Rachel Aaron's Blog, page 25

83 Problems

There's an old Buddhist story I think about a lot. It goes (more or less) like this.

A farmer was having a hard time of things: his crops were failing, there was a drought, etc. Desperate, he went to ask Buddha what he should do. When he got there, though, Buddha told him he could not help.

"What do you mean?" asked the farmer. "You're supposed to be a great teacher!"

"All humans have 83 problems," Buddha replied. "Even when you resolve one, something new rises to take its place. In the end, no matter what you do, you'll always have 83 problems."

"But what's the good of all your teaching if it can't solve my problems?" the farmer cried.

"My teachings can not help with your 83 problems," Buddha said. "But maybe I can help you with the 84th."

"Which is?" asked the farmer, crossing his arms over his mud stained chest.

Buddha gave him a kind smile. "That you don't want to have 83 problems."

***

I read a lot of books. I did this before I was an author, but now that I can write them off on my taxes, I read a LOT of books. In fact, I'd say the only thing I read more than books are the book blurbs I go through trying to figure out what to read next.

I mention this now, because if there is one sentence I've read in blurbs more than any other (especially in YA) is "Character X had a perfect life."

I see this all the freaking time, but I have never understood why. What is up with all these characters having perfect lives that proceed to fall apart? First, perfect lives are booooooring, good only for wrecking so the real action can begin. Second (and the reason for this post), is that perfect lives don't exist.

One of the things about trying to write characters who are also people is that they suffer from universal human complaints. One of these, as the story above illustrates, is that everyone has problems. Even people who appear to live perfect lives--the famous, beautiful, fabulous people eternally adrift on a sea of family money so vast they can never spend it all--have problems. In fact, the problems of the rich and famous are the most well documented of all.

It's easy to write these complaints off as First World Problems, which indeed they are, but the fact still remains that even these ostensibly "perfect" lives are riddled with annoyances and frustrations. Everyone has things that annoy them, things they consider problems to be fixed or eliminated or ignored. The reason you only hear about perfect lives in fiction is because the very idea of a "perfect life" is the greatest fiction of all.

This isn't to say a character in hardships can't remember the life he/she lost as perfect. Romanticising the past is a character trait. But when an author declares, "this person's life was perfect until X happened!" I declare, "Bullshit."

The point I'm trying to make here is this: if you are an author, and you want to start your main character off in a sweet spot so that they can have a precipitous fall into the main plot, that is totally cool. That opener is a classic for a reason: watching a fall is almost as enthralling as watching a rise. But please, please don't ruin it by describing things, or worse, having your character describe their own life while they're in it, as perfect.

If a character is a person, they will find something in their life that annoys them. It's human nature. No one describes their own life as truly perfect unless they're talking about a foggy romantic memory or they're trying to impress you. To that end, even a character who starts a novel in a "perfect" life should be entirely consumed by their 83 perfect life problems. Maybe their private chef never cooks their eggs the way they like, maybe their insanely rich parents don't love them like they think they should be loved, or maybe their unicorn ate all the clover and now there's a bare patch on the crystal palace green.

To whit, the character who resides in arguable perfect should still be annoyed about SOMETHING, and this annoyance can actually be a huge source of character development once the real plot kicks in. You thought the unicorn thing was bad? HA. You would kill to have unicorn problems now, wouldn't you, kiddo? That sort of thing.

I mean really, which sounds better? "Caroline had a perfect life, lead role in the high school musical two years running! But it all came crashing down when zombies invaded her small town." VS. "Caroline thought her biggest problem was keeping the lead role in her high school musical for an unprecedented third year in a row, but when the zombies show up to auditions, she has to choose between making the final cut and making it out alive."

Okay, so those are really dumb examples, but you get the idea! Everyone, even characters leading ostensibly perfect lives, has 83 problems. It is our nature, our super power. We can literally bitch about anything, no matter how petty or mundane. And when that basic humanity is not reflected in a character's situation, those scenes can't help but come off as flat and unrealistic.

So please, fellow authors, if you must have perfect lives, fill them up with First World Problems before you smash them down with Real Plot Problems. The fall from grace will still be horrible and engrossing, only now the person tumbling down the mountain will be far more believable.

Please Don't Steal My Books

Like most authors, I have a Google alert set to inform me when someone mentions my name online. I use it to keep track of reviews and generally assuage my vanity. Recently, however, I had to shut it down. Not because my books or blog had become so wildly popular that the tsunami of praise was washing me under or anything so awesome, but because I got sick of deleting all the notifications that came from my books being added to torrent sites.

I don't normally jump on internet bandwagons (I dislike crowds), but when Chuck Wendig, a hoopy frood of an author who always knows where his towel is, got on Twitter to declare this #dontpiratemybookday, the timing was simply too perfect for me to ignore. You have to understand, I'm thirty years old. I was in late high school and early college during the heyday of Napster. I get piracy, I really do, especially when DRM or other corporate shenanigans make it easier to torrent something than to buy it legally.

Hell, I don't even have that much of a moral problem with stealing, I'm the lady behind Eli Monpress, remember? I don't think people who download things off the internet for free are evil or immoral or even criminals. I do, however, think they're unintentionally doing great harm to the people whose art they enjoy.

You see, authors are entirely dependent on sales numbers. I'm traditionally published, which means the lion's share of my income comes from advances, money paid to me by the publisher in advance of publication. But here's the kicker: if my sales numbers aren't good, I won't get another advance, because no publisher will buy a book from an author who can't produce good numbers.

I can't blame them. Why should a publisher risk money on me if I don't sell? It makes no business sense, and contrary to the very odd belief that all authorship should be done purely for love of the medium, editors and authors and art directors have to eat just like everyone else. And here in lies my biggest problem with piracy. It's not that you're stealing my book, you're stealing my SALE, and thus, stealing my future.

I've wanted to be an author ever since I can remember. I fought and clawed and wrote my heart out for four years before I made it, but even after I got my book contract, there was no rest. It doesn't matter how good my books are, if I can't pull good sales numbers, I can't keep writing. My great dream of being a full time professional author that has been the driving force of my entire life is completely dependent on how many books I sell, and every time someone steals my book instead of buying it is a chip in my foundation.

For the record, I'm actually a big fan of a free and open internet. I agree with most of what comes out of Cory Doctorow's mouth, I support net neutrality, I chip in my $5 to Wikipedia every time they put up their annoying banner, etc. I love my open internet and I never hesitate to write congress when they try to fence it in. But under the current publishing model, my entire future is dependent on getting people to pay money for my work, and when someone torrents my book, that future I fought so hard for erodes just a little.

Maybe it won't be this way forever. Maybe in the future we'll work out a system where piracy doesn't hurt authors so horribly out of proportion to the minor offense of downloading a book. For foreseeable future now, though, illegally downloading a book is just about the worst thing you can do to an author.  It's not a minor crime for us, it's a shot to everything we've worked our butts off for. Most of us don't even begrudge you the money, but the sale? That extra number in the column that lets publishers justify paying us for our work? That matters. That matters a lot.

So please, don't steal my books. Don't steal anyone's books. If a book is too expensive, wait a bit and prices will come down (and on that note, the omnibus of my first three novels is only $2.99 right now, just sayin'!). Hell, I would rather you buy someone else's $0.99 book than steal mine, or anyone else's.

So if you're ever tempted to torrent that bestseller they're trying to charge $13 an ebook for (ROBBERY!), or if you hear someone bragging that they got all of a series online for free, please remember this post. I'm all about sticking it to the man, but we're not him. We're just folks like you trying to make a living doing what we love. Not stealing is great karma, too, so help a sister out and spread the word.

