K.S. Nikakis's Blog, page 2

To Plan or Not to Plan?

To plan or not to plan? That is the question! (With apologies to Shakespeare’s Hamlet). I spoke about planners and pantsers in Newsletter #1 and suggested that planning was probably more efficient. After all, surely it’s quicker to know what the story is before you start, and simply write it? But as I concluded then, writers are rarely purely one thing or another.

I’ve been tempted to switch from being a pantser to a planner since finishing my five book Angel Caste series, because as I also mentioned in Newsletter #1, writing the final book was very demanding. Actually it was exhausting and I feared I wouldn’t be able to pull the 300,000 words story-line together successfully and satisfyingly. I believe I did but it made me anxious about starting a series without a plan. Maybe it’s why I’ve delayed the decision by writing a stand-alone first; a stand-alone I have actually planned!

Yes! I completed 30 chapter summaries for I Heard The Wolf Call My Name before I started the novel but … I’ve rarely looked at them since! The eight thousand words I have written have already diverged significantly from the plan but does it matter? The summaries tell me there is a story and that it works, which is reassuring, but is it the story I really want to write?

The story I want to write has now taken on its own spark, and its own direction, as stories often do, and I get a big kick out of stories springing to life like this, and revealing exciting twists and turns. Of course, writing a plan, in whatever form, is also a way of thinking out a story and of exploring story possibilities, so it is never a waste.

For instance, I taught in China a lot when I was writing The Kira Chronicles trilogy, and after classes, would sit in my hotel room, with my feet on the window sill, enjoying the warm summer evenings and filling notebooks with hand-written notes on what Tierken would do, or Kira, or Caledon.

Sometimes I would scribble down that an idea was ridiculous, or that a particular action would never work. I never read the notes again but it was super helpful in sorting out the story that became the trilogy first, and later the series.

The other thing that indirectly helps my writing is travel. I was lucky enough to visit New Zealand early this year, one of my favorite places and the setting for Peter Jackson’s versions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and then more recently, Hong Kong, Japan and Hawaii. I always take a few phone pictures, but mainly I just sponge up what I am seeing. My husband was keen to see Kilauea erupting but it stopped two days before we got there. He was disappointed but our helicopter flight over the Big Island revealed deep emerald-green valleys, silver ribbon waterfalls, and sheer coastal cliffs that plunged straight into the sea.

Guess what inspired the landscape of I Heard The Wolf Call My Name? And Hawaiian, like Maori (the language of the First Nation peoples of New Zealand) is a member of the Polynesian language family. Tamati is a Maori name, as is Anahera,and there are other Polynesian words I’ve altered to make them my own.

 

Welcome to Newsletter #3

Hi everyone! Welcome to Newsletter #3! I’m working on an exciting new project and all my books are now wide which means if you love Deep Fantasy, you have a lot more choice on how you read it.

When I put out Newsletter #2, I was still in the middle of editing, augmenting and extending The Kira Chronicles trilogy into a six book series The Kira Chronicles series. I was also trying to sort out covers that reflected each book’s story and showed they were clearly part of a series. That job is all done now and I am thrilled with the result. The edit and extension of Kira’s story really improved it, making her and Tierken stronger and more engaging characters, and the covers are gorgeous. If you want to check them out go to the Amazon website and type in K S Nikakis. I won’t give you links because they are different depending on where you are.

One mistake I did make though was using the same name for Book 1 in both the trilogy and the series (The Whisper of Leaves). It really fitted and I wanted to keep it. Oh well, live and learn. I made it clear in the front matter of the series, that the trilogy is now only available as remnant paper books, but when you Google The Whisper of Leaves, it tends to bring up paper book (sigh).

More time was spent making all my 15 books available, not only on Amazon KDP, but through Barnes and Noble, Apple, Kobo, Scribd, Tolino, 24 Symbols, Playster, OverDrive, Bibliotheca and Baker & Taylor. Phew!

