CAT | The Gloss
This is another one of those chapters that, you do the work here, and it pays off for the next several books. If you’re going to do this kind of infodump I feel like the best way to do it is one in which you learn about the characters, their nature, while you get the info.
A recent revision to his chapter addressed the issue of why Heden agrees to investigate the Green Order. I don’t remember any of the Beta Readers asking about that. I think there’s a momentum; the reader wants the main character to go on an adventure, and so accepts it when he does so, even if it’s not in character.
Again, I don’t make it explicit, at least not to my way of thinking, but I believe a reader who’s looking for it will come to the correct conclusion. Why does Heden accept the mission? Agree to go into the Iron Forest?
I do not have a very clear image of Heden in my head. I know what he looks like, but there is no actor who is him. That’s true of most of the characters, and part of the fun, for me, is my readers telling me who they see in the roles. Sometimes very surprising, and equally insightful!
But like Gwiddon, this is one of those roles I cast. John Wood is, no surprise, the bishop. Playing essentially the same character he played in Ladyhawke. Arguably a cop out, but Ladyhawke wasn’t a huge hit and it was almost 30 years ago, so I don’t fret over it.
Though there’s also a strong element of Peter Eyre, the guy who played the King in Dragonslayer. I sometimes confuse them. 
This is one of the most important chapters in the book, and of those chapters that “hook” readers it is the most popular. That’s why I chose to end the first update with it.
Here, we learn what Heden does for a living. What service he performs for the church of Cavall. Though only one instance of it. It’s not all being sent to jails to kill people.
This is one of those chapters I had to run through my bullshit detector, otherwise known as She Who Must Be Obeyed. Because Vanora is a whore, and a teenager, which is something my significant other sees in her job on a semi-regular basis, I had to be careful that she seemed realistic. Not a caricature, and SWMBO replied that she seemed very like the real people she deals with.
I feel, in my defense, that it’s important to state up front that Vanora is not the hooker with a heart of gold. Her role here, and her developing relationship with Heden, goes in a completely different direction. Heden is not going to redeem her, none of the cultural mores implicit in the tart with a heart; the concept of sex as somehow bad, or of wanting sex as somehow sinful, are present here.
A lot of plot, most of it in the next book, gets spun off of Vanora’s career but the fact that she’s a prostitute is simply how I found her. I do not recall any decision on my part. If there was any conscious thought there, it was probably along the lines of showing the kinds of people Heden is used to dealing with. Being a campaigner, a ratcatcher, means he knows a wide cross-section of people in the city, people who would usually never come into contact with one another, but all know Heden.
Having discovered that Vanora was a Lady of Negotiable Affection, I knew I was walking a thin line. Because something can be entirely authentic, and not at all dramatic. By which I mean, if the audience rejects it, for whatever reason, there is no defense. Not even “but they’re really like this!” If the audience fails to suspend disbelief, then I have failed, no matter how clever I may think I’ve been.
It may not be clear, but it doesn’t really need to be, that Vanora is an epileptic. This is a concept that Heden’s culture (though not, you will not, all cultures in this world) doesn’t have. To anyone in Heden’s world, seeing someone having an epileptic seizure is seeing a man possessed. Only Heden, and possibly the Bishop, know the truth.
Heden’s friend Khalil’s comment about suicide, asking the question; what catastrophic failure is the brain experiencing, that it considers self-destruction as the only option, was a point of view I found in a Discover Magazine article on the neurochemistry of suicide. I found that perspective, from the point of view of the brain as a complex system rather than the psychology of the individual, fascinating. And so, the Hazar being the most medically advanced people in Orden, I dared give that perspective to one of Heden’s former adventurers.
Originally, Heden did kill Vanora in the jail, and that was done to show the reader what Heden does for a living, but at some point I realized she lived, and that was one of the keys to the entire book, as you will see.
You’ll spend some more time with Vanora over the course of the book, but she’s absent for most of it. She’s a catalyst for everything that happens, not the focus of the story.
Another important chapter and possibly the first one written for the book. It came to me as I was watching the HBO miniseries John Adams with Paul Giamatti.
