Last night I discovered that I was past the 100 page mark for the full length story I’m working on. This is usually my milestone. If I get this far and I feel like I want to keep going I’m in a pretty good place. It’s also when I start to think about what just slid off my brain and onto the computer screen and I either cringe and put it aside or I keep plugging away.

At this stage the characters are pretty much operating without any help from me. They’ve spent months or years bobbing about in my brain waiting for me to find somewhere to put them and either it’s a success or it’s a giant fail. They’ve probably gone through 10 career changes before popping out of the end of my fingertips or they just appeared in a place I had no idea what to do with, but either way they've found their home.

I’m a control freak, so sometimes when the characters start exercising their independence it leaves me flailing, but in a good way. An example of this is the last full length I worked on, still trapped on a Kensington flash drive waiting for me to put on my Really Serious and Ambitious Editorial Hat. This was one of those flukes where I didn’t actually write anything down before hand but just came up with a first line that really worked, but nonetheless I developed an outline in my head of what happens. Things are moving along swimmingly until I shocked my own pants off. Heroine is off somewhere crying in the middle of the night and realizes she’d gotten herself lost. “OHNOES! HALP!” she cries, and to both our astonishment the guy who comes to rescue her is the Sniveling Little Fucker I had intended to be only a piece of furniture with a talent for cunningulus. Is he there to fuck her? we both wonder, and again are knocked on our arses when he makes a genuine attempt to help her.

It’s quite the experience when you’re as startled as one of your characters and doing the whole WTF-face along with her and I burned through the next 100 or so pages just to see what he would do next.

Ok, I sound like a raving lunatic, but it’s true. This character railroaded me so much that I wondered if it would even make sense for the heroine to find her way back to the hero. On one hand I thought, “You know what? It’s your bloody story, and it’s porn. So long as someone’s coming …?” But on the other hand I remembered how I felt when I had the rug pulled out from under me by a couple of authors.

About a year or so ago I read Cleo Cordell’s Senses Bejeweled and before I say anything more let me just say that this was damned hot and I’m sorry I didn’t read the first book before picking up the sequel because I might not have been so harsh in judging it if I had known that these characters already had a bit of a history and it wasn’t a big, “Oh, by the way, this happened ...” Nonetheless, something about this book irked me in a big way – Cordell pulled a literary cock-tease on me. She introduced a character who was enigmatic and sexy as hell, flawed, somewhat deformed, and a real mean fucker when he needed to be. I waited and I waited and I waited for the heroine to finally fuck this guy, even though his deformity affected him sexually (didn’t stop him from getting a blowjob complete with money-shot, though …) Then, all of a sudden, he was gone. Gone where? He went away on business.

The fuck?!?!?! He creates this elaborate plot to lure the heroine’s lover to his palace and make him his sex slave, and then he just leaves. Poof. Gone.

I’ve been trying to find out if there was a point to this but I can’t find enough about Cordell’s work on the internet to get a blurb for her later publications and see if there’s a third book. If this was it, if Hamed the … pirate (is that what he was? I totally should find the first book …) just took off, I remain ever so pissed. I felt like she got me all worked up and then left me hanging with a “Oh, he’s gone, but here’s a couple of people fucking up against a tree …” It had me worried enough that when I picked up another Black Lace title and started to get into it I flipped to the back to see if there were any loose ends that would drive me crazy, and which point I’d probably have sent it back to the publisher with a nasty note. Just because it’s erotica doesn’t mean you can get away with big giant plot holes of doom.

Aside from that snag in an otherwise decadent book, Cordell did a good job. Unlike a popular fantasy author I’ve read … Sara Douglass. She was poised to be one of my favourite authors. I read Hades Daughter and I was probably one of the only people not outraged by the fact that the pissed off Trojan raped the Greek princess and two chapters later she was seriously into him (one, if she was going for an authentic mythological fantasy she passed, if you examine the love-lines of someone like Achilles; two, it set up the mother of all I’m-gonna-fuck-you-up moments by the heroine at the end of the book.) Then I made the mistake of beginning The Wayfarer Redemption.

I hate like hell to bitch about what an author does or doesn’t do with her own characters, since as I just explained they tend to get away from you, but this was just too much. The book seems to center on two characters, Axis & Faraday. Faraday is supposed to marry Axis’ half-brother, but of course falls in love with Axis, and vice versa. Because of a prophecy, Faraday comes to the conclusion that loving Axis would lead to his death and goes ahead with her marriage to the brother. She sacrifices her happiness for the man she loves. He moseys off into the sunset in search of his real family (weird-looking winged creatures or some such shit) and thinks about Faraday, worries about Faraday, and still loves Faraday. I’m convinced that love will conquer all. After all, what would be the point of putting me through Faraday’s sacrifice if she wasn’t going to find happiness with the man she loved?