Despite all this ‘publishing’ work, the creative part of my brain has been tick-ticking. I did mention in Newsletter #1 that I had another series brewing which I mysteriously called SOO. I even optimistically suggested I might be writing it and rewriting The Kira Chronicles in parallel. I was obviously wildly optimistic or naïve, or have a really bad memory because I discovered some years ago that, unlike some authors, I can’t write two different stories at once. I get so engaged with characters and what they are going through, that I only have enough emotional energy for one set at a time.

So, now The Kira Chronicles series is all done and dusted, am I writing SOO? Well no, because a book title popped into my head and refused to go away. Even worse, it dragged characters and scenes with it. I Heard The Wolf Call My Name (working title), a stand-alone Deep Fantasy, is now at the 8000 word mark of the first draft. I’m giving you a sneak peak in my Giveaways section. I am also giving you the YouTube links to clips that helped inspire two of the male protagonists: Tamati and Jax. See if you match the clip with the novel excerpt to work out which of the two is Tamati.

I am hoping to have I Heard The Wolf Call My Name out by April 2019, but lots of things happen over the festive season, so we will see.

Healing the Wounded Hero

Suffering is intrinsic to the nature of the hero, and to the hero journey and yet heroes seem to heal quickly both physically and psychologically. Brutal physical fights leave them with cuts on their eyebrows and grazes on the cheeks, or a slash to the arm that they bind up with dirty cloth (like Aragorn after Boromir’s death), to never suffer ill effects from again.

Of course, the results of an up-close and personal fight, are more likely to be blackened eyes, a broken nose, broken cheekbones and jaw, and broken teeth, all of which make the hero far less physically appealing. I recall reading that Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn) did indeed break one of his front teeth in half just practicing with a sword.

Given that the hero journey is equally a psychological journey, I’ve long been interested in the lasting mental effects of what heroes endure. Of course, the hero journey is about transformation, the death of the old self, and the birth of the new, but this is often portrayed very superficially.

Heroes lose their best friends and lovers in battles, suffer betrayals, have their notions of reality smashed to smithereens, but rarely spend longer than a few brooding moments on such events. They may be more cynical, less sentimental, usually braver afterwards, but little exploration is undertaken of the depth of their wounding or the journey of their healing.

The Hero Journey Inside the Hero Journey

This first came to my attention when I was writing The Emerald Serpent https://www.amazon.com.au/Emerald-Ser... The female hero, Etaine, survives a terrible ordeal which leaves her scarred both physically and psychologically and she lives on only to murder as many of her enemies as she can, before they inevitably murder her.

While I could thoroughly understand her motivations, I perceived that her revenge was not a path to healing and that the path to healing was, in fact, far more perilous.

As the story unfolded, it became obvious that the healing of the wounded hero was a hero journey within a hero journey. The wounded hero must depart from their vengeful world of suffering (separation or departure), struggle with the fears, threats and vulnerabilities of the stage between (trials of initiation), and emerge with the boon (wholeness, freedom from hate) which instructs others in the same predicament (Return).

This is not about the wiping away of suffering but about its integration. Etaine will bear the scars of her branding and her grief for Ellair to the end of her days, but in opening herself to love again and the possibility of a future, she defeats the hatred of those who first inflicted her suffering.

The Female Hero as Healer

Healing the wounded hero is also intrinsic to my Angel Caste series https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MXBVFRI
The female hero Viv grows up in a household ruled by a drunken thug, and after her mother disappears, ends up on the streets with all its violence and sexual abuse.
While feisty and never self-pitying, the damage this abuse inflicts on Viv, both as a child and as a young adult, is real and long-lasting.

As Viv travels the Rynth in search of her lost mother (the brief part of her life she recalls as happy), her inability to trust continues to thwart her chances of wholeness. It is only when she ends up in the female angel world of Erath (an anagram of heart and earth), that she recognizes and accepts the chance to take another path.


As in any hero journey, it is a path of pain and risk. Viv is helped in her Trials of Initiation by her love for a child, and later aids the male hero, Ataghan, to heal, and the boon (Return) is wholeness and happiness for them both.

