So what do bruises and sleep studies have to do with uncooperative bad guys?
In a roundabout way of thinking (like mine), the answer is plenty.
I’ve mentioned in a few places where the idea from Through the Veil came from…it all started with a bruise and an offhand comment my husband made while we were making the bed.
Voila, several years later, it pops up on the shelves at your local bookstore (I hope).
But for those who haven’t seen that story, it goes like this…
I bruise easy.
Very easy.
I’m also a klutz. A big klutz.
Which means I’m constantly bumping into things, knocking things over, dropping things…and I end up with bruises and no memory of where they came from. One morning, my husband and I were making the bed and he sees this big bruise on my hip. I think I’d been climbing on a chair and fell off, or something like that. He shakes his head, sighs, and says, “People are going to think I beat you.”
A couple hours later, he comes up to me and tells me, “You need to write a book about a woman who wakes up each morning covered with bruises and it’s because she keeps getting sucked into another world while she sleeps and she’s fighting a war.”
The writer in me goes….Hmmmmmm….potential.
It took me a while to start the idea—I knew from the beginning it was going to be more complicated than anything I’d written. I bet it was four years from that first comment to actually finishing the book. I’d work on it a little bit, realize I wasn’t ready and then just put it aside for a while.
Finally, though, there came a time when I knew I needed to just write the fricking book and stop putting it off. So I did.
This heroine has sleep issues…serious sleep issues. She’s woken up with bones broken, her eyes black, twisted ankles…certainly enough to freak people out. She’s given up trying to figure out what causes it—the doctors tell her she’s doing it to herself while she sleeps. The one time she agreed to do a sleep study so they can watch her, she was calm as could be, slept throughout the night and barely moved. But there was one thing that happened and it freaked her out enough, she stopped trying to understand, stopped looking for answers and just tried to pretend nothing was wrong.
The idea for Through the Veil, in and of itself, is more complicated than anything else I’ve written. That alone should have kept me busy and satisfied. But I’m never one for the easy route, because my characters kept throwing more complications in my way.
Like a bad guy that doesn’t want to be the bad guy and spent a few weeks making it clear that he isn’t the bad guy-he’s potential hero material.
Or when the ‘real’ bad guy makes an appearance. You know…the one who slips out of the shadows after the first bad guy (see above) causes problems? Because this bad guy is definitely the bad guy and he complicates everything.
Needless to say, this guy frustrated me. He emerged fairly early in the story. I hated him right off the bat. Even when I thought that he wasn’t “THE” bad guy, just one of them, I didn’t like him.
But then the secondary, potential-hero-material character throws his little wrench into the works and the story comes to a stop while I try to work this out.
While I’m trying to do that, the villain is off doing his thing, building up his history in my mind, making clear the rationale behind so many of his actions, establishing a presence that might have made him potential hero material…in another world.
But he can’t be a hero in this world. No matter how much honor he has inside him, the one thing that is vital to who he is makes it impossible for him to be anything but the bad guy.
So he’s off in the back of my head, growing his character (mostly without input from me). I’m aware of it-vaguely. And then when I really look at him again, I don’t see the villain I thought I hated.
What I see are shades of gray. How do you work with somebody who isn’t exactly a ‘bad guy’, but he can’t be a good guy, either?
If I had my way, I’d lock him in a mental closet, throw away the key, so I can do what I thought I was supposed to be doing with him. But that can’t happen and he’s already started guiding the story in the direction he wants it to take.
So I’ve got a hero. A heroine. A potential hero waiting in the wings. And a villain that could have been a hero in another world.
Oye. Are you confused yet?
Because we’re not done. We’ve also got a couple of serious villains who also want to complicate things. These are a couple of sick bastards, greedy, self-absorbed and crazy. A villain that could have been a hero doesn’t mesh too well with those villains who really are villains. Those real villains have no shades of gray. They are just villains. But they are in a position to cause a lot of trouble for the villain that could have been a hero.
If you aren’t confused, don’t worry. I’m confused enough for both of us. Or I was until about 2/3 the way through the story. But then I started seeing little cues and hints that the story had been heading in this direction all along-I just hadn’t realized it. Rather like I’ve been backseat driving with a blindfold, yet miraculously, I manage to get us where we need to go somehow.
And intact, even.
I’ve sweated, brooded and worried over this book, and now that it is done, and released, I should be able to breathe a little easier, right?
Sigh. Nope. Because the potential hero is already whispering to me.
As are a couple of characters who didn’t really even have any page time.
Once a character starts to whisper in your ear, it’s almost like the beginning of the end. There is no fighting.
There is no resistance.
All you can do is try to buy time because you’ve already got a hero and heroine who are (im)patiently waiting for THEIR happy-ever-after in an unrelated book.
If you’re curious about my heroine with sleep issues, my hero, my villain-turned-into-potential-hero-material, and my villain who could have been a hero…you can read an excerpt from Through the Veil here.
Alas.
