After finishing “Fog and Roses” and “Curses and Blessings”, I had calmed down a lot. I wasn’t writing, but I had written, and I had the usual murmuring cacophony back in my head again. I piddled with a couple of projects, I have a couple of friends that I share…ahem… fanfictions of a rather adult nature with, and I was working on one of those when I was hit by another story core.
Original fiction, strongly fantasy, set in the present day. Unusual right there for me, but it sounded good. I set it on the back burner, and let it simmer… I need a main character, a name, and the first four or so pages before I put fingers to keys. Finally, after about two weeks, I had the seed… Her name would be Nathalie, a struggle that took about a week to settle on. (Names are very important to me, and once a character has a name, that’s it. It has occasionally led to name recycling… in “Forget to Remember”, I needed a name, quickly, and gave Clair a temporary name that belonged to another character…Besseth. But when Besseth was written, that was her name, and it’s the name she has. So I have two Besseths.)
Nathalie would be socially awkward, an introvert, forever marked by the fact that she had been claimed at birth to stand during a culling of humanity. She would be a champion of one of the players in this war, his avatar in reality, as the world ended.
I liked it, enough to take my seat in my computer room, and drag out my writing keyboard. This, a gift from the spouse, comes out only when I’m serious. If I’m just playing, I will use the laptop’s keyboard, but real writing puts me far away from everyone else… the noise when I write is obnoxious.
First, I have to have music. I can’t write in silence. And even more obnoxiously, I do my best writing to dance/trance music at a pretty hefty volume. My husband does not like dance/trance. And he doesn’t like a ‘pretty hefty volume’. And, even though it was his inspired purchase, he does not like the rapid ticketytack of ‘my writing keyboard’. New keyboards have rubber nipples under the keys to render them nearly silent, but my Unicomp keyboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard is another critter altogether.
Okay, Nathalie. Again, unusually, Nathalie decided to introduce her presence by a strong and concerted first person point of view. This is both a blessing and a curse. I’ve always had good relationships with those who come at me using the dreaded ‘I’ pronoun, Clair remained unflappable through a hundred thousand words plus as an “I”, it’s not the easiest way to approach a novel. The ability to change points of view during my preferred third person omniscient view has gotten me out of a lot of issues. Stuck? Simple, switch to other character. Voila. Unstuck. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. However, the purely first person does help keep things straight, if Nathalie doesn’t have a reason to know it, then I don’t know it. It alleviates the temptation to go with a ‘cast of thousands’, to keep things tightly wound around her. And that is how this new one is… strongly first person. I take them as they come, however they decide to be.
With the beginning core of Nathalie in place, I turned my attention to her other half. As my husband notes, I really do write those romances I had planned to as a teenager, they just aren’t historical. And then he was there. Gideon. (Pause for another three days while I fought to find his name) Gideon arrived in my mind as a firmly set vision. Homeless, crazy, a volatile mix of childlike wonder and bugnuts insane. Eeeewwwhhh…what? How was I going to make this a sympathetic character, and how would I make it to where my imminently sane and reasonable main character would have anything at all to do with this? I decided to let her tell me. And I started this…about six weeks ago.
This is where I’ve been trying to get to this whole time, to have you all walk along with me during the birth and struggle of writing this novel. I felt the prior blogs were necessary to explain everything that’s come before. But we’re here now…
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