I am fascinated by the role of the female hero in healing the wounded male hero, and what the female hero receives in return. I am presently re-working The Kira Chronicles trilogy into The Kira Chronicles six book series https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07D63Z91H and this has come up in the relationship between the female and male heroes.

It is both a big topic, and one that excites heated exchanges (!), so I might blog on my experiences with it in The Kira Chronicles series at a later date.

The Cost of Perfection

I am a fan of The Voice, because despite its artifice, it demonstrates some of the issues inherent in the journeys of creatives who want to make a living from their creativity.

I am a particular fan of Boy George, because he gives useful, if not popular, advice. Many of The Voice judges extol the virtues of the contestants, particularly those on their teams, in very uncritical and unrealistic ways. They tell them how wonderful, talented and special they are, but being wonderful, talented and special, doesn't always equate to commercial success.

You also need a polished product to sell, marketing savviness, and sometimes a dash of luck.

The reality is that the most commercially successful creatives are not necessarily the most talented. In fact, if they are truly special and unique, I would argue they are less likely to be successful, particularly if they are writers seeking commercial publication.

The folks putting up the money to produce artists, of whatever kind, are quite understandably averse to gambling their money on the unknown and untested.

Most writers are familiar with publishers/editors saying how much they crave the new and fresh, whereas I would argue that they really crave a version of something already successful ie that they know will sell too. That's why so many successful books generate books with highly derivative plots that get publishing contracts, a marketing budget, and so enjoy at least some success too.

On Sunday night (27 May) Boy George said to a contestant: 'Perfection is the enemy of completion', and I went 'wow'. Never was anything truer of writing and yet writers are so often caught between the endless struggle to get it right, and to get it finished.

And which one, do you think, is more likely to lead to success?

As I have blogged before, I am in the process of splitting up The Kira Chronicles trilogy into a 6 book The Kira Chronicles series. I had thought it would require a tweak here or there, but it has required a lot more, and therefore eaten up a lot more time than I had planned.

I'm presently on Book 3 -The Secrets of Stars, and I'm filling in small plot holes and fixing the occasional mistake (like wrong character attribution) that slipped past me, Allen and Unwin's editors, and the proof-reader.

The trilogy wasn't perfect but it earned out a reasonably-sized advance and more through royalties. It continues to earn well through PLR and ELR too. So, take Boy George's advice to heart: do your best, but get to the end!

The Secret Story

The Withheld Story
I’m presently editing, augmenting, and splitting The Kira Chronicles trilogy into a six book series. While some fans of the trilogy have expressed dismay, the story will remain substantially the same, but with more explicit seeding of later events, a clean-up of some of my clumsier writing, and the reinsertion of the ending that didn’t make the final cut.

While I think writers should write the best story they can at the time and move on (or risk spending so much time editing they never write a second story), splitting the trilogy provides an opportunity to improve my writing, given I’m a better writer now than I was then. Book 1, The Whisper of Leaves, was also published before I had finished Book 2, The Song of the Silvercades, and Book 2 published before I had finished Book 3, The Cry of the Marwing so the ending was less well seeded than I would have preferred. Even given this, the main reason to split the trilogy, is that series do better on digital platforms and I now self-publish. But none of this is the point of this blog.

Re-engaging with The Kira Chronicles reminded me of peculiar feeling I had when I got the longed-for book deal from a commercial publisher and Whisper was about to be released. I can even remember when it struck me: I was driving down a dirt road near Melton on the way to work, and the peculiar feeling consisted of jealousy, indignation, and dismay. The story that had been mine alone (excluding publisher rejections) was about to be in the possession of countless others. It was almost like a violation, and for a brief moment, I didn’t want to share my story.

In less than a minute, commonsense had kicked in, especially as I recalled the joy I received from the artistry of others, and that if I hadn’t been entranced by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and spent years augmenting it in my head, there would be no Kira Chronicles anyway. But revisiting The Kira Chronicles reminds me of just how many versions of a story actually exist, and how few are shared.