We might not be able to stop piracy, but if we can change a few people's minds, we'll have done good, and that's enough for me.

- Rachel

Your Other MC: Thoughts on Villainy

First up, I want to announce that Orbit is putting Eli Monpress is on sale this month! Get the omnibus of the first three Eli books for only $2.99 (Amazon | Nook | Everything Else)! You could even say they're a steal (har har thief humor). This is a great and cheap way to get new people hooked on the series, so please, spread the love! Now, on to the blog post!

Here at last, my long promised post about villains. It took me so long to write this because once I'd announced my intention to make a post like this, I realized I didn't actually know what I was going to write about. My original goal was to write a simple how-to guide for creating a good villain, but the more I tried, the more I realized I was attempting the impossible. First, if there was actually a reliable alchemy to creating excellent villains, we'd see a lot more of them. Second, even those bits I have penned down are so incredibly specific to my own method of story percolating that I doubt they'd be of much use to anyone else.

Honestly, I can no more describe to you how to write a truly good villain than I can teach you how have an epiphany. I can, however, write a blog post about villains--what makes them good, why we love them, and what happens to a story when the villain can't carry their end of things--and hope that knowledge spurs inspiration. So, let's talk antagonists.

What Does A Villain Do?
I went over this a bit in my AMA sessions last month, but since this whole post is about villains, I want to go ahead and get the definition out of the way, just to make sure we're all on the same page.

At the very highest level, the purpose of the antagonist is to provide the plot's push back. In a story of any sort, you have the main character(s), who generally want to do something. The antagonist is the thing/person/force that stands in their way. Without them, the MCs would just go over and do whatever they'd set out to do, and there would be no story.

You'll notice I used the term "antagonist" there. This is because this not all antagonists are villains. An antagonist is simply someone or something who is against the protagonists. This conflict doesn't always mean that the antagonists are in the wrong. There are some books where the protagonists are, in fact, horrible people who shouldn't be allowed to have their way, and in those the antagonist is often the force of good who are trying to stop them. But those sort of reverse stories are few and far between. In the vast majority of cases, the protagonist is a hero working toward some kind of good, and the one standing in their way, antaging their protag, so to speak, is the villain.

Villains are antagonists who are not doing the right thing. Who are, in the vast majority of stories, actively trying to do the wrong thing, either by preventing the heroes from doing good or by doing evil in their own right that the heroes must stop. Sometimes this evil is straight forward (kill the princess, take over kingdom, cover world in darkness for all of eternity), other times the waters can be murkier. It is in this murk, however, that the best villains often reside.

The Spectrum of Villainy
I like to think of villains as falling on a spectrum. At one end, you have the pure cackling evil sort, think Sauron or (my all time favorite) Maleficent.


Now that is some stylish evil.

As fun as villains at this end of the spectrum can be, however, their unabashed love of being, well, evil can make their characters shallow. There's a reason villains like this tend to show up in children's fiction. There's no question that this character is bad, and therefore they can be killed by the good guys without remorse. Their evil is so intense they are dehumanized. Their deaths are victories to be celebrated, not murders.

Villains like these often have monstrous forms that match the black evil of their hearts, and they're always shown being cruel without provocation or purpose: kicking puppies, killing children, etc. Sometimes they're mindless evil, like the zerg from Starcraft or the zombie hordes from any of the Romero Night/Dawn/Day of the Living Dead movies. They don't have to be physically dangerous either. Emotional abuse can be far worse than any physical danger, especially if the hero is the one being abused. Judge Claude Frolo from Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame was a violent and powerful man, but he was at his most evil when he was calmly emotionally abusing Quasimodo.  However villains at this end of the spectrum present themselves, though, they are always 100% unmistakably evil beings who need to be killed for the good of everyone.

On the other side of the spectrum, we have the misunderstood or reluctant villain, the one who could have been a hero had things been different. My absolute favorite example of this is Antonio Salieri from the play/movie Amadeus (one of my absolute favorite movies of all time).


Though named for Amadeus Mozart, Amadeus is actually the story of the composer Salieri and his absolute frustration and jealousy with the young Mozart. Here is a young, vulgar man who, though his genius, effortlessly produces music so beautiful that Salieri believes it is the work of God, while Salieri himself is cursed with only the ability to appreciate that genius but never create such beauty himself no matter how hard he works. The unfairness of this drives the jealous Salieri, who is otherwise a decent, if overly strict man, to set in motion a series of events that bring about Mozart's death and destroys Salieri in the process.

Salieri is the ultimate reluctant villain. So much so, in fact, that he actually ends up being both the hero and the villain of his own story. You could easily argue that the bumbling hero in this piece is Mozart, but Salieri is without a doubt the core of its story. Amadeus is the story of the rise and bitter fall of a talented but ultimately forgettable artist driven to villainy by jealousy of another's true genius. It is a deeply complex character drama where plot takes a far back seat to the relationship between Salieri, God, talent, and music.

And it is here we see the biggest different for authors between the two extremes of villainy. While cackling villains lend themselves to shallowness, misunderstood villains like Salieri demand depth. They struggle with their misdeeds and take over stories with their own internal conflict. This isn't to say that one type is better than the other, just that they are different animals who require different treatment within a story.

In a plot heavy YA fantasy, for example, a reluctant villain with highly complex motives that require a lot of exploration might end up feeling cramped or underdeveloped despite your best writing simply because there's not enough space in a 100k action adventure novel to properly deal with all of his/her issues. Especially if you're already dealing with two or more main characters who also need development time. On the flip side, if you try to put a cackling evil-for-evil's sake villain in an intense character drama where everyone else is multi-layered, you're going to have a real struggle making sure your bad guy doesn't appear flat or one note by comparison (this is actually a huge problem in Hollywood movies, the heroes will be deep and multilayered while the villain is left as almost an afterthought).

This isn't to say you can't make either of these set ups work. You're the writer, you can do whatever you can imagine. I'm just saying that these are issues that bear consideration when you're putting your book together.

I'm also not saying that all villains fall into one of these two extremes. Quite the contrary, there are thousands of highly successful villains who fall everywhere on the spectrum, and most likely your villain will also fall somewhere in the middle. But simply by upstanding that there is a spectrum of villainy can help you as a writer understand where your own villain falls, and that, in turn, can help you figure out how best to use them in your plot.

What This Means and What it Doesn't
In the section above, you'll notice I used a lot of hedging words like "tends to be" and "most of the time." This is because part of our job as writers is to break the molds we're given. Just because evil overlords tend to be overly simplified just because they're wholly committed to their evil ways and misunderstood villains tend to invite more complex narrative because of the innate complexity of a decent person driven to do bad things doesn't mean that's how you have to write them. Hannibal Lecter showed us just how complex and nuanced a wholly evil character can be, while the Grinch from the Dr. Seuss story of the same name is a perfect example of how powerful and simple a misunderstood villain can be.

With so many good counter examples, it might seem silly to bother putting villains on a spectrum at all. But the point here isn't to be right, but to create a way of thinking about the concept of villain in a broader sense. Because the only way to make something better is to understand what makes it good in the first place.

Okay, So What Makes a Good Villain?
The same things that make a good character: hooks, flaws, and motivation.

