Aaron asked
If 39k words is all it takes to reveal Kaylin’s history, then perhaps you’ve been a bit lenient with Jewel, eh?

Well…it’s Kaylin’s first case, and because of the word­count, it doesn’t go into as much detail about the rest of her life as maybe it should; also, I thought it would end in a different place, because I’d hoped to be able to do her first case with the Hawks and the argu­ment over the ques­tion of her survival in the same story. This didn’t happen, because it would prob­ably have doubled the length.

Which is the more diffi­cult char­acter for you to write (at the moment and all things consid­ered), Kaylin or Jewel?

The answer to this one depends on the time of day, and in partic­ular on which project is currently causing me to pull all my hair out.

Kaylin is diffi­cult in part because the entire novel (almost any CAST novel) is from her view­point. Any infor­ma­tion that reaches the reader is infor­ma­tion she has to person­ally come across in one way or another. It can’t be unnat­ural; it can’t be infor­ma­tion she wouldn’t other­wise see – she has to be involved directly. This compli­cates the way the stories unfold or are presented.

I’m trying the “more” command in Word­Press to make the posts on the front page a bit shorter; please tell me if this is not helpful, or if it’s annoying.

With Jewel, this restric­tion isn’t there; she’s not the only view­point. Even when the action revolves around her, scenes in which she’s pivotal will be seen from other view­points. This gives me the freedom and flex­i­bility to high­light things that Jewel wouldn’t or doesn’t notice, espe­cially about herself. It also gives me the freedom, when she’s off-stage, to write about things that are rele­vant to the plot, and Jewel herself, that she doesn’t know. The reader will. Knowing some­thing a char­acter doesn’t gives a different perspec­tive to the shape of the unfolding story, and it allows things to proceed in a much more real­istic or natural way, because no char­acter is forced to be in every scene of import.

This would, oddly enough, make Kaylin the harder of the two to write.

But — and you knew this was coming, right? — Jewel is diffi­cult because she’s in a posi­tion of power, if not outright authority. She’s come from a similar back­ground to Kaylin’s, but she’s on the path to ruling one of the most powerful governing Houses in the Empire. The people she meets are people she has to impress enough that she has their support and their trust, and there­fore the cost for self-indul­gence is much higher – where in this case, self-indul­gence can be the simple act of speaking her mind or letting her temper get the better of her. Because of where she is, there are things I have to know about the Empire before I start a scene in which a signif­i­cant power is intro­duced. I have to know what that indi­vidual wants from Jewel, and what she wants in return; I have to know, when they threaten her – if they do – what forces they have behind them to back that threat up. Jewel is harder because her open view of the world is more complex; it’s wider and it spans more of society than Kaylin’s.

There are simi­lar­i­ties between the two char­ac­ters, but there are funda­mental differ­ences and forma­tive influ­ences as well. The most signif­i­cant, to me:

Jewel had to lead. Even in the forma­tion of the den in her early years, she was the leader, and she was informed by the respon­si­bility – and the guilt – of that posi­tion. It defines her.

Kaylin has never had to lead. She had to learn how to do her job. She has to learn how to control the power she does have. She decides what she does with her time outside of work (volun­teering at the Foundling Halls and the Midwives’ guild). But those deci­sions don’t imme­di­ately impact on the lives of the people she cares about, or the people who care about her; they won’t die because she’s given them a bad order.