The Multi-Story
Writers know multiple versions of a story live in their heads, never to see the light of day, and that many versions go the way of early drafts: rewritten into oblivion. In their own ways, these are all distinct stories, but generally not dispersed beyond the computer or the brain, because of their perceived or real imperfections, plot-holes, and so on.

I’m usually sanguine when I see film versions of books for the same reason (although don’t get me started on Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn). It is pointless being enraged by the film version of a loved book (unless the actual plot is radically changed), when the two mediums function so differently. People tend to be annoyed by the lack of match with the story or character they have concocted in their own head (yet another version), rather than lack of match with the author’s version, for the story we enjoy is a product of both print and our imagination that changes with each re-reading. Film allows less latitude because it gives us the visual of the character; we don’t create it.

Even with my own stories, I am sometimes surprised by the disparity between what I actually wrote, and my memory of the story with all its emotional baggage. I also have trouble sometimes letting the story go.

The Secret Ending
Books end where they do for a range of reasons. As writers we decide when and how the plot threads are resolved to keep the story’s momentum, and publishers decide when based on genre, print, marketing, sales, and pricing conventions. As well as the preceding factors, as indies, we also have the freedom to create sequels in the form of novellas or short stories, especially as promotional tools, when we have more to say beyond the ‘ending.’ Tolkien used extensive appendices for this purpose.

I have been happy to end my stand alones: The Emerald Serpent, Heart Hunter, The Third Moon, and Messenger (about to launch), on the last page of text, disengage and move on, but I had awful trouble doing the same with The Kira Chronicles and more recently, with Angel Caste, perhaps because trilogies and series can take years to construct, and therefore you live with the characters in their worlds for extended times. My emotional involvement with them tends to be deeper too.

I don’t want to write more in the last of my trilogy or series, because the plot is resolved and other stories are hammering at my brain, but I can’t let them go entirely either. So, I resolve my problem with a secret ending, that stays in my head. These often have soap opera feel about them, which is even more reason not to put them out there. In The Kira Chronicles, it involves the birth of Kira and Tierken’s son; in Angel Caste, a period some months after Viv takes up residence at the Scinta-ril.

It might be that, one day, these secret endings will evolve into something more substantial, after all, The Kira Chronicles started with the secret ending of Aragorn and Eowyn’s potential relationship, which Tolkien never wrote but Jackson did. Time will tell, but in the meantime, my secret endings give me a lot of enjoyment, as all stories should.

Deep Fantasy and Black Panther

Firstly, a few disclaimers: I don’t know much about Marvel Comics, or whether the movie Black Panther is authentic in its portrayal of ‘African culture’ which of course, like the continent, is incredibly diverse. As a Deep Fantasy writer, I was keen to see the movie for the Deep Fantasy tropes it might reveal, but I also wanted to see a film where black actors played characters, not black people. There were lots of wonderful parts to the film, but I’ll focus on the Deep Fantasy elements.

I was firstly struck by the similarity of Wakanda to Themiscira (Wonder Woman’s home island). Both exist ‘outside’ time, either being totally hidden from the outside world, or their true essence hidden (Wakanda appears to be ‘just another poor third world nation’). A place outside time, is outside the ‘normal’ constraints of the (known) world. This is the liminal. The place of change, danger, infinite possibilities. The place that must be passed through for rebirth to occur.

The movie opens with the murder of Wakanda’s king and the ascension of his son. This is the classic movement of one life stage to another, and the son’s (T’Challa) struggle to make this transition, is the crux of the entire movie. All the secret metal stuff is irrelevant!

Firstly, T’Challa must see off challengers. This is partly a conscious fight, and partly an unconscious one, delightfully illustrated by the fight taking place thigh deep in water, and on the edge of a precipitous waterfall. Water represents the unconscious, but he is not fully submerged. In the first challenge, he successfully defeats the challenger, and graciously offers him honor in defeat. This is a conscious action, of the ‘civilized’ ‘ritualised’ society.

