Well, it's done. For some reason, whenever I finish a major project that's the prevailing sentiment I have and A Candle in the Wind is no exception. It's been an interesting project, to be sure. A major thread of Roy's character is a sense of guilt that attached to him in a variety of ways. While I don't think guilt will ever not be a part of his character it's not something I want to explore in every story yet three of the four novellas I've written about him had that part of his character play a major role. I wanted to explore other things.
When I finished Night Train to Hardwick part of my goal was to tell stories less rooted in Roy's past. I think I succeeded in that. What I hadn't fully realized at the time was that I also wanted to look at Roy's goals and motivations beyond his admittedly strong sense of guilt. But before that I was interested in how Roy contained his sense of guilt.
At its core guilt is a sense of failure mixed with regret for the consequences of that failure, both of which are useful things to have a sense for. Then again, all human emotions have their place. I've already created a set of supernatural entities that represent emotions running amok and, like many of these universal supernatural entities, I consider them fair game for use in any fictional project I'm working on. So when I sat down to sketch out A Candle in the Wind I already had the monster part of the story worked out. Likewise, the climax where we see each of the seven Voices of T'aun make a play to crush the heroes' minds was the second part of the story that I had in mind.
The first was the setting. Avery Warwick and Riker's Cove were the first part of the story that fell in place because I have an odd obsession with lighthouses, probably left over from the years I lived near Lake Michigan, and I've wanted to tie a lighthouse to a candle druid for a while now. Once I had the place and the monster I needed a human face for the danger. While you can get away with not having one in a story like Firespinner, where the inhuman nature of the threat is part of what makes it dangerous, losing that human threat makes setting the stakes harder. Heinrich von Nighburg was the natural outcome of that. Unlike most of the ideas in A Candle in the Wind he didn't exist in any shape or form before I outlined the story.
With all the major parts in place I just had to add the protagonist and work out the details. It wound up being a lot more complicated than I expected and when I pull everything together I'll probably tweak some details to make some of the through lines work a bit better. But hopefully the general sense that people like Roy and Avery keep their demons at bay by hewing to their responsibilities and enjoying the small improvements in other's lives that dutiful behavior brings comes through.
At this point I'm ready for a different kind of a story, so we'll be leaving the Columbian West for a bit. When Roy comes back his past and sense of guilt won't be gone but they will be played down in favor of different threads that I look forward to exploring. In the mean time, as I do after I finish every fiction project, I'll be taking a break. No post next week and for the following several weeks I'll be running a series of essays talking about writing in various forms and aspects. Hopefully you'll find those interesting!
Before my break a reminder – I have a Substack now. You can find it here:
https://horizontalker.substack.com/
At the end of October all Roy Harper stories on this blog will migrate there and only be available to paying subscribers there! That said, by the end of this year or perhaps early next year I hope to have an anthology put together and available on Kindle and Print on Demand so stay tuned for updates on that. As for what's coming next... stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment