Fear

Fear is a powerful motivator. It's an interesting and difficult piece of emotion to slip into stories and novels and tales, but at the same time, fear is often what motivates characters and people in general. Fear if they do not do something, their situation will worsen or change to conditions they do not approve of. Fear if they do not protect what they love that it will be taken from them. Fear that they will be harmed, fear that if they do not act, no one else will.

Lonlor Swift is a character who, for two books and half of the third one, is driven by fear. It rules him and shoves him and wraps it's noose about his throat and refuses to let him breathe. And at first, I thought that this fear, this insistent panic that he feels, that increases as the books go on, as he plunges farther into this journey, was what makes him weak. Was this force that I had to get rid of, because how could the savior of the world tremble and cry and shake when faced with the villains? How could he buckle and bend and waver under the weight of the world when he was crafted to carry it?

Easily.

Lonlor is mortal.

He may have pointed ears, but Lonlor Swift, savior or no, is human.

Case in point:

Voices.

Fast approaching voices, and footsteps along with them. He froze, his arms trembling, and the distant thrum of a familiar noise hounded a new, terrifying facet into the situation.

The sound of waves.

Waves crashing against a shore.

Sener Island.

“I know he hasn’t awoken, wiseman,” a high voice was saying. “But what are we to do with him?”

Closer and closer-

The owner of the second set of footprints had no time to answer. With a frantic shove, he lifted himself off of the cot with a hiss between his teeth when the edges of his vision blackened. The next thing he knew he was hurtling toward the floor, slamming into it with an impressive thump and knocking the cot over on it’s side. He gasped as his shoulder slammed into the ground, and immediately curled into a ball, tears pricking at his eyes as the darkness covering his vision thickened.

“What was that?” the first voice asked from outside.

“I think he’s awake,” the lower tone of a male answered dryly.

No, no!

His breaths came heavy and quick, adrenaline spiking through him. His eyes snapped open as the two figures entered the tent, and he immediately attempted to get to his feet. It was a pathetic display, as though he willed his body upright with all the gusto he possessed, the most he accomplished was wavering, air whooshing in and out of his lungs as the strangers stared at him in surprise.

The man started forward with a noise of protest.

“Stars above, boy!” he cried. “What’s in your head?”

“No,” he breathed, his wild eyes catching a snippet of a worn face and wide brown eyes. “Get away.”

His voice was so light, so choked, that it was lost to the air as soon as he spoke.

“Come, up you get,” the stranger instructed.

The beaten figure felt a hand brush his shoulder, and with a strangled cry, he whirled away, crashing into the fallen cot.

“Don’t touch me!” he called out, cowering as deeply as he could into the stiff woodwork. He turned his face away, his posture submissive, his eyes downcast as he began to tremble. A droplet of water curved down the side of his face, his chest heaving as his raspy breathing filled the large tent.

“Child,” the voice of the man said. “We are not going to harm you.”

“Played that trick before,” he gasped pitifully in response. “Please, just leave me alone. Please…”

“Boy,” the man’s voice sounded closer, and he flinched, curling his screaming arms around his sides until the weight of them thundered new, fresh anguish across his mid-section.

“Just kill me,” he begged.

Lonlor is so frightened out of his mind that it drives him to do what I've always wanted to define him: Survive.

What and how does fear drive you and your own characters?

(cut short because I really should go to bed. Like, really really.)

So!

How has your guy's writing been going?

Have any recent stories of writing woes, triumphs, frustrations? If not, what's one of the biggest things you think you struggle with, as well as one of your biggest strengths?

Thoughts

Thinking a lot on my life right now, and what needs to be sacrificed in order to fulfill other goals. I'm not so happy about what I need to let go of, but I feel in the end that it's the right choice and something that needs to be done. My books have a heavy element of sacrifice, of giving up passions and people in order to fulfill the greater good. I suppose now it's time to live it, more then I've been doing.

It's just exhausting me at this point, but it'll smooth itself out.

Regardless, along with that, I've been thinking of Nycon a lot lately. He's an immortal, after all, and 90% of the people he loves the most in his lifetime are not. Of those 90%, one in particular would devastate him completely to lose.

