First post of 2023, here we come...and brief life check in.
I didn't stay up to greet 2023, mainly because part of my burnout is related to not respecting my natural circadian rhythms (grad school=night school=no bueno for me), and I resolved to do better now that I officially graduated.
So, I went to bed at a very respectable 9 pm, and then promptly woke up at 4 am to reflect on life. For the past two years, I've come up with a word of the year that I aim for, rather than a resolution. Last year's was "intentionality" and it sucked. It turns out that when you're an anxious workaholic, "intentionality" means "I will intentionally break myself down in the name of progress, because I can't afford to rest." It was awful. I resolved to come up with a word that my brain absolutely couldn't screw up.
So I thought about all the things 2022 lacked for me, and I think the major one was "play." I used to do things for the sheer joy of doing them. In 2022, I suddenly had no hobbies--my main one being writing--and a million stressors, because I'd determined to monetize every hobby. I was not any more successful than I would have been if I'd rested, and instead, I spent most of the year in a really unhealthy mental state.
I went back to old journals of high school me, and I realized that when the going got tough...the tough wrote fan fiction starring Ais Dinsmore. The tough drew her OCs, even though she wasn't the best artist. The tough had fun with fashion and makeup, wearing bright purple lipstick just because she could. The tough did things that 2022 me would deem "wasting time." And yet these things were essential to keeping me alive and happy, as essential as food and shelter.
So, in honor of my past self, I'm making this a year of play. No great goals and aspirations. The only goal is to stop taking myself so seriously, and it's difficult. For two days, my neck and knee pain has been minimal, and then I started sending my manuscript out to two people today (my lovely alpha readers) and all of a sudden, my neck hurts again. I don't know how to stop being stressed, except to remind myself of the joys of writing and to step away when it feels too heavy.
And obviously, the best way to do that is to share with you all one of my favorite scenes and how it came to be that way.
Let me set the scene for you: Ais has been with the fae resistance for a few days now, working in the infirmary under the watchful eye of Saoirse's father, Niall. Ais doesn't want this job--after all, why would she, when her magic comes alive around the wounded and every injured faerie there is a reminder of the boy she mistakenly killed?--but Saoirse's great-uncle, Fergus, wants to force her hand. Meanwhile, all Saoirse wants is to resume her medical training, but Fergus has his own job for her--she's studying under him now and enduring the violation of her mind, all in the name of the resistance. Saoirse resents Ais for leaving her with Fergus. Ais resents Saoirse for mocking her suffering.
Neither girl can see far enough outside of her own pain...and yet both recognize something in the other one, and all it takes is one wrong word to set them at each other's throats.
This is a scene that's existed in some form since the earliest drafts, and the first spark that made me realize I'd picked the wrong love interest. Originally it was Saoirse's sister, Enya, a character since deleted, who Ais falls in love with, but she has a rivalry with Saoirse since the beginning. The rivalry comes to a head outside the smithy, when Saoirse's sword begins disintegrating and Ais gets her sword balanced.
Obviously, not everyone who fights in a book is automatically destined to fall in love. If that were the case, we'd have ended up with Percy x Clarisse in the PJO series and...I do not ship that. At all. (I say this as someone whose first female book crush ever was Clarisse, so I believe I'm the authority here)
But, when you've got lines like this...
"So I grab her arm and spin her around, off-balancing her enough that she stumbles. I shove my knee against her and pin her to the wall." (!)
"In one quick movement, I draw my sword and press the flat of the blade against her neck." (!!)
"We’re both breathing hard. I’m close enough that I can feel her pulse against my hand." (!!!)
When I was going back and editing, I was like "how did I miss this?" How did I let the bland-AF-manic-pixie-dream-nightmare Enya monopolize all this precious paragraph space when Saoirse was literally right there?
I didn't know, but I knew that no matter what else I changed in the manuscript, two things had to happen:
Saoirse had to be the love interest, not her sister
The fight scene wasn't going anywhere, but would only become gayer
And so, the enemies-to-lovers romance that is now the core of my manuscript was born.
In the OG manuscript, this fight scene came around Chapter 12. In subsequent drafts, it has moved up, to where it now rests comfortably in the middle of Chapter 9, and now takes up a large portion of the chapter, where it once was about 3 pages.
And there's a reason for all this. Because the fight scene has become more and more layered. The stakes are higher. The fight itself now lasts longer, because I've become more comfortable with action scenes (my self-admitted Achilles heel).
But before the scene got good, it had to get kind of bad.
If Saoirse was the new love interest, it wouldn't do to have the fight scene come as late as Chapter 12, especially because I'd added in a new favorite scene which takes place in Chapters 11 and 12: the market attack scene, where Saoirse saves Ais. (And oh, dear reader, I'm writing about this in the coming weeks, I promise!)
So, I had to either move the scene earlier or later. I chose earlier, and I thought, what would work better to maintain the original structure of the manuscript (much of which has been scrapped in the final draft, as it was built around the Enya-Ais friendship) than to have Saoirse interrupt sweet bonding time between Enya and Ais?
Picture this: the girls are sitting around a river, swapping stories of their lives, when Saoirse and her bestie Tyge show up with some mead. Tyge just wants to be friendly and welcoming, and, well, Saoirse is their best friend, so she comes along, too. Saoirse gets a little drunk. Ais is physically incapable of getting drunk. Saoirse starts taunting Ais about her heritage and gets a little too close to home...and so Ais reluctantly strikes, even though she has a crush on Enya and really doesn't want to show off this side of herself.