After the fight, and as part of his ascension to the kingship (next life stage), he descends further into the unconscious (caves under the city) where, after imbibing a potion from a flower, he is literally buried and descends still further into the realm of death, where he meets his ancestors (his father), who he idolizes. He then returns with an exhortation to ‘breathe’ from the attendants. Ie he is reborn as king.

At this point, archetypally, he should be reborn in every sense, but he isn’t. He is essentially indecisive. He doesn’t know how to be king or lead his people and is desperate to be as his father was, not as he is. The woman he wants as queen (Nakia) recognizes this and refuses him. T’Challa is still in the liminal, the place between, and that puts him and his country (now leaderless) at risk.

Enter the aptly named Killmonger, also a creature of the liminal. Neither of Wakanda nor of America, his rage is unrestrained by ritual or law. He works as an agent for the CIA (also outside the law) as wrecker of countries and legal murderer, but his main driver is the want for revenge: for his own homelessness/lack of place/entity and for the historical oppression of Africans.

He challenges T’Challa and ‘wins’, which is unsurprising given T’Challa’s weakened state. T’Challa plunges over the waterfall (deeper into the unconscious) and is found and kept in suspended animation (by being packed in snow), which is symbolically apt given his ‘between’ state. It’s fitting he’s found by a tribe whose guttural chants are more on the primitive (unconscious) range of the spectrum too.

Meanwhile, Killmonger goes about his wrecking business, both of Wakanda and of the outside world. His lack of ritual understanding means he gains nothing from visiting his ancestors, and he returns not ‘reborn as a king’ but as the savage, juvenile wrecker he was prior.

Given the last ritual flower to revisit his ancestors, and buried in snow this time, T’Challa speaks with his father again. It is a very different meeting. He has since discovered his father is flawed, and partly responsible for leaving Killmonger caught between two worlds. He returns as king, and mortally wounds Killmonger, deep underground (totally in the unconscious) (not in the half in, half out unconscious of the water). He emerges as king this time, and sure enough in his station to offer Killmonger the chance of life. But Killmonger is a creature of the liminal and lacks T’Challa’s strength and skill to transition.

The final marker of T’Challa’s rebirth, is his acceptance by Nakia as a worthy husband. I could go on more about the female element in the unconscious (the anima) but this blog is long enough. Even without all this, Black Panther is a great film. Enjoy!

Deep Fantasy and The Shape of Water

Deep Fantasy Tropes

Okay, read no further if you're intending to see The Shape of Water, as this blog is full of spoilers. I saw the film because my cinema-phile daughter (who holds a Masters in Cinema) was in raptures about it and, of course, seeing what was so obviously a Deep Fantasy trope in the trailer, intrigued me.

Duality in Deep Fantasy

The key element of Deep Fantasy is the making explicit of the unconscious element of the hero's physical journey. This duality can be expressed in a range of ways including: Male-Female aspect (Luke and Leia); human-transcendent (Gandalf the Grey and Gandalf the White); killer-healer (Aragorn); conscious-unconscious (Furiosa [Mad Max - Fury Road] on her quest into the desert to find the Green Place [with-in]), as well as the more common method of showing the hero as a different person at the end of their journey.

The Duality of Amphibian Man

In The Shape of Water (a title that hints at the second hidden element: that which gives form to the formless), what The Guardian calls a 'fishman' is an amphibian in human-form, hauled from the waters of the Amazon to serve the US in their Cold War struggle with the USSR. As an amphibian, the creature is an inhabitant of two worlds: air and water, in Deep Fantasy terms, the conscious and the unconscious (more the latter, as with all creatures that inhabit the unconscious, it cannot survive long in consciousness). And like other archetypes that inhabit the unconscious, its form is more primitive than the human form (in popularly accepted terms) of consciousness.