The guy who plays Jefferson is brilliant and he inspired me to create Gwiddon and I would cast him as Gwidd if I could.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaqmBOyNCuE
Specifically some of the scenes when Adams and Jefferson are in Paris and Jefferson opens up a little. Gwiddon, obviously, is more outgoing. He is something of an orator, unlike Jefferson, but both are aware of the power of performance.
Like Domnall, Gwiddon and Heden go way back, and Gwidd is Heden’s best friend. But being Heden’s friend in these times is tough, and I think some of that comes through here.
There’s a lot of framing dialog in this chapter, a lot of commentary coming from Gwiddon that explicates a lot: Heden’s relationships with various people, his immediate past, his situation, and originally the chapter had none of it and I’m not convinced it wasn’t better for the lack. But this is a work-in-progress and will be until it is on store shelves.
I think maybe I pull it off, and I think maybe it feels natural and this is the point at which it’s time for the reader to stop feeling lost at sea.
Gwiddon asks a very important question in this chapter and I think it’s possible to miss it. I think it’s ok to miss it, drawing attention to it would be artless. But it’s a question I feel is important for characters to ask on behalf of the reader, so it comes up two more times over the course of the book.
What that question is, I leave as an exercise. But it’s cuts right to Heden’s motivation. Heden, throughout this book, is in the Waste Land, and this is critical to everything that happens in the first seven books. But it can be highly unsatisfactory for some readers, unless they understand that is the point. So I had to make it explicit. I had to take the question the reader will have, and put it in the mouths of some of the characters, so the reader understands that this question is the point of this book.
There’s also some stuff in here, very light, which when you get to a certain reveal in the next book will make you dash back to the first book to see if I’d had it planned all along and this is to let that future you know, yes I did. I love stuff like that. I know, it’s somewhat unfair to talk about this stuff so early, but you are the Internet Audience and so can shoulder the burden. 
Heden initially rejects the quest, as many Heroes do, but that’s not because I’m following some kind of playbook, it’s purely to create a needed tension, and to offer some insight into Heden. The man who’s been living alone in this inn for three years would under no circumstance go back into the Wode and Gwiddon well knows it.
One comment I get a lot from this chapter is about Feoc, mentioned only once in the entire book. Many readers want to know more. That readers are interested in one of Gwiddon’s spies, based solely on this reference, means I’m doing something right, but we cannot ever find out more about that. The reader often wants to see every reference chased down, but doing so would not be satisfying. It’s better to be thrown into the world, with all its complexities, and hear about things, meet people, who come onstage once and are never heard from again. That helps create the feeling of the secondary world as a real place. A lesson I learned at a young age from a Mr. Lucas. It’s enough to hear about the Kessel Run. We would not be improved by seeing it later.
By the end of this chapter you should understand that Heden works for the Church, that Gwiddon is his point of contact, and that he usually deals directly with the Bishop. And that he typically turns them down. You’ll see why next chapter.
One of the things about going with the third-person POV was that it freed me to do stuff like this chapter’s opening, wherein we see Heden from someone else’s point of view. That happens a couple of times and it’s a fun way to present the reader with a couple of different snapshots of what Heden looks like.
These next three chapters are really when things get moving, I feel. Vanora appears in only a few more chapters in the book, but she’s one of the two most important people, other than Heden obviously, and so bringing her and Heden together means stuff can start happening.
One of the things readers often ask is when Heden’s cat is going to talk, or turn into a foxy woman or something equally fantastic. I enjoy such speculation, so I think I’ll keep my mouth shut.
Short chapter!
I’m a big believer in the Chapter, and keeping things moving. Say what needs to be said, and move on. I always have Elmore Leonard’s rules of writing in my head; if it feels like writing, cut it. And don’t write the stuff people skip. He has other rules, but these are the ones I abide by.
Since we have a little break here, and not much to talk about, it’s a good place to talk about Heden’s mannerisms.
An early draft of Priest was very boring. I was bored reading it, always a terrible sign. Finally I realized it was boring was because all the characters sounded alike. They were all speaking with the same voice. And it was not an interesting one. It wasn’t even MY voice, it was just Generic Character voice.
