York by nightfall. She just walks in the direction she wants to go and keeps jumping a little further ahead until she gets  there.

And the Shadow-men. That’s the loose term we use for the seven hooded figures who command the Weaver. As I’ve said before, when I set up this story, I set up a plot line for epic fantasy. There was a horrible sorcerer named Bazantus, who conquered the world. And then he died; but prophecy said he would return one day. Again, I wanted to give the Theorylanders something familiar that they could work with.

Then I realized I didn’t want to write epic fantasy.  Well, the Bazantus plot-line was published; so we can’t scrap it now. And don’t worry, we’re not going to scrap it. But I decided to make it more complicated. I asked myself  “What if Desa finding Delothra’s Eye doesn’t prevent Bazantus’s return but actually causes it.”  Well, now we have an interesting shade of gray.

So I created these seven nameless figures who’ve been pulling Desa’s strings all along.

And guess what? They don’t even care about bringing Bazantus back!  Oh, they’re going to try to bring him back, but that’s not what they really want. No! No! No!  No secrets here. You’re going to have to  RAFO.  That means Read and Find Out.

So when you weave all these elements together, Chapter 4 ended up being fifty pages long.  This is where Jourdan comes in.  Jourdan read chapter 4 and said  “I love it. Can I redo Chapter 3?” Cathar had disappeared off the face of the Earth, so  I said, “Sure.”

It was Jourdan who invented the character of Azra. It was also Jourdan’s idea to split chapter 4 in two so that we had two chapters instead of one huge one.

And there you have it. That’s how we got to where we were.  I’ve plot arced the next 6 chapters and they’re in the works right now.  No spoilers. Sorry. All this time, I was sitting there, saying, “I’m not a fantasy writer,” only to realize that I’m writing fantasy and I love it. It was so nice to work with a team that I decided to put it all up online.

So there’s our story.

Jourdan and I have decided that we’re going to stick by our roots and we’re not going to redo chapters 1, 2 and 3.  However, the story will move in a different direction than those chapters might have led you to believe. We will be redoing the prologue.  It’s a little too “epic fantasy” and I think it turns people off.

So, that’s our story.

Good night, everybody!