"The Orphan Fleet" blog part three
Hello everybody, this is part three of my rolling-out-the-red carpet blog series for “The Orphan Fleet”, my fantasy e-book that’s coming out Friday. My god-king Amazon pays close attention to how many people pre-order the book, so if you’re interested I hope you’ll consider swinging on by and grabbing a copy while they’re on sale.
Anyway! I left off yesterday talking about how I wanted to avoid making my main character Jiaire either a Neurotic Hero or a Sociopathic Asshole Hero, two molds that I think have been getting way too much use lately. But I didn’t want some kind of a fake compromise between those two archetypes, and I didn’t want to write a story where the hero gets to avoid both extremes by virtue of never having to make any tough decisions.
What I hope I’ve done with Jiaire might seem either old or new depending on where you’re coming from. I wanted him to be a caring, compassionate human being who has feelings and vulnerabilities and all that stuff, but who doesn’t screw around when it does come time to act. I wanted someone for whom doing whatever it takes to protect his community means something other than torturing a dude in a basement until they cough up where the bomb is hidden. Jiaire’s genuinely not looking for trouble. He doesn’t walk around with a shadow hanging over him. He likes kids. He tries to cheer people up when they’re sad, and when people around him are disagreeing with each other he does what he can to solve the problem using the same resources that most of would employ.
When a situation gets violent, on the other hand, he doesn’t hem and haw very much. He does what the situation calls for, and he doesn’t second guess himself. But violence is not his heart. Even more importantly, it’s not what the people around him respect him for. Jiaire becomes more important over the course of the story, but it’s not because of who his parents were, or a constellation that was in the sky the night he was born, or any of that crap. And it isn’t because he’s surrounded by innocent people who need someone who can do terrible things to protect them. Jiaire gets respect from the people around him by being the kind of person people trust and want to have around.
All of that was on my mind as I wrote the story. Even given that framework, Jiaire did a lot of things that surprised me. “The Orphan Fleet” is a coming of age story. Jiaire starts out as a child who is protected from certain realities, and ends the story as an adult who has a lot more to deal with than he used to. I’d planned on having him become at least somewhat disillusioned. There’s one scene in the story where Jiaire finds out that his friends, people he loves and believes in, have done a bad thing, something he wouldn’t have thought they’d be capable of. I planned that scene expecting Jiaire to lower his opinion of his friends, which is a thing that happens sometimes as you get older. But Jiaire’s reaction to that situation surprised me (and I’m not someone who usually subscribes to the “characters are magical spirits that have a life independent from me” theory). If you read the story you can probably figure out the part I mean.
That’s it for now. I’ll be wrapping things up tomorrow with a brief discussion of the fantasy genre generally, and then it’ll be time for the book to come out. Thanks for reading.
Anyway! I left off yesterday talking about how I wanted to avoid making my main character Jiaire either a Neurotic Hero or a Sociopathic Asshole Hero, two molds that I think have been getting way too much use lately. But I didn’t want some kind of a fake compromise between those two archetypes, and I didn’t want to write a story where the hero gets to avoid both extremes by virtue of never having to make any tough decisions.
What I hope I’ve done with Jiaire might seem either old or new depending on where you’re coming from. I wanted him to be a caring, compassionate human being who has feelings and vulnerabilities and all that stuff, but who doesn’t screw around when it does come time to act. I wanted someone for whom doing whatever it takes to protect his community means something other than torturing a dude in a basement until they cough up where the bomb is hidden. Jiaire’s genuinely not looking for trouble. He doesn’t walk around with a shadow hanging over him. He likes kids. He tries to cheer people up when they’re sad, and when people around him are disagreeing with each other he does what he can to solve the problem using the same resources that most of would employ.
When a situation gets violent, on the other hand, he doesn’t hem and haw very much. He does what the situation calls for, and he doesn’t second guess himself. But violence is not his heart. Even more importantly, it’s not what the people around him respect him for. Jiaire becomes more important over the course of the story, but it’s not because of who his parents were, or a constellation that was in the sky the night he was born, or any of that crap. And it isn’t because he’s surrounded by innocent people who need someone who can do terrible things to protect them. Jiaire gets respect from the people around him by being the kind of person people trust and want to have around.
All of that was on my mind as I wrote the story. Even given that framework, Jiaire did a lot of things that surprised me. “The Orphan Fleet” is a coming of age story. Jiaire starts out as a child who is protected from certain realities, and ends the story as an adult who has a lot more to deal with than he used to. I’d planned on having him become at least somewhat disillusioned. There’s one scene in the story where Jiaire finds out that his friends, people he loves and believes in, have done a bad thing, something he wouldn’t have thought they’d be capable of. I planned that scene expecting Jiaire to lower his opinion of his friends, which is a thing that happens sometimes as you get older. But Jiaire’s reaction to that situation surprised me (and I’m not someone who usually subscribes to the “characters are magical spirits that have a life independent from me” theory). If you read the story you can probably figure out the part I mean.
That’s it for now. I’ll be wrapping things up tomorrow with a brief discussion of the fantasy genre generally, and then it’ll be time for the book to come out. Thanks for reading.