I didn’t know why that was, I only recognized the problem. Looking back, I know why. I didn’t have Heden’s voice. Gwiddon and Domnall are two very different people, but they both sounded the same because until I had Heden’s voice, I couldn’t lay down the others.
I knew instinctively that the problem lay with Heden and the way he talked. I thought solving that was the first step, I didn’t realize it was the only step. I didn’t realize that finding his voice, all the others would instantly fall into line, every character defining himself off Heden.
So I thought about it and as with many things, once I knew what the problem was, the solution came pretty fast.
One of the big influences on me and this series is Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series. Hardboiled detective fiction. Priest is, essentially, a murder mystery. Parker didn’t invent the tone in Spenser, he just mastered it. Well, I’m no master, I’ve got to figure it out on my own and there’s every reason to believe it may be many books before I really get it. But I knew the answer lay somewhere in Spenser.
Spenser does this thing I’ve never encountered in anything else I’ve read. He has this neutral statement he makes every once in a while; “sure.” And it’s not “sure, I understand, go ahead,” and it’s not “yeah, right.” It’s not encouraging, it’s not sardonic or patronizing, it’s completely neutral.
I needed to give Heden something that expressed the same thing, but I felt “sure” was both too modern, and too much from Spenser. It wasn’t that I needed something of my own, I felt likeHeden needed something of his own.
I was rewriting the scene between Heden and Gwiddon, one of my favorites, and Heden was replying to Gwiddon. I read his reply and I thought about it. It was just a lot of words, and very literal. The whole book was very literal at the time. And I thought “what if he just didn’t say anything?”
So I cut the line and replaced it with “Heden shrugged.”
That’s when I found his voice. That’s when he became terse, world-weary. That’s when he became Heden instead of my Main Character. Heden’s shrug was my “sure.” It didn’t matter how much I used it, it was Heden’s. I could not overuse it, because Heden cannot be more Heden than Heden!
It’s not accurate to say that every Heden is, is in that shrug, but finding the shrug led me to everything else. I suddenly knew who Heden was. He was now free to borrow Spenser’s “sure.” I think probably this was influenced by Parker’s other character, Virgil Cole from his excellent western series, and Robert Deniro’s character from HEAT. I was reading Parker’s westerns at the time, and HEAT was on AMC like twice a day for a month while I was writing that section.
As a side note, if you want to hear the Spenser “sure,” go watch the fantastic Caine Mutiny. The first act is kinda crap, but stick with it. Eventually Miguel Ferrer shows up as a navy lawyer and at one point says “Sure,” in that flat, neutral tone. Great character, great movie. Especially Act III.
This is an important chapter, or rather the events therein are important, though their full import will not be felt until well into the next book. It’s enough to say that everything that’s happened up until now was leading up to this chapter, and there’s a reason out of the long story we’re coming into the middle of, that I chose to begin here.
I really hope you’re reading the gloss at least after having read the chapter, if not after having read everything posted up until now because otherwise I’m about to spoil things for you.
One thing I’ve noticed some readers get immediately, and others completely miss, is that Vanora has a sexually transmitted disease, that she gave it to Domnall, and she gave it to him while he was having sex with her while she was in the jail, possibly unconscious, possibly while having an epileptic fit. Yeah.
That’s never made explicit, however, because I feel doing so would completely undermine the tone of the work. Well, never made explicit, except here. But you’re special, you’re reading this on the web, so you get all the goodies.
The struggle in and amongst the bodily fluids, like the profanity, is one of those things some readers feel like I’m doing to make a point, but if so, that point is lost on me. My significant other works in a real jail and tells me stories just like this one, often far more graphic, messy, and disturbing, and my only desire was to capture that. For that reader who is taken out of the book by reading about Heden and the girl flailing around in and amongst blood and shit and piss, authenticity and verisimilitude have become two different things, and the former has damaged the latter. In my defense I can only say; it’s my book and this is how I see it.
If you want to know how I picture the dungeon described here, it’s the same one Ben Hur is taken to at the beginning of the movie with Charlton Heston.
This is the first chapter where I feel the tone of the book is in evidence, and considering it’s only chapter two, that’s a good thing. Dom and Heden have a very natural, to my way of thinking, authentic relationship, and you can see it in the way they talk.
