Hey hey, it's me again. So, I was hoping to enter into my "unbothered, moisturized, flourishing" era, but instead I think I'm entering my "attempting emotional regulation, remembering my vitamins, managing chronic pain" era, and that's okay. It turns out that, when I've reflected on the past year and talked to some friends, I was in a darker, more worn down, and significantly more stressed state than I believed I was...so it's going to take a while before I'm consistently me again.
This past week has been really difficult, but I'm trying to hold onto joy and to let go of my self-imposed expectations for productivity--for real this time. And so I'm not ashamed for once to say that I did not get as far on anything as I wanted to, because I've been protecting my mental and physical health by actually self-caring, rather than just self-soothing.
Reminder to self and others: you do not have to be productive and thinking about your writing at all times to be a worthwhile human being.
But I have been thinking about something.
Thursday at work, while I was decompressing in my office from a full day of student appointments, random phone calls, and catching up with coworkers (and enjoying the momentary break from being a caregiver!), I decided to pull up my first draft of Book 2. I'd had a crack at re-reading back in August, but then my dear professor/beta/alpha reader sent me her comments on Book 1, and I was on a months-long journey to revise and line edit.
I'd already knew Book 2 needed help--6 Google Docs chapters filled to the brim with my comments could tell me that. I knew it while I was writing it in November 2021, before I took a break to revise the second draft of Book 1. I knew it while I was writing it in June-July 2022, after significant edits to the first few chapters (my only written material on the book at the time). I knew it while I was re-reading back in August.
And the reason why I knew it is that it was written before Book 1 was fully revised, and, as such, was plagued by the same problems that Book 1 was, except magnified.
What do I do with the supernatural weirdness that is Cailleach, for example? Well, I could leave her vague and mysterious and incongruous in Book 1, but Book 2 marks 2/3 of the way through the trilogy. You can't pull that in a Book 2. You gotta explain it.
What do I do with an ending that's kinda weak in Book 1? Well, I could spend fully half of Book 2 explaining it away and end up hanging much of the plot of Book 2 on it, but that leads to some serious pacing issues.
What do I do with all those extraneous elements from Book 1? Well, I could leave them as extraneous or I could attempt to tie them all in in Book 2, but it starts to feel more like there's an anchor weighing down the book than the world I know and love.
You get the point. Overburdened is an understatement.
And I think this is why I was never quite excited to get back to Book 2, especially after this fourth and final draft of Book 1. Because what do I do with a Book 2 that doesn't include Cailleach, shouldn't spend an entire half on Arawn's trial (yes, he was getting arrested. No, I will not explain), and includes almost every single character acting out of character?
You scrap the whole thing.
No, that's not right. Because the whole thing isn't trash. It's just...the whole book was a vehicle to get Ais to become the Morrigan. But Ais's emotional arc is so fully realized now--and was about 75% realized when Book 2 was finished--that writing another book in her POV feels redundant.
But there are moments of brilliance, like when Emrys and Ais visit Tir na Nog for the first time and are face to face with their family's enemies. Or when Emrys sees Maeve again. Or when they return home to a rebellion, and Arawn's castle is now burning. Or when Maeve and a now-powerless Arawn bond together.
And this is a trilogy. I have an arc for the whole thing, dammit. I can't just make it be a standalone because the problems from Book 2 feel even more unsolvable now. So what's a girl to do?
Well, the exact same thing I talked about a couple weeks ago.
You do a perspective shift.
If the most interesting moments occur in Emrys's point of view, then the book logically becomes an Emrys book. I did kinda get myself into this, because as any of my beta readers can tell you, I've been saying Book 2 is an Emrys book for a year now. But I just assumed (logically) that a first-person trilogy should have the same narrator throughout.
You can write a book where the narrator is not the protagonist. I mean, Great Gatsby, anyone?
But it's a wee bit harder to write a book where the narrator is not the protagonist when the narrator is already an established protagonist in Book 1. And also, Ais is not Nick Carraway. She never shuts up and has a stubborn insistence upon drawing all attention to her (even if she claims she doesn't want it).
But anyway, let me tell you all the beautiful ways shifting the narrator has shifted my story. Now, listen, I haven't written anything yet. I'm in the commenting and replotting phase, so I have a running Google Doc of prospective edits and a marked up copy of Book 2, where every single thing is highlighted in either green (keep this), yellow (keep the idea of it, but shift it in this specific way), or red (delete delete delete).
Obviously, much of it is red.
But here's what I'm learning throughout the process.
Whether we want it to or not, your narrator influences your story in massive ways, whether you're writing in third or first person. When Ais was the narrator, her brother's story became sidelined.
Ais's quest in Book 2 is as follows: Nuada, second in command to the king of the gods, returns to oversee operations in Annwn, which puts Ais in contact with the god who knew her mother best. Although we don't know it until the end, Nuada is aware the whole time that Ais is her mother's child and intends to crown her as the Morrigan. Nuada uses Ais to get Arawn arrested, and the rest of the book revolves around Ais being in Tir na Nog at Arawn's trial, feeling bad about herself, and getting progressively angrier at her brother for living his own life. There's Cailleach in there. There's politics. There's...a lot of stuff that feels the same as Book 1 and a lot of stuff that feels terribly convoluted.
Even writing it out feels convoluted. Which kinda tracks with my first drafts.
But Emrys's story is this: He's enjoying life as Arawn's new advisor and discovering his inner strength as a politician and scholar, but unbeknownst to anyone, he's still in love with Maeve, who found her way to Tir na Nog. When Maeve gets word of Lia Fail, the stone which grants unbridled power to true kings, Emrys makes it his goal to find Lia Fail. His singleminded determination drives away Maeve, and Emrys feels her leaving, but this is all he wanted...isn't it?
This is a story that's been hinted at in Book 1, but not explored. Which makes it a story worth exploring in a sequel. It also means that with a perspective shift, we're subject to his inner thoughts and feelings and not Ais's navel-gazing. When the twins split up, Emrys to go on his quest and Ais to explore a past that's already been explored in Book 1, putting the book in Emrys's POV means we now see this more interesting part.
The world is opened up. We can put characters in interesting relationships now (Emrys and Tyge on the page together? Yes please). We can do more, and that, to me, is super exciting.
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