Project Elfhome - Afterword

AFTERWORD

Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain

Judging by the number of “Making of,” some people like to know how their favorite stories and movies and such come into being. Judging by a handful of reviews on Amazon, some people don’t. Apparently the people in the latter camp like to think that authors are godlike people that can spin out a vast complicated story arc across multiple books, writing millions of words about a cast of a thousand named characters, in one massive, preconceived plot that doesn’t need to be tweaked or improved upon.

For those of you that enjoy such things, I’ve written down notes on the various stories. Why I wrote them, how I thought they were going to turn out, and how the plots were detoured to what you actually read.

For the rest of you, skip this. Trust me; you don’t want to see behind the curtain.

Stormsong

I’m going to talk about all her sections as a whole. The very first one I wrote for her was her meeting Tinker. I don’t remember what inspired me to attempt it but I do remember that the story flowed. The scene came out with this amazingly strong voice. What surprised me most was that it was in first person and an attempt to rewrite it to third person failed.

I loved the bit but couldn’t figure out what to do with it. The problem was that Stormsong doesn’t actually “meet” Tinker until the middle of the first novel, and at that point she blends into the crowd. I couldn’t extend the drabble into a story because it would go against canon; Tinker had no idea who Stormsong was and that couldn’t change.

I wrote it after I’d finished Wolf Who Rules and have always wished I could have gone back and tweaked the novel to reflect the drabble. There is a slight but not glaring canon conflict that Stormsong doesn’t mention this meeting while talking to Windwolf after the fight with Impatience. This can be dismissed by the fact that Stormsong didn’t think it would be wise for Tinker to include her in her First Hand.

I wanted to write more from Stormsong’s point of view, so I tackled her first meeting with Windwolf. Again, boom, the story flowed. Still there wasn’t enough plot there to be standalone. I didn’t have the time to invest into making it something bigger.

By this time I was working on Elfhome and I vaguely salvaged parts of the first drabble during the chapter Panty Raid.

The last bit I wrote for her was the journey to New York, written soon after I’d finished Wood Sprites. I thought about expanding this into a complete story but that way lies madness. Stormsong couldn’t find out more about the twins since she doesn’t mention them for three books. Nor could she find out that Sparrow was a traitor. Coming up with a true story that didn’t trip over those points would have been hair-pulling insanity.

Little Horse

Fans kept asking me to write something from Pony’s POV. I attempted to write something from after he met Tinker, but that didn’t work. He’s too on-camera during all the books. What ended up happening was simply a retelling of what the readers already knew. I was bored silly trying to write it. Everything that was interesting was too short to be called a story.

I decided to find a pivotal point in his life that didn’t include Tinker. Once I approached the story from that mindset, it was obvious that the story would be about him deciding to accompany Windwolf to the Westernlands. I wanted some trigger event so that when the moment came for Pony to choose, it wasn’t static “thinking” but an emotional response to some thrilling action.

Originally I started with Pony kneeling in the dirt, happy that he’d won the fight, but worried about the Wyvern’s judgment. It became obvious that I needed to back up and show the cause of the fight: Clove and his weak eyes. The bonus to this was I actually showed the fight. Action is always a good thing.

Lain

I had written that Lain’s pivotal moment in her life after her accident was during the first Startup. The first scene flowed up to the point where Lain is shown the saurus. At that point, however, I lost the thread of the story.

I made a lot of random stabs at it. In one version, Lain rescued a soldier that had been trapped by a steel spinner spider. In another, Lain set up elaborate quarantine systems. In a third, she was rescued by Windwolf and was healed by magic to the point she could walk with crutches. At some point I decided that I wanted her to be isolated and forced to realize that her brains were what mattered.

How to get her alone? It didn’t make sense with the setup I had in place that she would go into the forest alone. I didn’t want her to be stupid. I decided that I could bring in Yves to give him more airtime, show off some of their relationship and explain how the empire of evil reacted to the first Startup.