Beyond its duality as an amphibian, the creature is viewed as god-like by 'primitive' peoples but viewed as a low-level life-form by its captors; it is voiceless but able to communicate in a relatively sophisticated way; and is perhaps an hermaphrodite (its penis hidden behind a generalised swelling more characteristic of female genitalia). While its form is fish-like, its ability to heal (physically and psychically) marries the physical and transcendent.

I can't leave the idea of duality without commenting on the creature's eyes, which worried me throughout the film. The creature is tall and muscular (and tortured to the point of violence and savagery) and yet has puppy-dog, kittenish, baby-round eyes. I wondered if Del Toro had simply got them wrong, but they're more likely to be another element of its duality when contrasted with the hulking threat of the creature's body (innocence -experience).

In the final scene, the female hero 'dies to her old self' (in Joseph Campbell's terms [think how Gandalf the Grey becomes Gandalf the White]) and takes her first full breath under water (having assimilated what her unconscious offered). Water is a common symbol of the unconscious (as are tunnels, caves and places descended into) and is used in many clever ways in the film (too many to include in this blog).

The Purpose of Amphibian Man

Its key purpose is to give the voiceless back their voices (power). The unconscious is empowering, but only when brought to consciousness and integrated (ie wholeness is achieved). The female hero is mute and the creature restores her actual voice, but also her power to tell the antagonist, Strickland (Stricken-land? Constricting-land?) to eff off in sign language; it allows the female hero's best friend Zelda (voiceless as black and a woman) to seize back agency from Strickland and her husband, and it gives the isolated gay man Giles pride in himself as a worthy human being. It also provides a tool to contrast the sneeringly referred to 'primitives' of the Amazon with the sophisticated brutality of those 'civilised' folk of the Cold War.

The motif of muteness (disempowerment ) is pervasive in the film. Strickland silences his wife with his rotting fingers during sex; Dimitri (the Russian Agent) is shot in the mouth; and Strickland himself is smashed in the mouth at the film's ending.

Apart the motif of water in the film, other motifs of interest are the 'representations of life' (for want of a better term): TV, theatre, cinema, Giles' pictures and Strickland's home-life (the American dream); exclusionism: homosexuals, blacks, the unemployed, the lowly employed (Strickland urinates in front of the 'piss-wipers'); hand-washing: Strickland washes his hands before he urinates but won't after; his wife tells him to wash his hands before sex; Strickland allows his re-attached fingers to rot to a stench-generating, nauseating point before he hygienically pulling them off.

Happy viewing.

The Terror of Writing the Pivotal Scene

One of my fellow writers recently Facebooked about the horror and despair of writing what I call the 'pivotal scene'. The pivotal scene might not be the most important scene in the story, although it could well be. It might not be key to the plot either. The pivotal scene is the reason you started the story in the first place.

This is the scene that comes unbidden. You might be watching TV, driving, out for a meal, and there it is, in all its blood-pumping detail in your head. You might well be in the middle of another unrelated book or series, but the pivotal scene refuses to go away.

Put your head on the pillow at night, and there it is again, and it's no longer alone. It's drawn other bits of story inexorably to it, for no scene ever exists in isolation. And then the happy day comes when you can start to write the story which is home to the pivotal scene.

By now the pivotal scene is even more important because it determines what comes before, and what comes after. Why, you ask yourself, did the events in the pivotal scene happen? What triggered them? What were their consequences?

The pivotal scene is beautiful and dangerous and daunting. It was the reason you started the story, and reaching the pivotal scene, is often the reason you've kept going. And then one day, thousands of words into the story, you are about to write the pivotal scene.

And sheer panic sets in. This wondrous gem has lived in your brain in all its perfection, often for years, and now you must render it in words. And you fear that it's not going to end well.

What comes next is the arduous task of aligning the mental with the physical form of words. It is no more difficult than any other scene you've written, but it has taken on a god-like quality and the stakes are sky-high. What can you do but push on.

