Wit & Wizardry
Catching up and sprinting ahead while looking over my own shoulder.
A smorgasbord of NEWS! and a little character analysis amuse-bouche after all that.
First: the anthology I have been grinding away to bring into the world has finally been announced and I’m thrilled.
BEATING HEARTS & BATTLE-AXES is coming your way soon! This project has been a labor of love and swordfights, and I am absolutely ecstatic that it’s finally near-enough to real that we have MOCKUPS of our delightful cover, illustrated by M.E. Morgan, in paperback and ebook formats.
Second: the release date for THE SHEPHERD IN SHADOW is now June 28th, 2024.
In short, my household is still recovering from the plague. (We are vaccinated but this got past it! Be vigilant, my friends.) I lost a week-plus of freelance work time and have had a wee bit of a THING about an early chapter in the book and have had to rip out whole chapters to fix it. I determined that there was just no way to clear the publishing date of June 11th with the condition I was in all of last week. I am mostly better and now we’re at “regular levels of hay-fever-type congestion typical of this time of year” which is not necessarily more fun but is at least bearable.
Third: BRINGER OF THE SCOURGE is in the Self-Publishing Fantasy Blog-Off this year; my book is under the banners of the Queen’s Book Asylum, and the judge assigned to her fate has already read it! I am very curious about the other books in my section but I have been operating off of a set-it-and-forget-it premise to avoid agonizing and wallowing. I wrote the best book I could write; whether anyone else thinks it is any good past that point is wholly subjective.
Several of us with books with queer books in SPFBO past and present have put together a showcase for Pride!
There are nearly 50 books in this showcase—this is just one of the slides! Check it out:
I figured I’d wrap up this edition with a little ruminating, while I am working on bridging together a few different bits of book and thinking about how I got here, so to speak. Building characters is easily my favorite part of writing a book, and I think it’s probably part of why I prefer writing novels over shorter fiction. I like to live with my little weirdos for a while.
One of the indulgences that came my way in the early construction of Bringer was in my character design.
I went into this briefly in the letter where I discussed my use of Black Sword Hack to construct my point-of-view characters, but as I'm spending a lot of time with him right now in the drafting of Shepherd, I thought it’d be interesting to pull apart some of the components I used in crafting Mehren Tevaht.
I have said before, or at least, I'm sure I’ve hinted at it: one of my favorite ways to make a character is rooted in a habit that probably originated from fanfiction.
(I am a lousy fanfiction writer, alas. I can write some very faithful fixit fics or I can write very 1:1 alternate universes, but I have to salute the gonzo fanfic writers who can take Tony Stark and Clark Kent and say, “what if they were in the Matrix, and they kissed??” because that, my friends, is unfortunately not the fanfic writer I am.)
The thing I like to do is to take a character I find intriguing, and gently unspool them a bit. Most of the time, this process involves weaving in things from other characters I really like and tinkering with the what-ifs of alternate outcomes until something interesting emerges and I can twist it all together into a single strand once more.
In the case of Mehren Tevaht, I wanted an origin sob story for a magical mentorship gone awry; a situation that’d produce someone with complex interiority that is often in conflict with himself as much as he is the rest of the world around him. I needed him to be literate, and weird, and haunted. I wanted to borrow a few homage elements from stories I love, and fuse the rest of him together with the cultist beliefs that start to splinter as he grows into the role he earned in the first book. 1
The characters I borrowed little bits from, to complement the composite I was constructing are primarily Murgen, of the later Black Company series, and my other favorite weird little guy, Fritz Leiber's the Gray Mouser.
Aside from the physique (also an homage; I wanted a strong contrast to both Vierrelyne and Kharise, so making Mehren canonically smaller than Vi had some resonance) I suspect there's little evidence of either fictional fellow in my fictional fellow, but it's there.
Of Murgen, the thing I most wanted to poke at is the visceral nature of his dream-walking; that the world in his mind is as real as the world in front of him.
The worlds Mehren can see overlaid upon one another are materially different from Murgen’s situation and experience, but Vierrelyne's eerie dreams of the boy with the demon-green eye are also a light riff on this motif. Dreams as indistinguishable from reality are a poignant thing that I like to examine and untangle.
Of the Mouser: the thing I most wanted to probe at is the wicked little story of his origin, “The Unholy Grail,” which functions as a bit of prologue for the award-winning and well-liked “Ill-Met in Lankhmar” and serves as a perfunctory chronological origin to give weight to the later griefs and sufferings of the Twain who Traveled Thus. (Leiber's co-creator in this endeavor, Harry Otto Fischer, famously disliked this origin of the Mouser, and wrote his own, which survives in internet archives of the old Dragon magazine. It's not an especially interesting or compassionate bit of writing to my thinking.)
In any case, light spoilers for a sixty-two-year-old short story: in “The Unholy Grail,” a teenager called Mouse is apprenticed to a wizard. When the wizard is slain by a local warlord, Mouse vows revenge, declares himself Mouser, and draws upon both white and black magic (the Gray of his namesake) and the hard-scrabble of his own wits to best the warlord and win the hand of the warlord's daughter. He endures an unspeakable physical and magical torture, through which he experiences a clear depiction of intense disassociation, and it is this dissociation he uses to survive the torture and eventually prevail over his enemy.
Much of what happens in this story is lost on the character the Mouser later becomes. His wizardry is forever stunted; he is shrewd and cunning and perhaps best characterized as someone on Twitter once pointed out—
Self-serving, irascible, lascivious. Apt to take to the sea when sufficiently shamed for his various mishaps rather than deal with his own fallout.
A tangled up, unspooled bit of character thread that I had long wanted to do something with was:
What if I wrote a character who endured such a thing but emerged with quite a different outlook? What if, instead of defending his lover and triumphing (however briefly), the loss of lover, friends, and mentor drove him into a far worse place? What if that unbearable pain unlocked a different spark, one that could do something… (well, something you'll see Mehren do in this upcoming book.)
I have spent a lot of time thinking about how I got here because I do have to confront Mehren with his own choices, and his time in Tobinarde's hideous web, as he picks apart what he once thought of himself in order to become who he’s meant to be.
Until next time, resisting the compulsions of evil wizards ‘til Hell won’t have it,
—M.
He's done all right for himself, considering that when I began drafting the first book, I was convinced his arc would end around, mm. Chapter Eighteen.
Heroic whatnot, moment of bravery. Mais non.
Then we had Second Ending, as referenced in an earlier missive.
Still not quite happy with it, I realized that Vierrelyne would not be content with that outcome—and she would know how to set it right.