I should mention a little bit on language.
Each character in the book speaks in a specific mode that’s meant to convey where they’re from and their station. Mathe and Domnall, for instance, speak in a very similar way, and both use language differently than Gwiddon. And none of them talk like Heden. There’s really only two other characters in the book who talk like Heden, and both for the same reason. Heden’s developed his own accent, basically, as a result of his travels abroad and this accent is, in my mind, very American. West coast.
And since this is an alternate world, not our world at any time, not even our culture or any real culture, they would not really be speaking English. Tolkien kinda went overboard with that stuff, going all the way to give all the characters names in the invented languages they’d really be speaking. So Frodo’s name in the language the Hobbits actually spoke in Middle-earth was “Maura Labingi.”
I, however, am not that kind of writer. But knowing that these characters would not be using these literal words freed me to ‘translate’ their speech into our mode. So they swear. Real actual medieval people swore, often, and colorfully, these characters are no different. They just do so in a modern manner, because we are modern readers.
The profanity in the book is purely to make the characters speech natural. Not an artifice as language in so much fantasy is. Many readers may be turned off, because that artifice, that romantic sense of a lost age, may be one of the reasons they come to the genre and this I cannot begrudge them, but that’s not why I come to the genre, as a reader or a writer.
Here in Chapter Two we meet Domnhall, a recurring character and one of Heden’s best friends. If it seems like they’re estranged, that’s mostly because of Heden, as you’ll see.
There’s an important plot point here, but we’ll cover it in the chapter where it becomes explicit. Instead, let’s talk about hot man sex.
Taegan is, as you now know, gay. We’ll see him a few more times in this book, but he becomes much more important in the next book and, by Book Three, he is the title character, Fighter. Though not the main character, the main character is always Heden.
I can’t think of a time I ever felt like I decided what a character looked like, or what their gender is or race or sexuality. Usually I feel like I’m watching a movie in my head and just writing down descriptions of the characters who show up on screen.
Not only is that how I come across my characters, like I’m discovering them rather than inventing them, it’s how I think it should be done. Working in video games, I get very frustrated with the constant deconstruction and reconstruction of story and character in order to avoid certain connotations or implications. That’s not writing, that’s marketing. As a designer all that mattered was “is it fun?” As a writer “is it good?” turned out to have nothing to do with what mattered to the powers that be.
I’d gotten Heden out of the Hammer & Tongs and was working on What Happens Next when I realized I’d just introduced a whole lot of characters, and none of them were gay.
“That doesn’t seem likely,” is literally what I thought. “Some of the characters are gay, and I haven’t figured it out yet!” I felt like some of my characters were in the closet and hadn’t told me yet. I remember casting about, wondering who was hiding what.
Originally I thought “Gwiddon,” whom you have not yet met, and my only defense is that after having that thought, I found a great little exchange between Heden and a woman you are about to meet. She says she thinks she remembers Gwiddon from the Rose Petal and Heden patiently explains that this is very unlikely and she gets defensive, thinking he means “Gwiddon is too good a person to visit a brothel,” but Heden interrupts her and says “Gwiddon would not be interested in you, because you do not have a prick.” And then we get Vanora’s reaction and her asking about Heden, which was very cute. Because I liked that scene, I believed Gwiddon was gay longer than I would otherwise have.
I gave that draft to She Who Must Be Obeyed and one of the follow-up questions was “what do you think about the fact that Gwiddon is gay?” And she said “I knew it as soon as you were describing his shoes.”
Now, that may be true. But it offended me. It meant I’d done something horribly wrong, I’d created a cliché. Understand that the Gwiddon she was reading was in all ways the same as the straight one in the current draft. All the same dialog and mannerisms, only later in another scene do we hear about his sexuality.
My offense at my own laziness, made me remember that originally Gwiddon was supposed to be a popinjay. He dresses and acts the way he does because it gets him the chicks. It’s the height of straight male fashion, in a culture where being fashionable is not associated with one gender or the other. Heden is a contrast not because Heden is Masculine and Gwiddon is Feminine, but because Heden is a gormless lump who wouldn’t know how to dress nicely if his life depended on it. A finely tailored suit would spontaneously rumple upon contact with him.