It'd be a lot to go through, and eternity to go through it.

Doubt.

“Finn,” he said, and she knew it was something serious by the way her name lingered in the air like a cloud.

“Mm?” she mumbled back, sleepily tracing her free hand across his chest. Her eyes were half hooded, watching the evening light catch like fire on the crimson strands of his hair splayed across the pillow. The pads of her fingers ran trails across his skin, delighting in their freedom to do so, and a soft smile tugged at her mouth in the pause that followed.

“Do you ever have doubts?” was the heavy weight pulling her lover’s mind down, and Finn staggered under the unexpectedness of the question. She gained a foothold a moment later, her eyes drifting to his hand that lie on his stomach. She admired the slender fingers, calloused from a lifetime of work and strain, tipped by claws that were meant for tearing and prying. She had only ever felt gentleness from them over the years, had only felt warmth when she slipped her delicate hands into his capable ones. The digits were the same, the spaces between his fingers always waiting for hers to fill them. She thought of the girls at court, who often approached her during her travels and asked what it was to be in love with such a man. Finn always knew what they were really asking-

Why was she not afraid?

Shadow cat lovers had destroyed the human kingdom, after all. His mother had tainted a king and brought down a dynasty, had ravaged the land with unhappiness and dreadful rumors and scorn. History stood as a tell tale sign that any and all who took those of shadow blood as their lovers were brought down in the worst darkness imaginable. They would ask her what he was like, and she, weary of the same questions meaning something else entirely, would look them in the eye and state if they wished to know, they should have gotten to know him instead of seduce him for his standing.

They thought her foolish.

She thought them idiotic.

They were ignorant to the man that had saved the kingdom his kin wished leveled. They were ignorant of how when he was alone with someone he loved his posture changed from that of a silent bearer of immeasurable weight to one buckling beneath it. They did not know that he resented his standing, that he wanted nothing to do with being Commander, that he was so strong under a duty he had never wished. That he feared for his men’s lives, that he breathed nightmares knowing his decisions could decide if they live or die. They did not know that whenever someone was flogged or hung from his army that Kanaray, stone faced and silent, counted every lash of the whip, that each blow coiled his muscles under his skin until he hardened every part of himself against it. It never worked. She had put her hand on his arm often enough to witness it, to feel how desperately he wanted to shrink away from the stares and the praise and the scorn.

They did not know how desperately the Commander, with all his strength and power, wished to be loved.

How he was utterly convinced, for years of his king telling him so, that he did not deserve it. That he was nothing.

A soft sigh escaped her, and she felt him shift when her breath tickled his skin.

“Doubt about what?” she asked, her hand trailing from his chest to his hand. He threaded his fingers through hers, and she shifted her head on his shoulder to peer up at him. He was not looking at her, his eyes focused across the room on a thought she could not see.

“You and I,” he plucked it from the air, and with the admittance his jade eyes swept down to meet hers.

Her brow furrowed at the question, and Kanaray, seeing her confusion, elaborated.

“Do you ever have any doubts about loving me?”

At that Finn shifted herself, moving from lying on her side, her cheek against his shoulder, to lying with her torso draped across the side of his, skin on skin. It would be pointless to ask where the thought came from, as Kanaray’s head had been honed with the ability to doubt since he was young. It was crafted from years of the world causing him to do nothing but doubt in order to survive. If he did not doubt everything and everyone then they would turn against him before he expected it.

She put her face close to his and parted her lips, her voice warm.

“Commander,” she addressed him, and a small smile curled one edge of his mouth upward. He often smiled when she addressed him by title, though, admittedly, it was usually in the heat of an argument that she used it. “Have I ever shown doubt?”

Kanaray paused, and Finn pressed a kiss to his chin.

“Do you think I’d be here if I had any?” she whispered softly.

Kanaray’s cheeks flooded with red, and she chuckled, pulling up her arms to lazily cross them over his chest, resting her chin on them.

“Kan,” she chased the laughter out of her voice. “It would be a lie to say I never had any doubts. For years I doubted us. For years I wondered if this was truly what I wanted, if you were worth waiting for, worth the effort I was pouring into us when you never wanted there to be an us in the first place.”