It worked. It worked well. It worked so well that this was the first thing my beloved beta reader (who helped me realize my first chapters were trash) really connected with. In fact, she questioned why it wasn't longer. So I made it longer, and I just kinda held onto it.
Until this final draft, when I was going back and critically reevaluating everything, and then I began to question the stakes. They were kinda there. Saoirse wounds Ais by bringing up her mother. Ais wounds Saoirse by bringing up Fergus, her great-uncle. Then they literally wound each other. But the big problem is, because Enya continued to be a major player, there was no space to look at the ramifications of this fight.
In fact, I had this line in there to explain everything away: "When Tyge comes to collect me the following morning, their amiable disposition is the same as ever. Not even a hint that I had their terribly drunk and belligerent friend in a headlock mere hours ago, though I wait for it. In a way, I almost long for it."
Like...this girl is gonna be your love interest, and this is such a physically and emotionally charged moment for them, and that's all we get?
I was like, no.
And it occurred at a place with no symbolism to either Ais or Saoirse. It needed to happen somewhere charged (outside of Ais's found family's home). It needed to be longer. It needed to have more buildup and more cooldown.
So, I changed the location. I made it deliberately gayer (rather than just unintentionally gay, which happens to everything I write somehow). I made it worse for Ais: Saoirse goes inside her head and sees what we, the reader, don't know she sees--the entirety of Ais's worst memory of the day she killed the guy who turns out to be Saoirse's brother, Galvyn (this turns into another of my favorite scenes).
We get this (minus the buildup, because I can't give y'all everything right away, now can I?):
One second, we are in the smithy doorway. The next, I grab Saoirse’s arm and spin her around, off-balancing her enough that she stumbles. I shove my knee against her and pin her to the wall.
In one quick movement, my mother’s sword is out, the flat of the blade against Saoirse’s neck.
We’re both breathing hard. I’m close enough that I can feel her pulse against my hand. The golden rings in her hazel eyes. The warmth of her breath. “Just do it,” she says, seconds before my head ignites with pain.
And it all goes to the cairns from there.
I feel a sharp stinging in the side of my thigh. I gasp and stagger back, flit my fingers lightly onto my leg and feel a hint of wetness there, staining my nice trousers. Blood. Damn her.
She takes advantage of my momentary injury to press the attack, slashing towards me as I backpedal, steering her away from the doorway and out into the southern markets. Distantly, I register the gasps of onlookers, the toppling of an almost-bare produce stand. Sad, bruised apples tumble around us, getting underneath our feet as I slice back at Saoirse, catching the edge of her blade with mine.
Her range is short and she relies upon a closeness that I won’t allow her to have. Which works to my advantage as I move us away from the square. Out into the distant Kelwyn tunnel, where a narrow branch of An Kelwyn runs through an crumbling riverbed, the runes aboveground starting to become too corroded to carry much down here.
But nothing seems to make her stop, and our weapons clash through the silent twilight. I follow her dagger downwards, trap it there, but she’s stronger than I am and slightly taller. She cuts upward and breaks the hold. She rushes in, stabs towards my sword arm.
I quickly toss my sword to my left hand and spin out of her range. She finds me anyway, one leg sweeping under mine until I’m flat on my back, rolling in mud to escape her. I anchor my sword into the ground, pulling myself up just as she readies for another attack. And while I pray for time to breathe, time that Emrys almost always grants me, Saoirse keeps coming, her movements progressively getting broader and messier. And somehow never stopping.
She just keeps jabbing and slashing with the dagger until a particularly vicious stab sends her forward and I latch onto her wrist, dagger a mere hairsbreadth from my chest. Her eyes lock onto mine as our hearts beat a tandem war cry.
“You were going to wound me with your magic. Too noble to do it, though, right?” She hisses.
“Only because you were going to get in there first and shatter my mind,” I say.
And maybe it’s the heat of the battle. Maybe it’s the way her pulse jumps beneath my fingers. Maybe it’s the vicious light in those fierce hazel eyes.
But something makes me whisper, “But I guess you’re too weak for that, right?”
A burst of white explodes behind my eyes. The tip of her blade edges closer to the six cobalt lines of my heartrune.
I’m stronger than you’ll ever be, Dinsmore, she says, before my worst nightmares flash before me. Macha’s diagrams come to life, Rowena’s constant derision, my brother the golden child, one crow shattering beneath my hand, then many crows.
I have always, since I sat before the catalog of my mother’s twisted art, known what I am. Have always fought against it. Am now forced to confront it.
As my breath becomes shallow, my head a thing of pure agony, the Saoirse in my mind settles on the one. An exposed heart beneath my hands, the ribs shifting around it as my fingers become slick, coated with blood that finds a way under my fingernails even weeks after and--
I am not sure which one of us breaks first.
“That one isn’t yours to touch,” I say through the haze of pain, and I feel something crack beneath my hands. Hear a metallic shattering and a sharp gasp as Saoirse leaves my mind as abruptly as she came.
As my senses slowly return to me, I become aware of three things.
Saoirse’s dagger is in pieces before us.
She’s clutching her wrist, a deep plum swelling already beginning to form beneath the surface of her skin, at the same spot a rune is developing on me.
And Tyge and Nerys are standing there, open-mouthed.
A witness to every brutal instance.
So, anyway, to close out all this, I hope that your 2023 has been amazing and restorative and wonderful already, and holds so much more in store.
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