One of my favorite sayings in writing is that every villain is the hero of their own story. Like your hero, your villain needs to yearn, to crave, and to act. They need the agency to move the plot to their own ends and the motivation to make them do it. They can't just be evil because you need someone to lock your hero up so she can make her daring escape. Or, I guess they can, but this is a post about writing GOOD villains, not plot devices, which is what villains become when you let them wither.

Way back at the beginning of this post, I defined the villain/antagonist as force providing the push back that must be overcome before the heroes can achieve their goal. They are what creates the tension, doom looming on the horizon, the threat in the dark, the mountain that must be overcome. If the three act structure is defined as 1) put your characters in a tree, 2) light the tree on fire, 3) get your characters out of the tree, the villain is the one setting the fire, or the one chopping down the tree, or the one doing both at once while climbing up into the branches after them. Villains are conflict, they are your other main character, just on the opposite side of the plot.

But even more important than their vital roll in the plot is what a good villain brings to a book's emotional weight. What we as authors are really asking from our readers is investment. At the simplest level, we want them to be invested enough to turn the page, but on a larger scale, you want your readers to care about your characters, to stay up all night reading just to make sure everything turns out okay. The greater the level of reader investment, the deeper the book hooks into them, the more they remember it. I've read plenty of books that I've liked, but the ones I loved were the ones where I felt a deep emotional connection to the characters, and those are the books I bug people to read.

Commercial success in a book is directly related to reader investment, to how much people care. To that end, you want to make sure you give your reader every opportunity possible to become invested in your work, and villains are a huge part of this, because people LOVE great bad guys. I mean, I didn't watch The Dark Knight for Batman, I watched for the Joker, and I wasn't alone. But you don't get invested in a plot device, you get invested in a person, and what's what a good villain has to be: an amazing, interesting person capable of captivating your reader's attention.

The easiest way to do this is to create a villain people love to hate. Hate is the simplest emotion to inspire (see the commonality of puppy kicking mentioned above), but being easy, hate is also simple. For my money, the absolute best villains are the ones you hate but also sympathize with. Maybe they have very good reasons for the terrible things they do, and you can't help but feel for them even as you're cheering for the hero to win.

These sort of villains fall toward the "redeemable" end of the spectrum, but you can also court reader investment on the unrepentant end of things by having your villain be tempting. The will to evil is a universal constant, and villains like The Joker or Hannibal Lecter are masters at showing just how much fun life on the dark side can be. With good writing, good dialogue, and good hooks, a wholly evil villain can be hypnotic and addictive and even admirable in their unwavering dedication to being dastardly.



All that said, though, one of the true challenges of writing great villains is that you have a limited amount of space to do it in. In the vast majority of cases, the villain is not the main character. No matter how big a deal they are, in the end, it's not their story. Cutting away from the main character action to check in on the villain is a classic way to build tension, but like any powerful tool, if you use it too much it loses its impact. In fact, often the less you show a villain, the better and more interesting their scenes get, though how much is too much is something only the writer can decide.

But If You REALLY Want to Learn How to Create a Great Villain...
The best way to do it is to go and find your favorite villains and figure out why you like them. And once you've pinned those down, find some more. Read books, watch movies, read comics. Comics are actually really awesome places to find great villains (Magneto 4 EVA!) as well as some truly terrible ones. Honestly, though, that's even better. I've always found you learn way more from figuring out why a sloppy mess didn't work than trying to pick apart a masterful job that did. Pick up the bad guys and dissect them, try to think about why the author/artist/director made the choices they did. And if you don't like my villainy spectrum, make your own. That's what I did! It's just a model, a way of organizing information so you can think about it more clearly. But the important part of this, the most important part of all writing, is thinking. If you can look at Hannibal Lecter and understand why a soft spoken, over educated sociopath who likes to eat people captivated America, then you've got all the foundation you need to create your own amazing villain.

So there's my villains post. I hope you enjoyed it! Please leave your comments if you think I missed something or if you have your own way of defining villains. I'm all about learning something new. Thanks again for reading!

- Rachel

PS: My next post is going to be about my experiment writing a series that had NO villain. It was... interesting. Let's just say I got a very hard lesson in exactly how much work a villain does in a series. Until next time! - R

Learn From My Fail: Character Edition

As some of you might already know from my ecstatic late night tweeting last week, I just finished and turned in the final novel in my new SciFi trilogy. This was the 12th novel I've finished (13th if you count 2k to 10k, which I've decided I don't since it's not actually a novel) and the second series I've completed... and OMG did it kick my butt.

That's the thing about writing, isn't it? Even after a million and a half words written (that's only counting finished books, if we throw in scrapped projects and cut words, it's over two million) I'm still making mistakes. So, in the spirit of learning and to try and make all that hell I went through into something positive, I want to share what I learned so none of you ever have to go through that shit. Because seriously, it sucked.

Lesson Learned: Characters Dictate Plot, Not the Other Way Around
My new series, hither to referred to as Paradox, is a high octane science fiction action series with a strong romantic subplot featuring a female powered armor mercenary. There's also a giant conspiracy, aliens with shadowy plans, and lot of intrigue and mystery. It's a plot heavy series, in other words. Lots of things happening and people doing stuff and external conflict (aliens attack, secrets are revealed, etc) pushing events forward.

Seeing that, when I sat down to plot the events of the second and third books (book 1 was already turned in), I naturally plotted the action first. These were the events that were going to happen, and my characters would have to deal with them (RED FLAG). I followed my usual plotting method, and by the time I was ready to start Paradox book 2, I had everything all nicely laid out plus several notes about the events of book 3 (because knowing where you're going is essential to tight writing, but never more so than in a complicated series like this one). For the first half of the book, I was trucking along just fine. And then I got to the middle, where everything started going wrong.

Remember that red flag? This is where it comes in. See, several big secrets are revealed in the middle of book 2, and Devi, my main character and the novel's first person perspective, is forced to go on the run. Here's the thing, though: Devi was created from a mix of Ellen Ripley, Sarah Conner, Killashandra from the Anne McCaffrey Crystal Singer book, and Toph from Avatar the Last Airbender. If you know any of those characters, then it should come as no surprise that Devi doesn't run. She's a mercenary who clawed her way up the ladder through raw skill, reckless ambition, showmanship, and a flagrant disregard for her own safety. So when the plot said, "Run!" Devi cocked her gun, dug in her heels, and said, "No."

Through the lens of perfect hindsight, this disconnect is obvious, but at the time things were far more murky. I didn't even realize how much trouble I was having until I started missing my word quotas. I went from an average 8-10k a day to 4 or 5, and then 2. It was infuriating, because I was writing. I was following the damn plot, I just wasn't getting anything I liked and I couldn't figure out why. I knew something was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what, and with a deadline looming, I couldn't stop to figure out what. Eventually, I forced myself to finish the novel and turned it in, but it wasn't until I got my editor's notes that I realized what was actually going on.

By focusing everything on the plot's action, I accidentally stole my character's agency. I pulled up the plot train and told the characters to get in, but Devi's not the kind of woman to lie down and accept being railroaded, and all her scenes from that moment on were pretty much junk. This wouldn't have been quite so bad in a third person book, but for a first person character, especially one as belligerently proactive as Devi, it was doom. So I did the only thing I could do with a book so intrinsically broken: I went back to where things went wrong, deleted everything after that point, and surrendered the reins for the rewrite.

Funny enough, nothing in the plot changed. All the events still happened as I'd laid them out, only now, instead of me going to Devi and saying "this is what happens to you," the thought process went, "here is what happens, what do you do?"

