#but this is a fantasy novel with a fantasy circumstance. how are you gonna navigate that. mental age or physical age. which takes precedence

[bidokja]

oh my god a web novel that actually draws a realistic line in the sand about wierd transmigration age gaps??? the bar is so low but it sure is refreshing when a series clears it

[jeanmoreaux]

can you tell us a little more about dark rise? i love hearing you talk about books, and i'm always more inclined to read them when someone talks about them in depth rather than reading some random person's review of them.

*me, popping back up ten years later with a silly little drink in hand and feeling very, very embarrassed* hi there, wow it’s been some time. life is crazy, isn’t it?

i’d love to talk a little about it but at the same time i don’t think i can talk about it much without getting into spoilers? not that the plot is unpredictable but it partly lives off intrigue (it [the plot] is well-constructed, and as an avid story-enjoyer you’ll probably guess quite a few of the twists because they’re set up well, which doesn’t make the reveals any less satisfying tho in my opinion). so this is all gonna be very abstract and vague. sorry about that </3 idk if you’ve read c. s. pacat before, and while i’d say dark rise reminds of the other stuff she has published, it still manages to be quite different. just to have it mentioned from the start: we know she really likes to explore power dynamics, especially ones that are quite unbalanced in one way or another, and i think dark rise taps into that too, even though to a much lesser degree. so depending on how you feel about that, you’ll read this novel differently.

i think an aspect that’s most central to the story is the idea of fate and how an individual’s agency plays into it. is there something like fate making us into who we are? are we destined to turn out a certain way, a certain kind of person? is there free will to fight again what or who you’re supposed to be or do you play into the hands of fate by defying an ending that seems to be predestined? and i think the story isn’t only concerned with the concept of self-agency but also responsibility. how do you navigate your relationship with yourself and with others in moments when you’re seemingly forced into certain roles? what do you owe the people around you and what do they owe to you? how do you avoid dynamics and patterns and how responsible are the people involved for perpetuating or changing them. and there is also an emphasis on how our relationships, the love we have for other people, additionally influences all of this! this might all have already clued you into the fact that there are basically no straight forward answers to these questions. and i know we keep going on about morally grey stories etc. on this website that sometimes aren’t really morally grey, and in this case i’d say (give that this is a ya title, leaning (new) adult) it does actually engage with moral ambiguity and grey morality. also please keep in mind i only read book one so far, but i could see some corruption arcs happening (give the right circumstances). and ofc in true c. s. pacat fashion the interpersonal relationships do explore loyalty, devotion, seeing people at their worst and still choosing them, the building and breaking of trust, complex parent child relationships, trauma and how it influences your life, etc. there is a “chosen one” element to it, but i think it’s handled well and in an interesting way that truly allows for some interesting conflicts to arise later in the story.

it’s by no means a perfect book, and there are some things i would have tweaked or adjusted, but it’s some of the best ya fantasy i read in a while. it doesn’t shy away from leaning into some more uncomfortable things and it doesn’t try to baby the readers. it’s giving them space to think for themselves, i’d say.

[keen2meecha]

Other books?👀 What else are you writing? Oh and if you could share how you go about plotting arcs with pov characters across more books that would be cool!

Oh boy, I am working on. So much. But! My 2020 projects are gifted (of course) a book called Happy Endings about a slightly amnesiac sweetheart named Melissa (I’m gonna be doing the Novel Prep Tag game for this one later) and then my NaNoWriMo project Call Me Crow (working title) about three characters on separate but related journeys navigating a post-zombie apocalypse world (as in the zombie apocalypse happened years ago, and now they’re living in a slightly rebuilt society). And, of course, I always have the A Mother’s Love series on the backburner, a high(-ish lmao) fantasy about preventing the end of the world again.

As for the second question: let’s take A Mother’s Love for an example. When I started writing that series, I knew two things for certain: there would be two main characters that the series follows, Suriyah and Allison; and they would both be involved in the inciting incident: a peace conference attempting to end the civil war that’s been going on for decades ends with a horrific explosion and the veil between this world and the Afterworld being torn open, allowing demons to pour through unrestrained. This is, obviously, not good.

From there, I focused mainly on developing the characters themselves.

So, on one hand, we have Suriyah who, due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time and also very suspiciously fleeing the scene of the crime, gets blamed for it. On the other hand, we have Allison, who no one even knows was there when it happened. This means that we’ve got two characters going on very different journeys, and I did that for a reason. See, A Mother’s Love is meant to introduce the world of Suda, because that’s a central location for most (not all, but most) of my fantasy novels. At the same time, though, Suriyah and Allison need to neutralize the very real threat! Hence, two povs, two separate goals to accomplish. This then led to me charting out their journeys according to what made the most sense for their characters and the paths I set them on based on the inciting incident.

In the first book, Suriyah’s journey is about clearing her name, because she can’t do anything to save the world with everybody in power breathing down her neck, waiting to execute her. This allows the reader to become familiar with the world and Suryah as a character, while also setting up some Surprise Tools That Will Help Us Later! That means that it’s up to Allison to begin the investigation, actually driving the plot forward and unraveling the mystery - and also, you know, dealing with some of her own baggage. At the end of the first book, however, the roles reverse: Suriyah manages to get enough people on her side that she’s significantly harder to execute, and Allison gets side-tracked by a very personal discovery. So the second book is the opposite: Allison’s journey introduces us to whole new facets of Suda that Suriyah has no way of knowing about, while Suriyah’s pov deals with solving the rest of the mystery. Shit happens, things get sort of fixed but the fix only uncovers even larger problems. And then in the third book, Suriyah and Allison (finally) meet. This is when the plot really picks up because the information they have gathered separately is able to be put together for realsies, so in the fourth book, they can actually end the threat once and for all (well. basically). 

So, basically, I came up with the circumstances (the end of the world) the roles I needed the characters to fulfill (introducing the world vs actually solving the plot mystery) and then figured out what made the most sense when. And note that this took almost five drafts to lock into place, and now I need to rewrite it because I focused so much on the two characters and their journeys that I never moved on from the zero draft plot, so now I have to rewrite most of the plot with all of this new information in mind. Woof.

The other way that I’ve noticed is, if you do a lot of outlining (like the three-act Save the Cat! structure) you can, at least for the first draft, treat each pov kind of like it’s own separate book? Obviously, this only works if the characters aren’t constantly up in each others’ business, but if you at least outline their journeys separately and then weave them together from there (hello, Call Me Crow) it can be helpful to make sure each character has their own development and arc and story! 

Is that... is that helpful? I hope it’s helpful, because this is. So much lmao