Bear in mind, you can write the pivotal scene at any stage and work backwards and forwards from it. The pivotal scene in Angel Blessed was near the end and I wrote it before the preceding three chapters. I knew the pivotal scene, but not how to get there, but once it was done, I had a framework to close the gap.

Having written 'out of order' for the first time in eleven books, I think it's something I might do again, perhaps even write the pivotal scene first. We'll see.

The sweet sadness of ending a series

I'm in Mourning

I have just finished writing Book 5, Angel Blessed, the final book in my Angel Caste series and I do not feel relieved and I certainly do feel like celebrating. I feel sad, bereft and lonely. It's like my best friends have gone overseas, or worse still, died.

I have very vague memories of feeling this way when I completed The Kira Chronicles, but not when I completed The Emerald Serpent, Heart Hunter or The Third Moon. These three books were shorter and stand alones. So is that the difference?

Emotional Connection

The Kira Chronicles and Angel Caste are both about 300,000 words in total which are a lot of words to spend with characters. It is also a long time. Angel Caste took from 2012 to write because I interrupted it twice to write other books, something I'll never do again. The Kira Chronicles had a longer gestation but a shorter writing time. One way or other, I spent years with these characters, and I felt for them, and in some cases loved them. I have laughed at my desk, sworn at my desk, and cried at my desk as I've shared their lives.

Plot Complexity

Angel Caste really stretched me, which is what I intended, but marrying the spiritual story line of the three angels with the daimon/human story line was difficult in Books 1-4, and then bringing the plot threads together in Book 5, exhilarating and exhausting. As a pantser, I have a lot of faith in the unconscious and was confident it held the answers, but the actual spade work of writing is via the conscious mind, and boy, was that hard.

I also had two very damaged characters who had to turn down the path of healing. Pulling this off required a lot of thought about motivations, actions and reactions, which again, stretched me. This is truly a Deep Fantasy narrative and one I'm proud of.

Saying Goodbye

While I'm still editing, the story is done. I have been privileged to share the journey with these characters, but now I'm leaving them to get on with their lives. Do I feel tempted to use my created worlds for other characters and other stories? No. Allogrenia, Sarnia and Kessom belonged to Kira, Caledon and Tierken. Ezam, Esh-accom and the Scinta-ril belongs to Thris, Viv and Ataghan. I have other worlds to discover, and other journeys to take.

Killing Your Characters

It's hard to think of an author who doesn't kill someone at sometime, fictionally of course (unless you're writing for a very young audience), then again, the excellent The Very Best of Friends (illustrated by the extraordinary Julie Vivas) springs to mind. So the rest of us are pretty much serial offenders in the accidental death/murder department.

Killing characters is one way of building emotional depth in a narrative as many a TV Soapie attests. But killing a fairly anonymous side character is very different to killing one who's been around for hundreds of pages (or months of viewing) and the reader/viewer has built a relationship with. It's also different when you're the creator of that character and you happen to love them very much.

I've instigated the demise of characters in all my nine books, but the character I've just killed (half-way through Angel Blessed Book 5 in the five book Angel Caste series) was close to my heart. He was engaging, loveable, imperfect, important, and I'd know his end since I started the series in late 2011.

Knowing his ultimate fate made it no easier to write it however. His death was harrowing, both in the narrative and to write, but it was necessary for a number of reasons. It triggered a second harrowing event integral to the series, but in terms of Deep Fantasy, the genre I write, he needed to die to move the male protagonist to the next psychological life stage.

While the doomed character lived, the male protagonist had no reason to change. The death also pushed the female protagonist further along the psychological path of healing she had turned down.

It can be tempting to kill characters off willy-nilly when things seem to be lagging and a little excitement is needed. Or to kill them off without fully thinking through the consequences. I had intended to have Snowhawk (gay male character in Heart Hunter) die in a tragic accident, then a beta reader pointed out how common the deaths of gay characters were in novels, as if being gay would ultimately be punished.

Snowhawk survived and I think I achieved a more powerful story by allowing him to do so, and that is the best test of who lives and who dies in a narrative sense.