At this point in the book Douglass makes my fucking list of people I’d like to hit in the head with a sock full of pennies. She introduces this completely unlikeable character by the name of Azure. She kills someone and is dragged off by Axis’ real mother to the land of the freaky angels so she doesn’t get lynched. Now, if Douglass had explained right off the bat that Azure killed because she had been horribly abused for years she might have won me over but she didn’t. Instead she drops Azure into the action halfway through the book and decides that she’s going to be awesomesauce.

Oh, did I forget to mention that Axis gets a raging hard on and MUST FUCK AZURE BECAUSE IT IS HIS DESTINY? Ok, fine. I’ll go with this, because Faraday is still waiting for Axis to come back and in his defense, if I remember this correctly, he thinks she’s dead. I was literally in the middle of the sequel to The Wayfarer Redemption when I realized Axis and Faraday were never going to be reunited and I’d been screwed by Douglass.

I ended up surfing the net to find out what the hell happened and as it turns out a lot of people were just as pissed as I was, and after getting a rundown of the whole series from someone I discovered that Axis & Azure have freaky angel babies and that Faraday not only continues to get screwed but when she dies she’s reincarnated as Eve (you know, as in Adam and Eve—yes, it’s more irritating than The Da Vinci Code), thus dooming her to be scorned by a whole new set of assholes. At one point someone directed me to the FAQ on Douglass’s website. Among other things, she talks about why Faraday was made to suffer so much. This is an excerpt from the FAQ:

Is Faraday ever going to have a happy ending?

I would dearly like to squash her under a huge pumpkin studded with rusty twelve-inch nails so that she dies a lingering, painful death from blood poisoning and a badly leaking belly, and I reserve the right to do so any time I feel like it. (Of course, by the time you get to the end of "Crusader" you'll see that that is not quite the fate I've given her ... nevertheless, I've been nasty enough ...)

I say for the second time in this post – the fuck?!?!?! What is the point of creating a character as sweet and as benevolent as Faraday, make your readers sympathize her, root for her, set her up as the main character and then continue the rest of the series with a completely insane attitude like this? And it is insane, not to mention insulting to the reader because it comes with no justification other than “because I can.”

Yeah, because you’re a Mary Sue writer, Miss Douglass. Azure reminds me of those non-canon characters that get stuffed into fan fiction all the time. She’s the poorly explained new castaway that makes Sawyer forget about Kate. She’s that girl Mulder meets in a bar and takes home to get over his burning loins for Scully and ends up falling in love with. She’s the meat in the Sam and Dean sandwich. She’s the sub that finally allows Dr. House to reach his full potential as an S&M god who spanks his woman with his cane before telling her that her love has made him complete.

I was going to point out Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and how Louis ends up meeting Lestat again instead of staying in Armand’s Theatre of Sexy Emo Vampires as an example of resisting temptation to make the story work, but then I remembered she Mary Sued me in the Mayfair Witches when Michael screwed 13-year-old Mona and everyone was cool with it, including his crazy wife. I was also going to use Bridget Jones as an example but in case you didn’t know this, in the unpublished continuation Bridget breaks up with Darcy, gets pregnant by Daniel and they end up raising the baby together … I’ll so I’ll shame Douglass by using some other popular fiction examples. I’ve only read two of the In Death books by Nora Roberts (writing as J.D. Robb) but this I know: Eve Dallas is going to be with Roarke for the rest of her life. I know this because Roberts is a smart cookie and she knows that if she fucks with her own canon her readers will tear her apart. Similarly, in the Stephanie Plum books it’s clear that in spite of constantly making out with Ranger, Janet Evanovich’s heroine is OTP with Morelli. If Evanovich kills Morelli in the line of duty and Ranger steps up her devoted fans, while a little tickled that Ranger will be doing all the good touch/bad touch from here on out, will be nonetheless be left going, “Wait, what? He’s dead? No, seriously, he’s going into hiding, isn’t he?” (meanwhile, Morelli/Stephanie shippers will Dixie Chick Evanovich’s ass …) Don’t believe me? Look at Laurel K. Hamilton. I’ve only read one of her books so I don’t really care, but there are some pissed off Anita Blake fans out there lately and she really has no one to blame but herself.

… ok, that was a bit of a rant but I do think I’ve made my point. Letting your characters exercise a little independence does wonders, but at some point you have to bring them back and tell them, “Um … hello. Remember me?” So even though I dreamily imagined OHNOES! HALP! Realizing that the Sniveling Little Fucker is actually a good guy and makes her happy I’ve made a commitment to get her back with the hero. With the 150 or so pages that came before SLF I set it up—she has to be with him, it's mean to be, it's fate. It’s canon. I maketh be, peons. Everyone learns something, everyone grows, and if this book is published and read I won’t be screwing over the reader by having the hero conveniently die or become Lord of the Assholes in order to make way for SLF. Screw him. If he wants it bad enough he can pretty-please me into a short story to wrap things up for him.

This is what I’ve learned from other authors about writing. For the most part everyone gets it, but occasionally you get some dickhead who breaks tradition and has to suffer the wrath of their readers. Not like they care, since by this point they’re rolling in a big heap o’ money first thing in the morning, but it makes it no less insulting to the readers.

Labels: reading, writing