His eyes caught on hers, and she raised her head up as she continued.

“I had more doubt regarding loving you then one person ever needs in their lifetime,” she acknowledged. “I’d spend days agonizing over what I should do, how I could get through to you. I doubted if you truly loved me in return, if you could ever trust me enough to tell me. I was mocked for it, and on some days I mocked myself. But I stuck with you.”

His eyes watched her, drinking in the ease in which she spoke of her doubts as if they were fair weathered friends.

“It made me stronger,” she decided, tilting her head. “Every moment of doubting made me question why it was I loved you so much. It made me realize that I could not give up, no matter what you did to push me away. If I had not doubted as often as I did, I wouldn’t have known why it was so vital that I fight for you, that I fight for us. Instead of swooning over you at every moment like those other fools, I grounded my affection in something stronger, and every time I would doubt it, it would strengthen. It had too, else I would have never waited for you, would have never stood by you like I did.”

Still the halfblood said nothing, and Finn smiled.

“It was worth it, love,” she told him in a low voice. “I have no regrets.”

He cocked his head, black ears sweeping forward to catch her voice.

“None?” he asked, and Finn felt no surprise, felt no alarm that he should be doubting her assurance. Kanaray had no doubts in his own feelings, that much she knew, else they wouldn’t be where they were presently. He was swept up in the mindset that it was too good to be true, that this happiness and joy was to be snatched from him the second he let it sink in. She let the silence trail for a moment, let the moment hover over them both, and then she unfolded her arms. She skimmed her fingers up his chin and then placed her hands on either side of his face, pulling his head toward her as she leaned up to kiss him. Kanaray responded to her at once, and a small thrill tingled down her spine at the wiliness, something that was still new to her, coming from him. She was certain she would be tempted to place her lips over his often, just to experience his reaction. A reaction that did not involve unease or tension.

She pulled back only when she required air, her heart thundering like a wild herd of horses in her chest. She felt his speed up beneath her, and she smiled at it’s pace.

“None,” she breathed against his mouth, her eyes fluttering open to greet his warm gaze. “I love you, Kanaray Hohtay. Fangs, claws and all.”

Kan chuckled, and she wrinkled her nose when she felt the rumble bounce about in his chest.

“And I love you, Lady Finn,” he whispered back to her, his eyes sparking with a light only she was privy to. “Nobility, stubbornness and all.”

She smiled at him, tilting her head to kiss his cheek.

“Say it again,” she murmured, and Kanaray did not hesitate.

“I love you, Finn,” he said in her ear.

She trailed her lips across the corner of his mouth.

“Again,” she requested, and the corners of his lips curled upwards.

“I love you,” was his answer, and barely had he breathed the words then her lips were on his, her hands twining around his neck.

Yes, it had been worth it.

Every single moment.

Thoughts on violence.

Recently I picked up a copy of the writing magazine, Poets & Writers , because I've been staring at the writing magazines for ages at work (BN) and wanted to give one a go. This issue looked promising, and in it I found an article about violence and blood in novels. The article asked when it was appropriate to "show" violence, and when it was appropriate to "hide" it, and leave it to the reader's imagination. It gave examples of mystery, fiction and crime novelists, and how they effectively freak out the readers without going into gruesome detail about every drop of blood or every knife plunge.

And, as writing thoughts do, it got me thinking about what I consider effective in fiction, in books and in movies and shows alike.

As SoF is a series that is 75% fighting and war and 25% talking and scheming, I am familiar with the concept of choosing to display what and where and how. King Allan, my antagonist, murders his father and mother violently in order to ascend to the throne (or is that his reason at all? ;) ). He cuts his father's throat and drowns his mother in the palace fountain, all with his bare hands. I could have easily gone into great detail in some flashback about how it happened in disgusting detail, but instead I focus on how Allan, at that moment, felt to have power enough to kill his own parents. They are his first kills, which are important in the life of any antagonist, but I purpose to leave the gruesome details to the readers. It's their imaginations that are being provoked to see it, after all. If I had gone into pages and pages of detail of the struggle (Allan's father and mother were not soft shadow cats- they were warriors through and through) I would have taken away a huge portion of the raw feeling I wanted the scene to have.