So I threw that out. I wanted Gwiddon to be an unrepentant, unironic ladies’ man. Not compensating for anything, not doing it to prove anything, just lucky to still be attractive and powerful in middle age, aware of it and willing to exploit it. Back to the drawing board.
As soon as I’d thrown out Gay Gwiddon I hit upon Taegan. I instantly knew he was the right guy for this. I like subverting expectations and the idea of the bad-ass fighter being gay is still unexpected. I mean, we’re maybe close to 50/50 at this point, because certainly we’ve seen it elsewhere.
There are only two steps really in this process. The process of making him gay. Step one was leave him exactly as he was, and just say he’s gay. I believe there is a gay point of view, just as there’s a female point of view, and getting in there can be hard, hem hem, but step one is not looking for it. Because I believe that we’re humans first, all that other stuff second. Maybe we’re Matt and Geoff and Bob and Taegan and Gwiddon first, and humans next, and labels last, I’m not sure.
Step two was the give him the opportunity to be gay by which I do not mean “listen to showtunes,” but put him in a relationship. That doesn’t happen in this book, because Taegan is a minor character at this point, but stay tuned.
Part of the gay point of view is how a gay person fits into society. And being gay is merely unusual and maybe a little distasteful in the culture these characters are from. It’s not a sin, or unnatural, no one would think that or even understand that point of view. So in a certain sense, Taegan acts like a gay fantasy. He gets to be gay, have a real relationship, he’s not sexless, but without being judged. He’s free from the crap gay people have to put up with in our society and that’s part of the package here. Escapism. Fantasy. Heden is impossibly tough, and that’s why we like him. Taegan is impossibly gay. You know what I mean. He gets to be gay in a way a lot of people don’t.
It took me almost a whole day of reading out-of-print books online before I found the authentic medieval term for a gay man. That’s part of the process too. These people are living in a pre-enlightenment, pre-industrial society, and so while they are not from OUR medieval period, they are from an analogous time, and so I find such research adds verisimilitude.
The creative process is among the most fascinating things in the world for me, and that’s the purpose of the gloss. Reveal the process. Not to expose problems and invite solutions. That’s an editor’s job. This book, no matter how many times I redraft it, no matter the suggestions I get from fellow writers, will remain unedited until a pro who’s worked in the genre agrees to take it on. Until then, the gloss is just to reveal the process. I hope you find mine as interesting as I find others!
I mention Elmore Leonard’s rules for writers later in the Gloss for Chapter Four, but it’s worth noting here that I violate one of them right up front, I use adjectives. I figure, if they’re good enough for Robert B. Parker and Terry Pratchett, they’re good enough for me. I went through a period where I tried to rip out all the adjectives, and indeed now reading the book I think I went a little too far in that direction. There’s such a thing as style and if you pull things back too far, you start to erode your own work. But I left some of them in!
I don’t believe this was the first chapter written for the book, but it was always intended to be the first chapter. By which I mean, I started with an outline and this was always the first chapter in the outline. Though I believe the first chapter with Gwiddon was the first actual writing done.
I do all the heavy lifting in the outline, that’s where I solve all the problems and when I run into a problem while writing, it’s back to the outline I go!
In this case, the only thing I knew was that Heden goes to the jail, and while there some cultists kill a man. The obvious point to be made is about how dangerous the job of being someone like Aragorn would really be. Show the unintended side effects of the hero’s job.
But really all I wanted to do was blow someone’s head up in the first chapter. Start with a bang. That’s it. Just grab the reader’s interest. The rest that stuff is what the reader naturally takes away from it all, and I am happy they should do so, but it’s a side effect of the tone and subject matter. It’s not, in other words, the reason for the chapter.
This first chapter is doing a lot of work and I feel it suffers for it. A recent edit made it longer than it used to be and, at over 3,000 words, it’s one of the longest in the book. I also noticed, when I was recording the audio for it, that the section with Taegan fighting wasn’t as smooth as the other action sequences in the book. Which means it probably needs a redraft. Long chapters are often a sign that I’ve packed too much crap in. And it now seems somewhat antithetical to the idea of starting with a bang.