That was it. Three months of horrible, hair pulling writing failure answered by a simple perspective shift. Looking back, it was laughably obvious, but then, the simplest answers are always the biggest game changers. And oh, how the game did change. The moment I gave Devi back her power, all my words came back. Writing was fun again, as it always should be, and the new book was so much better.

By the time I finished my rewrite three weeks later, the basic events of the ending had not changed. The characters still went to the same places and did the same things, but the way those scenes were written was completely different, because Devi was acting rather than reacting. She was now dictating the plot by her actions rather than being dictated to (because Devi doesn't do being dictated to, even by me), and this subtle shift changed the entire tenor of the book.

The real kicker of this lesson, though, was that I already knew it. I even have a section of 2k to 10k that more or less says "don't do this." But I thought I was making Devi proactive because she was still powerful and dangerous. She still had her guns and her skills, she was still a badass, so I thought I was covered. In reality, though, I'd fallen into the subtle trap of confusing different types of power.

Power in a character doesn't come from their own badassery or how many people they can shoot, it comes from their ability to make choices. When I took away Devi's choice and forced her onto the plot train, I stripped her of her real power, and she wasn't having any of it. That should have been a red flag right there, because when a character flat out refuses to do something, they always have good reasons. My real failing in all of this was that it took me so long to shut up and listen.

I like to say that I'm god in my novels. I'm the writer, I literally create the world from my imagination. You'd think, then, that I would have all the power, but I don't. I, too, am bound by the rules I set down and the people I create. Annoying and plot wrecking as their protests might be, a character who can stand up and say No is a treasure, one I'm still learning to appreciate.

I hope that this post about my mistakes helps you to avoid similar missteps in your own writing. Really, I should have stopped the moment I knew something was wrong. Forcing yourself to write a book that isn't working is just about the most painful and ego bashing experience possible... for a reason. Because you should never be doing it. I knew that, but I thought I was better. I thought I was a hotshot writer and could just fix things as I went. (Cue hysterical laughter). Yeah, no.

Really, this was Lesson #2: when something's wrong, don't press on, stop and fix it. It's a lesson I have to relearn every book, apparently, but hopefully your head isn't as thick as mine and you can spare yourself the suffering. I'm sorry for the huge rambling and overly specific post, but I try to write this blog as the diary of a working writer. That means recording and examining the way I screw up to make sure I understand what went wrong and never do it again, but also so that there's a record of how I solved the problem for the next person who falls into the hole.

Anyway, I promise my next blog post will be more generally useful and entertaining. Until then, thanks for reading and good luck with all your words.

Now, on to copy edits!

- R

AMA: Answers Part FINAL!

What a fun series this has been, and such great questions! I'll TOTALLY have to do this again soon, but for now, let's wrap up the year by wrapping up the questions,

Onward!

the superhero princess said: Rachel, I'm curious about your thoughts on villains (a subject that fascinates me). Some of my favorite characters in film/literature are villains/anti-heroes (Loki, Gollum, and Snape come to mind) and I've always thought there were two (or more) types of villains (the sympathetic and the truly evil) -- what is some writing advice/general thoughts for creating a great villain? (How did you think about yours)

I've always felt that villains make the series. While protagonists labor under the onerous of being, while not necessarily good, at least redeemable, antagonists suffer no such restrictions. They are free to be as amazingly interesting and terrible and messed up as you could possibly imagine, often end up being everyone's favorite characters.

As I mentioned on day 1, I'm planning to do a big post about them soon. With that in mind, I'm not going to go into too much detail here, but to answer your question, here's a quick look into what I think about when I create a villain.

First off, I always craft villains and heroes as a matched set. Even if they don't know each other and are completely unrelated except for the fact that their goals conflict, you'll always get better villain/hero interactions if you think of them as being in relation to one another. I didn't do this with Eli and Renaud in The Spirit Thief and Renaud ended up being forgettable  However, I did do it with Josef and Coriano and I still get emails about that sneaky swordsman. I also did this with Eli and the Duke of Gaol, and I think OCD Edward is my favorite "mini-boss" of the series.

So I try to develop villains and heroes together, focusing on how they relate, how they play off each other, and how they will ultimately come into conflict. The better they fit, and the more interesting both characters become.

This relationship also determines what favor of villain I'm after. Roughly speaking, villains come in two types: redeemable and irredeemable. Redeemable doesn't mean the character has to "turn good," just that you can see how they could if given the right chance/motivation. Irredeemable villains on the other hand are completely beyond hope and actively delight in their villainy. Redeemable villains tend to be more sympathetic and deep, but irredeemable villains tend to be more fun.

For my money, the best villains are the ones that could be heroes themselves if only they'd stop being so ruthless/stubborn/proud/etc. That one moment when the villain and hero face each other and you can just see how, if things had been different, they could have been allies, that is character GOLD. Snape had this in spades, and I think that's why everyone stuck by him/loved him so relentlessly.

But as deep and complex as a redeemable villain can be, unrepetent evil is its own special kind of blast. For example, Maleficent is one of my favorite villains of all time even though she had next to no development beyond "looks cool, says awesome stuff, turns into bitching dragon." For a story as simple as Sleeping Beauty, that's all you really needed. For a more complex (and hilarious) example of this type, I point to my other favorite evil lady, Yzma!



Black hearted villains are often much more straight forward characters than the ones who are simply misunderstood or wrong minded. Their ability to captivate readers comes from tapping into our power fantasies rather than our sympathies. Using a simple villain like this can give you a lot more room in your story to focus on your heroes, but you do have to be careful not to make your villain TOO simple lest they end up a cackling evil stereotype instead of a character.

This is the most The absolute most important thing to remember when creating a villain is that you aren't creating an antagonistic force of conflict, you're creating a character. Your villain should be every bit as developed as your other MCs, even if they don't get much page time. They need their own goals and motivations and circumstances. Their actions should make sense to THEM, even if they don't make sense to anyone else. Most importantly, your villain should have a life outside of their villainy and an end game that reaches past the protagonist's story. In short, they need to act like a real person, not like a roving wall that only exists to block your protags.

Again, more on this later when I can get my thoughts more in order!

Anonymous said: Are there any fun facts about any of the main characters that didn't make it into the books?

Yes! The biggest one was that Miranda originally had a love interest. He was a wizard baker in Zarin whose shop she frequented when she was in town and he had a huge crush on her but she was too busy to notice (though her spirits did). I always meant to write him in, both as some cute non-duty related character stuff for Miranda and to show how normal, non-Spirit Court, non-crazy wizards lived their lives (he made happy bread in a bakery full of awakened equipment), but I just never got the chance. I can't even remember his name now actually, poor fellow.

Other tidbits include outing Alber Whitefall as gay and the fact that he has a long running antagonism with the series's other old queen, Giuseppe Monpress. I didn't get to do nearly as much as I wanted with these guys! Also, Morticime Kant's name was a giant set up for a joke I never got to make. See, when Illir revealed himself as Morticime Kant, author of those horribly inaccurate books on wizardry, Miranda was supposed to sputter something like "you can't do that!" to which Eli would answer "Looks like Morticime CAN!" and it would have been terrible and hilarious. Alas, the scene never worked out, so now you lucky people are the only ones to know the true extent of Eli's terrible puns.

Laura Stephenson said: I'm with OathBreaker wanting to know if you plan on writing a book with dragons. They're my favorite fantasy element, and I think you could make them appropriately sardonic and full of themselves.

