IF WE LIVE

Hanny’s Story

I was just writing innocently along, telling my planetary romance, when I got to the part where my people were over wintering in Wawee. I planned for them to tell stories. I’d give them a couple of lines humorously describing each tale. Sarey telling about one of her stranger clients. Richard, Plott, and Peterson trying to tell the others what happened on their ship.

Then Kel starts to roll the word. Everything I thought I was doing with this novel went out the window. Up to this point he was a cheerful murderer with a bombastic, almost clownish edge to him. After he tells Hanny’s Story it’s obvious he’s something else altogether. So was this novel. It stopped being my story and became the characters’ stories.

The Song of Ayva

The weirdest of the tales is the one that interrupts the action of part two. I was in part one when intrusive thoughts began to tell me a story. This happens to me all the time. I see visions. I hear voices. I transcribe. This is what I do. I knew this was my mind explaining these new people I was going to write about. What disturbed me was a lot of these fragments were in verse. I had no intention of writing an epic poem, which this obviously was. But it wouldn’t leave my mind. I went ahead and wrote the next section, which is basically a heist narrative, in which my heroes rescue Miry from the castle. Once I got to know her, I thought maybe she would tell this tale. But that was obviously wrong. I couldn’t interrupt the narrative in Part 1 yet another time. Also, Miry’s an intelligent person of a preliterate culture: she would have probably known this whole story in the original verse, maybe even been able to sing it. To try to create this verse epic was not something I was prepared to do, even if I thought myself able to do it. I went about my business through the end of Part 1. In Part 2 we met Laury. She was the one. She was going to tell the story. She knows the story and remembers its most striking lines but isn’t part of the Hastab culture. This allowed me to avoid most of the poetry and also add her sardonic takes on the story she was telling.

After I wrote this, there was no going back. I was writing something that was very strange. I had no idea what it was, but I had to go on.

Kel and the Bull

 I really enjoyed writing this.  I liked the way it began as a conversation. I liked the way the end is in the beginning. The other side of the coin is that it reveals what Kel Malin really is. He’s an epic hero in the mold of Theseus or Herakles. Like those great heroes, there is a tragic shading to his story. Again and again he tries to save people and do right, but he never gets anything for himself. Until the very end. Once again, these tales trapped me into writing something bigger than I intended.