This morning I considered two of my favorite shows, CSI (the original way back when) and Castle, and how they portray murders. I love CSI dearly, but most of the time, I'd say 90%, they show the murder happen, either in the end when the suspect is caught, or in the beginning. While there are plenty of episodes of CSI that freaked the willies out of me (people living in your attic and spying on you at night? Noooo thank you.), I find that the gut response to those murders are not nearly as strong as what I experience when I watch something like Castle. In Castle, when the show begins with murders, we see the murder scene and the body with the suspect gone and the victim just waiting to be discovered. Immediately (especially if it's incredibly bloody) I'm drawn in, and immediately I want to know how it happened, and who was responsible (and how badly Beckett will kick their skull in, but that's not the point) and why. The murders are never shown (at least to my memory), even during one episode where they have a recording of the murder happening. The screen pans out and we focus on the characters watching it, on their reactions, instead of the actual violence happening on screen.

To me, the descriptions the detectives and investigators give are far more effective than the scenes of the murders actually happening in CSI. If I told you there was a man holding a family hostage, and he was executing them one by one, but doing it by dragging them into the other room or across the street to the woods where you can't see, and all you hear are gun shots, what do you think of? The unknown, and your imagination runs wild with it. This murderer is taking the kids one by one, taking the parents, with no mercy, and the others have to listen and know he's coming for them next. If he shot them all "on screen" and I described a brutal killing with punctured chest wounds and skulls splitting open, it would invoke either numbness, or disgusted horror- not quite the emotions needed for the scene.

Thats not to say I believe EVERYTHING should happen off screen. There's a need to know when to show the violence, when to describe it, and when to imply it. I don't describe Allan's first murder in detail, or how Se'vre kills off characters. There's a scene I wrote where he is sitting across from a woman (she's not important) he fully intends to kill, but he's seducing her into relaxing in his presence. She does, to his delight, and he, as Se'vre does, toys with his food and victims in such a way that it seems for several moments that he's actually quite harmless. The scene ends with him, in a "round about" way, telling her he intends to murder her. When Se'vre appears again, he has blood on his face and makes a comment alluding to her murder- but I never write about how it happens, what he did to her, or how the blood got on his face. Se'vre is a messy killer, and he likes it that way.

My antagonists are created to be horrible, twisted and rotten people through and through, but they are also written to be people. I want to invoke emotions and reasons and moments where the reader believes, for a fraction of a second, that whatever is about to happen has a chance of not happening because they see that Allan and Se'vre and Avlon and Revelin are just, in the end, people doing horrible things. And that it's a choice.

In the same way, I wrote an entire (albeit short) chapter of a character being tortured. I needed to show the reader everything that happened in that period of this character being brutalized and tortured in every which way possible, because later, those same readers needed to connect and remember what happened as this character remembers. I needed that connection of sympathy and horror when the character reacts the way they do to situations, of understanding, because this torture is an experience kept between the character it happened to and the audience. The other characters are suddenly the ones who heard about it but did not see it, did not feel it, and it switches the stage around so that the readers have a behind the curtain look at a huge aspect of this character's development. It was a hard chapter to write because of the violence, but it was necessary, and I believe it made the story, the latter books, more effective in their telling because of it.

Of course, SoF is about war, and there are many deaths I am forced to describe. However, I have tried to be careful in how I describe them. Saying a blade was run across someone's throat verses going into great detail about how the tendons were cut and the blood gushed is a line that needs to be recognized. I've read writing before where brutalization, especially by the antagonist, is described in such great detail and so often that I became numb to it. It desensitized me in every way as I read about these deeds this character committed, and I became less interested in his crimes and how to stop them. There's a point you reach where you cannot take it to the next level, where you are stopping your reader from teetering into suspense and horror because you've started the violence at the highest level it can get in the first place. They will flinch at first, sit on the edges of their seats and immerse themselves, but the second they see this is the norm, that this is what will be happening at every plot twist and turn, it becomes ineffective. They become less invested in the characters and their own emotions and reactions.