Did you see my answer to him in Part 2? Yeah, I can't wait to show you peeps my dragon series. It's going to be an ensemble cast story like Eli, but near future, cyber punky Urban Fantasy with dragons and awesome. A hot mess of badassery, in other words. Of course, I have to write it first, and sell it, but if I can manage to work it out OMG it's going to be so amazing. Snarky dragons will reign forever!

And finally, I have two questions about Eli's sexuality that I'm going to answer together. HOWEVER! Since the answers delve deep into Eli's upbringing, I can't help but make them EXTREMELY SPOILERIFIC. So, to protect those of you who don't like to be randomly spoiled, I'm hiding the rest under a cut. Read on at your own peril!

And

Anonymous said: While I personally suspect Eli's sexuality is "money" more than anything else and am perfectly happy leaving it there, I would be really curious to find out who the gay characters besides Giuseppe, Alber and the Empress (unless she was bisexual) were, if you're willing to say!

I've been waiting a long time for someone to ask me this question, and I'm kind of afraid you're not going to like the answer. See, when I create characters, there's some stuff I know and some I don't. Sometimes I don't know because the detail is unimportant, like a favorite animal or whatever. Sometimes, though, it's because the character refuses to tell me.

Unfortunately, this is how it is with Eli's sexuality. I can't tell you if Eli is straight/gay/bi/loves only gold because he's never told me. I know that sounds like the most bullshit answer ever, but I swear it's the truth. Eli has always been my chattiest character. I know more about him than I do about myself. But on this one issue he's silent as the sphinx, and because I know him so well, I understand why.

You see, Eli lived with Benehime from age 11 until he was almost 15. This means that he spent his formative years of puberty completely under her thumb, suffering some pretty extreme emotional and physical abuse at her hands during his time as the White Lady's "love."
Benehime herself isn't actually a sexual being. She's a Power, a created custodian and demigod. She can't reproduce, so she has no urges like that. Instead, her love is entirely about possession and control. She wanted Eli to be hers, her treasure, her pet, her thing, and she did not appreciate it when Eli disrupted this fantasy by acting like a thinking individual with his own opinions.
These years with Benehime left him with some pretty deep scars, one of which is a pathological fear of showing love to others. A healthy one, I think, considering how Benehime would react if she ever found out he was interested in another person. For example, let's say he liked Miranda. If he ever showed romantic preference for her, if he, say, kissed her, Benehime would kill her on the spot.
That kind of fear does things to people. For Eli, it made him very guarded. He's a very personable and charming man, and quite good looking in a roguish way, yet he has never had a real romantic interest. He's never even considered one. Add to this the abandonment issues caused by his parents and it's no wonder the boy's an emotional mess. Hell, he can barely let himself love Nico, Josef, and Giuseppe, the people who are the closest thing he has to a true family.
Long story short, Benehime did a huge number on poor Eli's ability to look at others in a romantic way. I don't even think Eli knows what he likes because he's been too terrified to ever think of another person like that. It's kind of hard to check out a cute girl or guy when doing so might cause a crazy, possessive Power of Creation to kill them out of spite.
Looking back, Eli's character probably should have been much more broken and damaged than he was. I attribute his general good attitude to his natural strength of character and his boundless optimism about the world. My favorite part about Eli was always that he never gave up, ever. That same cleverness and resilience that made him the world's greatest thief also allowed him to survive Benehime more or less intact.
Will he ever get over this and try to get laid? Almost certainly. Come on, did you really think anything could hold back Eli Monpress? But as of the end of the series, Eli's not even thinking about it. First, he simply has no time for love at the moment when there are bounties to be earned, and second, he's not an introspective person by nature. It's going to take some very uncomfortable self reflection to work through all this, not one of his strong suits. Even after he gets through his initial block and does become interested in someone, it's going to take a very very VERY patient and understanding person to help him untangle the emotional mess life with Benehime left in him.
I'm sure that was WAY more than you wanted to hear about such a simple question, but you should all know by now that things are never simple when it comes to Eli Monpress. Still, despite everything, he's very happy at the end of the book and he means to stay that way. I bet once Josef and Nico go off to be lovebirds for real, Eli will get lonely and find someone of his own (he can't stand being alone, that's why he made friends with so many spirits at such a young age. Eli craves company! What's the point of being fantastically charming if there's no one around to hear you?).
So, on that note, I leave the decision of Eli's sexuality up to you. After five books and this huge block of text, you have about the same chance of guessing right as I do! But I do want everyone to know that he got his happy ending. After all, all he ever wanted was to keep chasing his bounty with his best friends (preferably while messing with Miranda as much as possible), and that's exactly what he plans to do. It's the simple things...
Oh, and a final note about Miranda and Eli's relationship. Many readers have expressed disappointment that they didn't get together. I can understand the disappointment as I also love a good "opposites attract" romance, but really, can you imagine what would happen if Miranda and Eli actually tried to have a relationship? He'd be lucky to get out with his life, and all his limbs. They make fantastic adversaries and unlikely allies, they've even formed a grudging sort of respect for one another over the events of the series, but on a person to person level they annoy the shit out of each other. I knew by the end of The Spirit Thief that ship would never sail. Still, they are friends in a way, and that's important too. Especially for Eli, who doesn't make real, trusted friends easily (at least, not human ones).
As to who else in the series is gay other than Alber Whitefall, Giuseppe Monpress, and Nara, the Immortal Empress (who, for the record, liked ladies way before Benehime showed up and stole her heart forever), those are the big ones. I think Krigel (Banage's assistant) might have been, but it was never important enough to the story to make a real call on. 
Just for the record, I don't actually set out to make gay or straight characters when I'm working on a book. I  make people and then let them make up their own minds about who they like. Honestly, unless I'm specifically setting up a romance, character sexuality doesn't even come up. If it isn't relevant to the events of the story or the character's reactions, I leave them alone about it. Don't get me wrong, sexuality is very important, but it's only a part of who we are as people. Just as I identify myself as a writer way before I identify as a straight woman, so do my characters identify themselves as thieves, warriors, and world changers far ahead of when they tell me what bits they prefer on their lovers.

That said, I do try to represent a diverse range of sexuality in my books, not because of any PC nonsense, but because that's how people are. We like all sorts of different things, and since I try to always think of my characters as people, I make sure they like all sorts, too. Also, it's SO MUCH FUN to let readers assume a character's sexuality and then switch it up on them. I do so love delivering a good sucker punch to the expectations!
And on that note, the AMA is concluded. Thank you all again for the amazingly awesome questions! I hope you had half as much fun reading the answers as I had writing them, and thank you as always for reading. You people are the best! I'll be back soon with that post on villains I keep promising. In the meanwhile, have a happy and safe New Year and I'll see you all on the other side!
Until 2013, I remain your humble writer,Rachel Aaron

AMA: Answers part deux!

Lying in bed recovering from the Christmas hauling/mauling and a sinus infection and slightly high on cough syrup, let's answer some questions! (Note: All the following answers are cherry flavored. For those of you who prefer the green Nyquil, apologies.)
To business!

Jessi said: I was one of those wrimos who constantly posted on the NaNoWriMo forum. I've come to bother you, yet again :P 
Almost done with book 3 of Eli. Did you know that some of this big world building stuff was going to come together the way that they do when The Spirit Thief was still in the works? I started reading Spirit Thief before the 4th and 5th came out, and I can see how awesomely epic The Spirit Eater acts on it's own within a trilogy. Im excited to see where 4 and 5 go from here! 
How many rewrites does it take for you to reach the point where the story really starts to cinch together, and the writing doesnt feel like gobbledygook? I'm on a second rewrite, and after moving around time, things are working quite nicely.
Thanks for doing this!

