HERO and PEGASUS

 

Technology, proliferating in all directions the way it does, keeps preventing me from writing this sentence with any kind of clarity of antecedents.  The review I posted the link to last night that docks PEGASUS one star for the diabolicalness of the cliffhanger ending came to me via Twitter, and on Twitter I said to the reviewer that in response to all these people—in the blog forum, on Twitter, and on Facebook—throwing themselves into postures of fatal despair about the ending of PEGASUS, perhaps I should retell the story of the effect on the author of writing Aerin's first battle with Maur in THE HERO AND THE CROWN.  Whereupon way too many people tweeted or emailed back oh, yes please!  Tell us the story!  Please! 

            Well, oops.  It's easy to throw out titbits in Twitter's 140 character bursts without realising there may be repercussions.  I could just about get the story, such as it is, told in another 140 characters, and clearly should have.   It's just that HERO is the first story I almost died of which makes it kind of stick in my mind.  I've always sweated and bled with my characters—I still remember Beauty and Greatheart's gruelling final journey back to the Beast's castle in BEAUTY—indeed, as I think about it, that experience was very like what I wrote here last Wednesday, about adrenaline spikes when you have ME.  I wrote BEAUTY in a fairly continuous five-month white-hot adrenaline spike, not knowing what I was doing, trying to get this short story out of the way so I could get back to the novel*, and I lived it very intensely as, even then, I intensely lived all my stories.  So that slow awful exhausting journey was slow, awful and exhausting** even when I was writing it like a creature possessed.

            In HERO . . . I knew it was coming. 

Okay, the following is kind of a spoiler.  But not really.  As you're reading the book you're going to figure out what's going to happen before it happens.  It's all in whether you're enjoying the journey.  I'll leave out anything too explicit.

I knew one of the Great Dragons was going to turn up at the worst possible moment, I knew that Aerin was going to go face it, and I knew she would have a very bad time.  I think I possibly didn't know how bad or I might not have had the nerve to . . . nah.  The story makes you do what it needs you to do.***   The battle was gruesome enough—and I knew she must—she had to survive, because I knew she went on to meet Luthe and go after the Hero's Crown.  And I still saw Maur loom up before her/them/us and I quailed, I wanted to run away and hide.†  As I say, the battle was bad enough, but the aftermath, when she's not sure she's going to live or not . . . I wasn't sure either, about either of us.  I've told the story many times that I crept around the house for weeks, limping on my right ankle and holding my left arm curled protectively against my body, and breathing shallowly because even breathing hurt. ††  Every writer knows about being taken over by a story—the way the real world fades and the story-world gets brighter and brighter†††.  There are some stories that are positively dangerous to be taken over by—and my guess is that a story that is never dangerous to be taken over by probably isn't worth a lot, although that may just be my personal extremism showing.  But there are parts of any story that you can write and still have a life, and some that . . . you can't.  The aftermath of Aerin's battle with Maur was one where I couldn't.‡

            And frell frell frell it, but the aftermath of the end of PEGASUS is not dissimilar, and not only because people keep writing to say YOU WHAT?  THAT'S THE END?  I'M SUPPOSED TO WAIT FOR THE SEQUEL/SECOND HALF OF THE STORY?  WAIT?  YOU'RE MAKING US WAIT?  Um.  No one is sorrier than I am.  Trust me.  It's been so bad, not always, but off and on, that I'll wake up in the morning with a sense of unmitigated black doom and know that My Life Is A Ruin . . . and then I'll think (possibly after the first cup of caffeine starts to kick in, or possibly the Gladness of Hellhounds begins to penetrate) no, wait!  It's okay!  It's just PEG II!  And it's going to be all right!‡‡

            Something that a lot of people apparently still haven't forgiven me for is reading the battle with Maur out loud at a conference, long before the book was finished and between covers for people to buy.  My reading—and you are welcome to look this up in your beaten-up copy of HERO—ended with 'The dragon's fiery blood fountained out and covered her, and she fainted.'  There was one of those you-could-have-heard-a-pin-drop moments, and as it happened they'd put me in a room too small for the audience that turned up to hear me read, so there were people sitting on the floor in the aisles and standing pressed up against the walls.  And they all stopped breathing.  I have to admit . . . it was great.  I looked up from the page and . . . there were all these people staring at me.  In 999,999,999 cases out of 1,000,000,000 I hate being stared at, but in this case . . . oh the power.  The dominion, grasp and sway!  Mwa ha ha ha ha ha!  But I don't think I've been to a library conference since where at least one person from that audience that day hasn't come up to me and said 'I've never forgiven you for . . .' even if they're laughing as they say it.‡‡‡ 

            So I have some experience of ruining my readers' peace of mind, and torturing them with cliffhangers.  But I wrote HERO way long before the internet happened—and way way long before I was out there dangling in the virtual breeze and all too available for cries of outrage and remonstrance. 

            Ah well.  I'm hoping that after PEG II I can settle down and be a nice author again for a while.§ 

* * *

* You've heard all this before.  The novel I was writing is one of what have become the Twenty-Six/Forty-Nine Next Damar Novels, and is specifically the story Aerin has a glimpse of near the end of HERO, of three characters, two of them named Leo and Tommy. 

**Beauty's experience back at the Beast's palace after her visit home in ROSE DAUGHTER is straight out of nightmares.  My nightmares.  When she turns around and goes back down the corridor, and when she climbs out a window are both big yesssss! moments for me.  But when I saw that stuff piling up on the page during the first draft there was a big nooooo moment from the writer.  Stories are merciless.  They use everything they can find of you, and if they can't find what they want, they keep looking.  

*** The story made me end PEGASUS where I did.  You said you wanted to get two books out me, right? it said.  Fine.  The first one ends here.  Oh, stop snivelling.  You can end it where I tell you, or you can go back to one eleventy-hundred-page novel, and you and the hellhounds can starve before you finish it. 

† The truth is I spend a lot of time wanting to run away and hide.^  It's a good thing I'm the writer and get to stay at home.  With lots of blankets to pull over my head. 

^ The shout, Cambridge minor!  Grab your rope!, in the bell tower does it to me every time. 

†† With this story always goes the fact that Aerin lying in bed listening to her breath rustle in her lungs is straight out of my experience of having pneumonia when I was eleven—and almost died.  I rustled when I breathed for years after.  What was I saying about how stories use everything they can find of you? 

††† Yes, we're all mad.  Some of us dissemble better than others but . . . 

‡ Interesting factoids include that I fell down and broke my ankle toward the end of the writing of HERO.  My right ankle. 

‡‡ It's pretty frelling hairy, but . . . 

‡‡‡ Something else that comes up regularly is that that scene is only about halfway through HERO.  There's a lot left to happen.  'I couldn't believe that was only halfway!'  Yep.  Authors are evil.  But only because stories make them do it.

§  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, etc