Also, while I believe in the idea of showing how Teagan is different from your typical guard by the way he uses his sword, I feel like there’s a more effortless way to go about it. Right now I think I spend too much language on description, interrupting the flow. That use of the long-sword is authentic, by the way. There’s a 17th century woodcut showing how people who fought with a long, or broad sword would basically treat it like a tool, rather than a weapon. Meaning, they had no real notion of “hold it by the handle, swing and stab,” but rather “use all the parts in any way necessary.”
There was originally a “flyover” setting things up more, but I quickly cut it. Readers sometimes say they don’t understand everything that’s happening, but I think that feeling is desirable. You know what you need to know.
Here’s that original intro, which is replaced by the first paragraph in the current draft.
—
It was cold, the light was thin, and Heden’s hard leather boots rang on the cobbled street as he approached the gaol. The dawn moon spun, thin and pale-red like a distant ghost in the blue pre-morning sky. Domnal worked the night watch which meant Heden could meet with him now at the end of his shift and avoid the press of bodies, the throng that surged through Selkirk starting in less than an hour. It meant convenience, but it came at the cost of a bright, glowing sun and blue sky. Heden was conscious of this.
The gaol was a large, single-story stone building which meant it was both important and old. The massive Cathedral of St. Llewellyn, by contrast, was merely important. The cathedral dominated the landscape like no other building including the castle. It was impossible to live in Selkirk and not be aware of it constantly.
It was half a mile from the Hammer & Tongs to the gaol, from the end of Mull street north, and then east on Whitten. Both were main thoroughfares and had wide, cobblestone roads. The cobbles hurt his feet. They hadn’t hurt his feet the five years he first lived here, but then three years in Capital and he became used to the flat Riojan sett. Maybe he was just old. Certainly he was old.
As he often did, he thought of all the other people who walked on the stones and how they must be thinking the same thing without complaint and then for the first time it occurred to him that his expensive boots, bought in Capital, might be the problem. Many Riojans preferred style over comfort. Maybe everyone else wasn’t as stoic as Heden, maybe they just had better boots. He vowed to make a point to invest in some new boots. It would give him something to do later in the day.
While it was bleak and felt empty in that time between dawn and sunrise the streets were not completely deserted. In a city of over 100,000 souls they never were. Empty like this the city seemed so huge, the two and three story homes and shops all seemed massive. During the day, streets crowded with people and carts and horses, the city seemed to shrink. Heden marveled at how wide the streets were when he saw them like this. It was only during this time that he noticed the little details. In his mind, all the wooden buildings were brown, some with new white trim. But now, taking the time to look, he saw that many of them were red or blue or green but so old and dirty that the colors were muted.
Reaching the stone gaol,
—
Of course, back then, the chapter was much shorter. Having this long intro was less of a problem then than it would be now, but unnecessary in both instances, I feel.
The “recent edit” I mentioned took the guard the Eseldics kill and made him a little more important. I wanted to begin the chapter with a confrontation. Whereas originally Heden meets Mathe, I added the character of Wil (who I named, on a whim, after Wil Wheaton, because I was reading his blog at the time, and that spelling of Will seemed appropriately archaic) and then set him against Heden.
We’re not supposed to think Wil is a bad person, only that he’s not used to having 30 cultists milling about and he’s nervous. His bad behavior is more a reaction to that. Once I had that set up, it struck me that Wil should be the guard the Eseldic’s kill. Before, he was a random guard named Bened. Conflating Bened and Wil was purely to avoid introducing too many characters. I didn’t want to manipulate the reader by introducing someone and then killing them off, and I hope to avoid that feeling of “Oh he did this on purpose to create a reaction” in the reader by making Wil unlikable.
But now I feel like the chapter is both too long, and not representative of the tone of the overall book. But that’s not a battle I’m going to fight right now, I’d rather wait and see what an editor thinks. The reason I posted the first seven chapters is because Chapter Seven is where many readers are “hooked.” You might see why. But some readers aren’t hooked until later, it varies. Be nice to hook people in chapter one, but in my experience as a reader, that’s rare. It’s very rare that I know I’ll love a book based on the first few pages.
And that’s it! Gloss part one, done! Let’s hope it’s interesting to someone.