Thank you for helping me out of a bind! (Seriously, writing things people actually want answered? SO MUCH EASIER than coming up with stuff on my own!)

I'm so glad you'r enjoying The Spirit Eater! Nico has a very special place in my heart, though it took me much longer to get a feel for her than for my other characters, mostly because she was so quiet and Eli was the opposite of quiet. To answer your question, you got me. While I always knew the general meta plot of the Eli series, Book 3 was where everything really started coming together. Before I was always hinting at larger things, but Spirit Eater was where I had to start actually ponying up on those promises, which meant I, as the author, now had to know exactly what I was doing.

Looking back, I consider The Spirit Eater as my trial by fire. It was where I first realized just how absurdly ambitious I was being, first saw the enormous scope of the work ahead. Honestly, it scared the shit out of me. I was absolutely convinced this was it. I was going to mess this up and everyone would finally realize I was a hack who didn't know what she was doing. I was also pregnant, and the combination of dread and hormones was murderous.

But I didn't have a choice. I had a contract, I had to write this book. More than that, I owed Eli and everyone else this story I'd dreamed of for so long. So I did it. I wrote and rewrote and pretty much forced myself to figure everything out. Spirit Eater was the fourth book I ever finished, but in many ways it felt like the first because by the time it was over, I felt like I'd really mastered a book for the first time.

So to answer your question, no. I didn't know how it would all come together when I was writing Spirit Thief, only that it would. By the end of Spirit Eater, however, I knew EXACTLY how Eli's story ended, and I used that knowledge to go back and make changes in the first two books that tied everything together. This was one of those times where the slow pace of publishing works out in the author's favor!

To answer your second question: one of the things I say a lot (I mean, a lot a lot, to the point where my husband finishes the sentence for me) is "the book gets written in the second draft." As we all know by now, I am an obsessive planner, but despite my best efforts, my first drafts are still giant messes. True, some are messier than others, but they're all F'ed up to some degree. This is perfectly natural. Every general knows that no plan survives the first encounter with the enemy.

This used to really bother me, but after much gnashing of teeth I finally realized that a first draft is exactly that: a first try. It's the place where you discover exactly how and why all those awesome plans fall apart. By the time I'm ready to do the second draft, however, I understand where things went wrong (since, thanks to all that planning, I actually know what I was trying to do). Because of this (and because of my extremely thorough editing process), nearly all of my books gel completely by the end of draft 2. Everything after that is fiddling with subtleties.

Of course, it's taken me many books to reach this point, but I swear you will reach it. We talk about craft a lot, but really, most of story telling is just applied problem solving. Learning how to solve your novel, to make everything click, is just as vital and hard as learning to craft a sentence or create a character. But with practice, patience, and the steadfast belief that there is a story worth telling buried under all that gobbledygook, you can make it work. Remember, in the world of your story, you are god. It is impossible for you to make a mess so huge you can not solve it. You just have to be patient, clever, and unyielding  and everything will work itself out. Scout's honor.

OathBreaker said: 1) Now that your finished? Is there anything you would change about an Eli book? Put in, take out. Give a character more page time?
2) If you were to or have written a dragon story. What kind of dragon would it be? Friendly, neutral, hostile. Color? Scaled or unscaled? Fire breather or somthing else?
3) I asked you about Warcraft once but I'm curious what other universe you'd like to write in?

1) The only real changes I'd make are both for the Spirit Thief. First, I'd make Renaud less cackling evil and the plot less predicable. Hey, what can I say, it was the second novel I'd ever written! The other change I'd make is I'd give Nico more page time. She's almost a shadow in book 1, and while that's perfectly in character for her, I really should have shown more. As I mentioned in the question above, I didn't understand Nico very well then. I should have spent more time with her. Oh, I also would have brought Sparrow in a bit earlier. Otherwise, though, I'm very happy with how everything worked out!

2) As it so happens, I AM working on a dragon story right now. An AWESOME one that I will be writing ASAP. My dragons are feathered and come in a lovely variety of colors. They are also beautiful, confusing, complex creatures who have adjusted... poorly to the modern world. Poor darlings have issues. I love them to pieces and I hope ya'll will too! But it's far too early to say more (books aren't even written, so much can change), so I'll just leave it at that.

3) I would give a kidney to write a new series of Shadowrun novels. I'm a huge fan of the SR mythos and universe, but the novels are AWFUL. I can write much better ones (have, in fact, GMed much better ones). Catalyst, CALL ME!

As you mentioned, I would also dearly love to write a WoW novel, though the Warcraft Lore is so convoluted now I don't know if it could bear more iteration. Still, I have plans to build a mountain retreat named "Thrall's Rest" one day, so don't count me out completely. I would also write a bitchin' Starcraft novel, for the record.

GodOfLaundryBaskets said: What's your favorite scene from the Eli series? Why?

Arrrgh, don't make me chose! I really do adore them all, especially the ones at the end. Hmmm, well, in no particular order: I adored Miranda's scene in the Court in Spirit's End, also her big scene with the Lord of Storms. Any scene were Eli got to be a smart ass (so, like, all of his scenes). Writing Josef being the worst king ever was amazingly fun. When Nico would stand up for herself. Anything with Banage, Sarah, or Alber Whitefall (favorite line of Spirit War: "Banage will stand on his principles until they gnaw his legs off.") I also loved writing Benehime, trying to make her understandable and sympathetic even as I made her terrible.

So yeah, there's no hope. Whatever scene I'm thinking about at the time, I can probably come up with a reason why it should be my favorite. The truth is they're all my favorites, as it should be. No one should love my writing more than me!

Sophie Dean said: If you ever switched to realistic fiction, what would you write about?

Oooh, good question. Hmmm, well, I'm not really a fan of realistic fiction, so don't have many story ideas for it. Honestly, whatever I did would probably end up having some kind of fantastical element. I just can't seem to not add magic to things. If I did end up doing something realistic--our world, no magic, no science fiction-- I'd probably try to write a smart, brutal romantic thriller in the Salt vein (though not quite so dark). But the chances are slim, there's way too much awesome fantasy/UF/SF to work on first!

**The next question/answers contains SPOILERS for the end of the series! You have been warned!**

Anonymous said: What's next for Nico? Where does her relationship with Josef go from here?

Confession: this question made me squee just a bit. Oh boy, Nico and Josef. Well, they end up happy, though it takes them a stupid long time to finally confess that they actually like like each other because Nico is so shy and Josef is... Josef. Personal relationships aren't exactly his forte.

Still, can you imagine either of them ever giving the other up? Of course not! They find a way forward. Maybe they get married, maybe they just give Osera to someone more responsible and run away to raise a bunch of of very weird, violent, but loving children. The point is they're happy and together. Forever. And Eli will just have to get used to feeling like a third wheel. Fortunately, he's too conceited to ever consider himself as such.

** Spoilers end! You may resume reading!**

Alex Omega: Here's one a bit off the wall: How did you manage to keep your Eli-verse characters from cursing?
My WIP is intended to be in the lighter-hearted vein, like Eli (or actually like Salvatore's early Drizzt novels). However, I find some of my characters are, um, pottymouths. 
Wouldn't be a problem if I were writing dark fantasy, but I'm aiming for something my soon-to-be 10 year old can read without Dad giving him the thumbs-up on using profanity. How did Eli and company wind up being PG-rated?

