The amount of money I’ve paid my therapist because of my involvement in Tremontaine has probably sent him to the Bahamas eight times, unless he’s saving it up to go to Mars with Elon Musk.When I signed on to the project I had almost no experience writing fiction of any kind, much less sci-fi/fantasy fiction. If you put together all the fiction I’d ever written before, in fact, it would come to less than half the length of this episode, and that’s including the novel I tried to write in third grade. On top of that, I read Swordspoint
in high school in the 80s, back when every character in every fantasy ever published was straight, and once I realized what was going on it changed my world. So, you know, no pressure or anything.Then I read some of my other co-authors’ books, and it got much worse.Anyway, eventually my therapist pointed out that, while he had no problem with my spending my energy gaining insight about my own insecurities instead of, you know, writing the story I had said I would write, my collaborators might not share his opinion. So I told him to fuck himself—which is a thing I do with some regularity—and then I went home and ate half a pound of M&Ms and sat down at my computer.After The Weekend™, I knew a lot about our characters: I knew that Rafe was passionate when it came to learning, I knew that Micah had Asperger’s and found patterns beautiful and soothing, I knew that Kaab (who at the time was named Chalchi) was impulsive.But just because I knew a lot about our characters didn’t mean I knew our characters.This became eminently clear once I started writing. Sure, I had a passionate Rafe on the page taking futile astronomical measurements, and a pattern-loving Micah wandering around soaking up math lectures at the University, and an impulsive Kaab in Riverside looking for Tess. Fine.But it didn’t feel like Swordspoint.There was something missing from the world. So I went back and reread Swordspoint and The Privilege of the Sword and The Fall of the Kings, which by the way I urge you to do (or to read them in the first place if you haven’t yet), since talk about a whirlwind of delight and joy. And after I was done rereading (and, in the case of some of my favorite parts, re-rereading), I realized that the answer had been staring me in the face the whole time:Each of these books has, as a central character, a man who a) is fucked up and b) doesn’t give a damn who he offends.What we needed, I understood now, was somebody like Alec in Swordspoint and Privilege, somebody like Theron in Fall.So I had an idea, and I talked to Ellen and Delia, and they were like, sure, go for it, and they had some thoughts, too, about refining it, which were excellent (as are all Ellen-and-Delia’s thoughts). And then I checked with my other co-authors, because what I was thinking of doing was definitely something that had never come up during The Weekend, and people seemed to be okay with it.So I went ahead with it and made Rafe an arrogant slut.Suddenly everything made so much more sense to me. I’m arrogant, and though I’m now married and boring I used to be a slut, so I basically just thought of the most obnoxious dialogue I could come up with and put it in Rafe’s mouth. And once I had that, Kaab started becoming clear, and Micah started becoming clear, and the whole thing just got really fun to write.So I guess the lesson, in the end, is write what you know?
