Last week, I realized JT Austin, one of the heroes of The Children of Amargosa and Second Wave, wasn’t pissed off enough. So I had Suicide beat his ass sparring with swords. All great fun writing in screenplay format.
This week, I demonstrated the new Laral overlord’s douchiness, as well as Kray’s. Spoiler alert: Kray’s still an asshole. I’m sending Davra on a journey. And JT picks up a Gelt barmaid after drinking with Duffy and two characters who will feature heavily in a coming novella. The trouble I’m having now is focusing on Eric Yuwono, the third member of my broken fellowship. He’s sort of been passive through all this. Meanwhile, a young girl who may or may not be familiar to readers is kicking ass, taking names, and has all manner of oppressed human, disgruntled Gelt, and yet another intelligence heretofore unknown (but hiding in plain sight all this time) following her. I planted a seed in The Magic Root and The Children of Amargosa with the city of Deming getting overrun by something more than cannon fodder. I watered it in Second Wave with some of the wildlife clearly not so wild as we thought. Now it needs to grow and blossom in Storming‘s climax.
I also have abandoned to YA motif for this trilogy. That sort of goes south in Second Wave with the behavior of a ragged band of Polygamy War veterans. From the other side of that war. Also, Suicide drops an F bomb to voice her displeasure at JT. So we’ve pretty much wiped out the YA bent. Now?
JT, who is legally an adult under Martian law, has a rather graphic encounter with a Gelt woman (who looks suspiciously like someone who has a novella named for her.) He is rapidly turning into the Jimmy McNulty of this trilogy.
One character who has no POV scenes, either as a spectator or an active participant, is Duffy. Duffy is a retread of an earlier character I wrote, and someone once told me the original did not seem like an obvious choice to be a POV character. Though Duffy is about 15 in this (and yet drinking. Hey, he’s not on Earth, so no rules. Right?), he has gone through a lot that most people five years older haven’t dealt with yet. Like his parents getting vaporized in a mushroom cloud or losing several friends to heat rays, Gelt fire, and the odd wildlife encounter gone wrong. He still takes solace in people trusting him to make stuff go all explodey.
But he’s not a POV character. With this big of a cast spread out over a wide area (one on a different planet entirely), four POVs is about all I can reasonably dump on the reader. Neal Asher and John Scalzi do more. I’m not Neal Asher or John Scalzi, so… Yeah.