It wasn't easy. I'm very foul mouthed in real life. The decision not to curse in Eli was one I made very early and very consciously precisely because I wanted my books to be accessible to anyone who wanted to read them. I wanted my series to be the sort you could recommend or lend to anyone without fear of offending. Part of this was marketing, why limit your audience? But mostly I also wanted a book I could safely give to my kid some day without being held back by a bit of language. In all five books, I say the word "bitch" once, but otherwise nothing.

I got around the cursing angle in two ways. First, I used substitute curse words, the delightfully English but still very PG "bloody" and my own creation, "Powers," which also served as world building. Mostly, though, I just had my characters express their displeasure in other ways. This was good, because more often than not in writing, cursing is a crutch, a way to easily show your character's emotional state without actually having to show it. By making the conscious decision not to curse in Eli, I forced myself to be clever, and ultimately I think it served the novels well.

This isn't to say that cursing can't be part of characterization. In the series I'm writing now, which has a first person POV, my main character is a mercenary. Cursing is like breathing for her, part of her unvarnished, unrefined, aggressive charm. It's also something others gripe at her for. Instead of being a crutch, cursing is something I have her use as a form of creative expression, and I've worked really hard to make her dirty language hilarious in its own right. (She's a creative curser.)

I guess it really comes down to why are you characters cursing so much? Is it their environment? Their upbringing? Is cursing part of your character's voice? If so, then I'd hesitate to cut it, especially if you're writing fantasy for a mature audience instead of a young one. However, if your characters are cursing because you can't think of anything else for them to say, that would be a problem that you should probably think long and hard about.

And whew, I think that's it for tonight! I'll answer the last set tomorrow, but if you have something for me, you can leave it on the original thread. Thank you again for all the lovely blog post fodder, and I hope you're enjoying this Holiday Q&A!

- R

AMA: Answers part 1!

Wow, you folks are AWESOME! What great questions! Let's get started!

WARNING: Some of these contain very slight spoilers for the Eli series. Nothing big enough to put under a cut, but if haven't read past book 3 and/or are very sensitive to spoilers, you might want to exercise caution!

All good? Onward!

Paul Weimer: What kind of genre fiction do you like to read for pleasure, Rachel? What is your favorite book you read this year? What sort of non fiction inspires you and your writing? Can you divorce the art of analyzing the craft when you read a book? 

I've always been a wide ranging reader, and since I've started writing, I've tried to reach even further. For non-fiction, I love research heavy sociological books like A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships (fascinating!) as well as lyrical non-fiction like The World Without Us, which (for the record) is one of the most beautiful and thought provoking books I've ever read.

For fiction, I love fantasy (duh), especially glorious epic fantasy, though I don't like really dark fantasy (bad people doing bad things for no good reason is an automatic put down for me). It's not that I hate excessive violence or gritty realism per se, I just tend to prefer lighter stories and happy endings. There's enough misery in the real world.

I also love romances, both of the paranormal variety and Regencies, Urban Fantasy, and weird, beautiful lit fic by people like Lynda Barry and Jeff Noon. My favorite authors whom I will never write like include Sarah Monette, China Mieville, and Margaret Atwood. And to balance out all that literary pretension, my favorite series of all time at the moment is Immortals After Dark by Kresley Cole. Regin the Radiant is my spirit animal.

As to the "can I turn off my writer brain long enough to enjoy a book" part of the question, the answer is... no. There is no off switch for the writer. I am constantly analyzing books to see how other authors put them together, and for the most, that's a good thing. I find all kinds of new tricks to steal! Sometimes, though, it can be annoying, but really, if the story's good enough, I get swept anyway. I have read some truly AWFUL books just because I loved the characters and wanted to know what happened. This is because, while I can never turn the writer brain off, my reader brain is by far the stronger influence, forcing me to stay up to unholy hours of the night finishing even badly constructed books because MUST KNOW WHAT HAPPENS!

Elizabeth: Did you write Eli as a morally grey character on purpose or did he just more or less present that way? Miranda seems to be the only.character that really balances out Eli's grey morals. Do you think the story would have been really different if their morals were reversed?

I love this question! You are exactly right when you say that Miranda balances Eli, because that's what I created her to do. From the very beginning, Miranda was meant to be the cop to Eli's robber, the hammer of iron clad responsibility to help remind him that he is actually a good person and make him do the responsible thing.

Eli came into my head fully formed, but that doesn't mean I didn't spend a lot of time figuring out exactly how he ticked. One of Eli's biggest struggles is his natural affinity for rule breaking (a direct result of his overly strict childhood courtesy of Banage) warring with his deep inner moral compass which, to his dismay, seems firmly planted on good. Eli wants to be outside the system, to steal from fools and ride high at the expense of a society he sees as overbearing and silly. He wants to do what he wants and is a fairly selfish person. But selfish people aren't always bad, and when push comes to shove, Eli always does the right thing. Miranda's role in the series is to be that shove. Without that dynamic, or even if it was reversed, I don't think the series would have been a quarter as much fun.

J. Leigh Bralick: When you wrote the Eli Monpress books, did you have all the interweaving threads that would pull together in book five identified at the very beginning? I just finished it (and ADORED it...and am working on my review!!), and am stunned and amazed and in awe of your genius at how you wove in these little elements throughout the whole series rather on-the-sly like, and then at the end they all came together in jaw-dropping brilliance. 

So I wanted to know if some of them kind of poked their heads out in the last book and waved their arms and said, "Hey, don't forget about me!" or if you knew all along that they were important. :D

Thank you so much for the kind words! And yes, I did have most everything planned out pretty early. The details came later, but the general tangle of relationships and meta plot was there in essence almost from the start and cemented by the time I finished Spirit Eater.

This isn't to say a lot of plot threads didn't suddenly pop up and scream "YOU FORGOT ME!" all through the series (Oh god, they did) but because of my publication schedule (the first three books came out in three months at the end of 2010) I was able to go back and plant seeds in the first two books while I finished the third. This was PRICELESS. Without the ability to go back and put fix things like I did, the series wouldn't have been nearly as complex.

Even though I've written 6 books since I finished Spirit's End, I consider pulling off the end of the Eli series as the highest achievement as a writer to date. I've never wanted anything to work as much as that final book, and the fact that you and others think it does makes me want to sing for joy. Part of me is terrified I'll never be able to pull off a balancing act ike this again (the Eli series was its own breed of magical unicorn for me in a lot of ways), but then, at the time, I didn't think I'd ever make Eli work either. Just goes to show you never know what you can do unless you reach for it.

BG: I think you said you were planning to write about antagonists. I'm interested in reading what you have to say about that.

I still intend to do a big post about bad guys (and not so bad guys) in the future, so I'm going to hold off on getting into this too deep. The basic gist, though, is that the villain is the other half of your story. The heroes drive the story, but the antagonist drives the conflict. Boring villains make for boring books, but since your villains don't get nearly as much page time as the MCs, making them interesting or even sympathetic requires some pretty clever writing.

One of my favorite sayings is "every villain is the hero of their own story." This was why I softened Benehime instead of making her just plain crazy evil. In her mind, she was the victim and she deserved freedom and happiness, and really, she did, she just went about it all wrong. Methodology is often the only thing keeping a villain from being a hero. The ends don't justify the means.

For example, in my new series, one of the antagonists is working toward an unarguably greater good. If circumstances were different, he would be one of the heroes, but he isn't, because to get to that greater good he ruthlessly stepped on others and caused enormous suffering. This was a line I drew. I could have easily justified his unsavory actions to the reader just like the character did in his own mind. But I didn't, because I was trying to make a point.

