Mel asked Katherine Addison:

Was nailing Maia's voice and speech rhythms different at all from getting down the voices of the narrators of DoL? Related question: What led to the decision to add third narrators to Mirador and Corambis?

Katherine Addison Okay, twofer because that first answer was rotten to have to give.

Writing the narrators in the Doctrine of Labyrinths got progressively harder as it went along. Felix's speech patterns are more or less me; Mildmay is the dialect I grew up hearing (and, believe me, I can achieve that level of obscenity in my own voice without trying very hard ); it took me *forever* to hear Mehitabel (I should probably have *hear* in quotes, because I don't actually hear voices in my head, but it's the only word that comes close to explaining what it's like); and Kay was *dreadful.* Dreadful, dreadful, *dreadful.* (Even though I love writing with second person familiar and formal--it makes English so much more socially nuanced.) Although Corambis was just a hard book to write, start to finish.

It's certainly not a *different* process in third person than in first, and it's still a matter of "hearing" the cadence. (My other recidivist first person narrator, Booth, has a cadence quite different from any of the DoL cast.) And of hearing the characters. Knowing how they speak and who they are go hand in hand. Actually, for me, it's a trifecta: what their name is, how they speak, and who they are--all or none.

To answer your second question, my original plan, way back when I thought the Doctrine of Labryrinths was going to be a well-behaved trilogy rather than an inconvenient and sprawling quartet, was that the first book would have Felix and Mildmay as narrators, the second book would have Mildmay and Mehitabel as narrators, and the third book would have Felix and Kay as narrators (Kay wasn't Kay at that point, but I can't remember what I thought his name was, so let Kay stand as a place-holder for his eventual self). That plan self-evidently collapsed when the first book fell apart into two books, but I was still doggedly clinging to it, because I am nothing if not stubborn, until my beloved writing partner, Elizabeth Bear, read part of the first draft of The Mirador and said, You need Felix's point of view. And I wept and wailed and gnashed my teeth (no, really, ask anybody), and finally had to admit she was right. And if Book 3 needed Felix, it was self-evident again that Book 4 would need Mildmay.

Which is the long way of saying it wasn't so much a decision as a very slow accident.

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