My
first manuscript
No,
not the first one I got published. The first I ever wrote. Back in
the dim, dark nineties when no one had ever heard of paranormal
romance or urban fantasy.
I
read a lot of big fat fantasy, so that's what I tried to write. It
was this rambling tale of a nun, who was also a doctor, who discovers
that the gods she's worshipped all her life are actually a gang of
demons intent on taking over the world. I was pretty clueless about
worldbuilding at the time. I liked the idea of a four-month-long,
dark winter, so I put it in the deep latitudes of the south. And I
thought it'd be cool if, instead of swords and bows, they had
flintlock pistols. So I shunted it out of the Middle Ages into a kind
of quasi-Civil-War era. And the romantic hero was a rabid villain who
did horrible things to innocent people for fun, until the heroine
showed him the error of his ways by driving him insane (literally).
Yeah,
it was terrible :) But I had a lot of fun. I revised it about a
hundred times. Even submitted it a few places, to editors who sighed
at how awful it was and patiently sent me form rejections.
But
hey, you've got to start somewhere! And when I look at that
manuscript now, the themes that pop out are surprising. Stuff that at
the time, I didn't even really know I was writing about.
'Good'
and 'evil' as fluid concepts that warp in the eye of the beholder.
People who are one thing on the outside and quite another on the
inside. Dual personalities, demonic possession, voices in your head,
the war against the darkness within you.
Then
again, maybe those themes aren't so surprising. I look at my
published books, and I see the same things. I write charming demons,
evil angels, 'good' as the lesser of two evils. And every single one
of my books has characters with twin personalities or voices in their
heads. For instance, Joey in POISON KISSED is a shape-shifter with a
dark and hungry creature inside him, and Mina is possessed by her
magical voice. And Ember, the heroine of my upcoming book BLOOD
CURSED, is haunted by the apparition of the stronger, tougher,
no-nonsense self she wishes she could be.
Seems
I have some deep-seated need to write about insane people! But the
idea that writers have a 'core story' – one they tell over and over
again, in different forms – is well-known. Mine is 'the darkness
within', and I embrace it. It pops up everywhere, whether I mean it
to or not. And it started before I knew anything about writing or
publishing, way back in that very first manuscript.
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