These are the sort of things you can do as an artist when you start really digging into and using your villain role. There is such a huge breadth of moral complexity and depth in the way we frame who is a protagonist vs. who is an antagonist. Everyone can hate a cackling evil villain. It's easy, nothing is challenged  But when your antagonist is a reasonably good person does bad things in pursuit of a greater end, or who was forced to do bad things by terrible circumstance, then the reader has to think. You're forcing them to use their own moral judgement along with your protagonist to figure out what really is the right thing to do, and that right there is where the book hooks in deep.

So there's a teaser! I'll be doing a much more thought out and in depth post on this in the weeks to come.

Wyndes: Why do authors make their blogs hard to read by putting white text on a black background? I know that sounds facetious, but it seriously is a question that I'd love the answer to. I get why designers do it -- hey, it looks cool -- but it impairs readability dramatically, making it harder for every person with astigmatism (50% of the population!) to read the words. It seems like such a strange choice for the people who should care about the words first. I write this as someone who is seriously considering changing a title because I can't find a capital "C" that I like, so it's not like I don't understand putting design first. I just don't get why so many writers do it.

I'm afraid the short answer to this is: I like it. My eyes are very sensitive to light and I find reading white text on a black screen much easier than dealing with a glaring white or patterned background. That said, as an author who was a graphic designer and has an astigmatism, I'm deeply sympathetic to your plight. If it really bothers you, my suggestion would be read the blogs that give you trouble on an RSS reader (there's a link to my feed on the sidebar marked FEED ME RAWR!) where you have complete control over the color scheme. I personally like Google Reader, but there are many lovely free readers to choose from. Sorry for the eye pain!

And that's it for today! Again, thank you for the amazing questions, y'all really saved my blogging bacon! I'll be getting to the rest next week. Until then, if you have a question you'd like to add to the pot, please feel free to leave it on the original post.

Ask Me Anything!

Sorry about the sudden dearth of blog posts. The dry spell is a combination of family health problems (nothing too serious, just frustrating), a looming deadline and my seeming inability to figure out the right ending for this book (plotted ending looked great on paper, but now that I'm in it, many problems have appeared and solving those problems is proving very frustrating), plus a simple lack of anything really to say.

SO, since I hate an empty blog, I'm opening up the floor to you lovely people. If you have any questions about Eli, writing, publishing, or which dessert is the BEST dessert (flan, hands down) I will answer it. (FUN FACT: the first time I wrote the sentence above, I wrote "which desert is the BEST desert?" and the answer to that is the Taklamakan Desert in Western China. Come on! Its name means "you go in, but you don't come out" and it has sand dunes the size of mountains.)

Anyway, is this a lazy way to get out of thinking up my own blog subjects? Absolutely! Do I feel shame? NONE! So ask away, and if you'd like to see me answering some other questions, please check out my (seven page!) NaNoWriMo thread.

Answers go up this week and next week if I overflow. As always, thanks for reading!

- R

Official Rules for Daggerback

Sorry I've been away so long! I'm finishing up a book and that always makes me more hobbit-like than usual (why yes, I DO live in a hole in the ground! It's cozy, and there's tea.) But, since some people have been asking, I'm popping up to do a post with the official rules of Daggerback!



For those of you scratching your heads, Daggerback is the gambling card game Eli likes to kick Josef's butt at. This isn't Josef's fault since the skills required to be good at Daggerback are a head for percentages and the ability to bluff, both of which are areas where Eli has him beat. (Really, Josef should probably just stop playing, but he's too competitive to ever say no.)

A Daggerback deck consists of the following:

4 Kings, worth 2 points
4 Queens, worth 3 points
6 Wizards, worth 4 points
8 Knights, worth 5 points
and, of course, the three trump cards, the Hunter, the Weaver, and the Shepherdess, which are worth 1 point each.

Just like in Hearts or Gin Rummy (my favorite card game), lowest hand wins in Daggerback. Hands are played thusly:

At the beginning, everyone puts their beginning ante into the pot in the center. Once everyone's put in their money, the dealer deals everyone two cards, one face up, two face down. Once everyone has their cards, the play begins in earnest.

Since everyone has one card visible and one card hidden, players try to bluff each other on their hidden card. For example, in The Spirit Thief, Eli knew Josef's hand couldn't be any good because he was showing a knight, the worst card. But, Eli being Eli, he wheedled Josef into bidding higher than he should have. This bidding stage is also where players who know they have low hands can choose to fold and forfeit their initial bid.

This first round of bidding only goes around once. Once everyone has thrown in, the dealer deals the final cards and the final round of bidding begins. Unlike the first bids, which were capped at one per player, this second round of bidding continues until all players are done. It can go on for a while, especially if you end up with two players who both think they have winning hands.

Players must keep bidding to stay in the game, either matching or raising the bid before theirs. If they can't, they fold and forfeit everything they've put in. If none of the players can match a bid or if all players agree that enough's enough, the bidding ends and everyone shows their cards. The hand with the lowest total points is the winner and gets the pot.

So, as you see, not a complicated game. The hands are fast and the rules are simple, making it a favorite among the caravaners and bar room types, especially since all the cards use pictures meaning  you don't have to be able to read to play (a big concern back before the Council of Thrones improved literacy rates).Naturally, no one of any money or breeding would be caught dead playing Daggerback, which is part of why Eli loves it so much. That, and it's a bluffing game. It was practically made for him! (The fact that the deck is small enough to fit in his pocket doesn't hurt either, Eli has a highly mobile lifestyle).

And that's Daggerback! Of course, I'm an author, not a game maker. I created Daggerback as a way of slipping the three Powers in early and to show the Eli group's dynamic. With this in mind, I can't vouch for Daggerback being a good game, but if you want to fleece a Josef of your own, now you know how.

For the record, it is totally possible to create your own Daggerback deck out of two decks of playing cards, so if you give the game a try, let me know! Also, if of you are game theory fans who can think of a way to make the game more interesting without changing the cannon rules that appear in the novels, please let me know.

Final note: a huge shout out is due to StellarFour who did an amazing review of Spirit's End! I am blushing, I am! Thank you everyone who helped launch Spirit's End with a bang!

Two Post Spirit's End Interviews!

Whew, I've been a busy bee lately! I was going to do a blog post about villains (again), but it's not done and I wanted to go ahead and post links to these two really great interviews I did to celebrate the release of Spirit's End!

The first is over at Fantasy Book Critic (with whom I did a previous interview way back when the Eli Omnibus came out). It's always such a pleasure to speak with Mihir and I had a ton of fun. We talk a lot about the inner workings of Eli's world, how I wrote the books, and my new SciFi series. Warning, the interview has a lot of spoilers about the end of Eli, so if you haven't read Spirit's End yet, you might want to hold off and read this one later.


My next interview just went up at Stellar Four, and I have to say I'm blushing! They say very nice things. This is a spoiler free interview, though I do reveal the sexuality of two secondary characters, so I guess that could be a spoiler? But it's not in the books explicitly, so I'm pretty sure you're safe. Anyway, go read it! I had a very good time and Megan, I'm sorry I broke your heart!

So there you go, two new interviews full of delicious Eli secrets! Go, enjoy, and I'll be back in a bit with a big post about antagonists. Until then, try not to die from all the Christmas music (seriously, my grocery store had Frosty the Snowman on loop. I'm considering never going there ever again).