If I described every swing of Lonlor's sword as he fought in war (he fights in many of them), every limb he cuts off or every person he kills, it would get not only tedious, but annoying. Instead I focus on what he feels, or if he even does. Does it numb him, fighting for hours upon hours, watching his comrades and friends fall by his side? Does the smell of blood and death become so normal to him that he can't remember what clean air is? Shadow cats are a race that delight in blood, and they tend to bleed out their victims in gruesome ways. I wanted to include a scene in SoF where this is shown, and I did describe it through Lonlor's eyes. But I don't describe every murder and every happening of violence in such detail that it numbs the reader. At least, I like to think I've learned enough to not do so. Naturally, if acts of violence happen and are so important to the plot they need to be described in great detail, then do it.

But remember we live in a world where murder happens every day, unfortunately, and most readers will be well familiar with the motion of slashing someone's throat or running them through or shooting them. "He put three in her chest" can provoke more emotion then "The bullets hit her once in her shoulder, her collarbone, her chest, and spurted blood across her shirt". Don't take your reader's imagination for granted, especially if you write fiction. Give it help, show it what you want to get across, but don't assume that they have never seen a crime show in their life or don't know what bullet wounds look like. Give them a taste of the scene, but don't shove it down their throats. They won't be able to enjoy it then, and savoring is important.

And for goodness sake, please don't slather your fiction with blood every page. There are people who enjoy that type of fiction, but you would be doing yourself, your future shrink and your readers a favor by limiting it to when it's necessary.

Find the balance and stick with it. Don't be afraid to show some violence, but be wary of showing far too much.

Started a new manuscript today.

Because I'm already restless with no writing project in the wing. The manuscript tab to the right has thus been updated!

This one's style incredibly different from how I'm accustomed to writing (this story is told from the perspective of a modern teenage girl in first person, the direct opposite of SoF), and the writing just springs out of nowhere as I type. It's very exciting...so exciting that I wanted to share a snippet I just finished with ya'll. Read on for it! :)

I know how the world ends.

Some say the world ends in fire. Others say it ends in a flood, or a supreme deity smites us all with no mercy. I’ve heard people stand on street corners on soap boxes and shout to the world that it’s end is near. We will all be judged at the end times, they say, their eyes wild and frantic. There is nothing we can do to stop it. I always wondered, as I passed such people, why they were raising their voices and screaming for all they were worth if what they preached was true. Would that be how any of us, should one of us be gifted with the ability to see the truth, with how it all ends, act? I can’t say it would be my first response. Warn people, yes, but I’ve seen crazy people all my life. I know the signs, I know what others shrink away from and decree as abnormal.

I know what will not be tolerated.

It would be my choice, if I knew when it was to come, to let it. I have no one to warn, no one to frighten with my doomsday speeches and predictions that none would take seriously. I have nothing, but even as I passed such people in the beginning, my head down and my eyes cast anywhere else, my music blaring in my ears as I walked, I had everything. I had everything because I was not standing at that street corner screaming those words, I had everything because I was not in this moment that jars the irony so deep into me I wonder if anyone would be able to extract it, if I were to live. It’s doubtful.

I know how it all ends.

It is with none of the things that humans, over time, have concocted. The irony of it all is what the world does end with, and how it is so simple. How something like this eluded even the greatest story teller, even the greatest mind that ran over the probability of the universe running it’s course.

The world ends with a name.

My name.

My identity strung in one word. Three syllables for those who do not know me, two for those that do. The very few I held close to my chest and refused to let go.

It would be a very short tale to tell if that was how I began, with the end. All tales have beginnings and ends, and I could not help but begin mine with where I stand now.

I’ve always been a bit backwards.

Let me begin again, the best I can, with what I know.

My name is Cynthia McDonnell.

Remember that name when it is whispered at the end, and remember, remember as this unfurls, one very important fact you cannot let go of.

I know how the world ends.

And very soon, so will you.

Draft 2 of Book 2...

...is done.

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:)