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dhc-official · 5 days ago

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Uh-oh master, a fourth rough draft has hit the attention span

State of DHC: #1

On top of shifting my focus to a new draft to take things in a new direction, I'm also procrastinating* starting this newest draft by writing about the older ones! (*we'll call it retrospecting, it sounds more productive that way) So I may as well finally tell you all what I've been up to.

Lilith, what in the ever-loving fuck is Devil Hunter Clara, you might be thinking to yourself as you read those words in the order that I wrote them. Well, I'm glad I asked! As it stands, Devil Hunter Clara (DHC) is a collection of rough drafts and scrapped chapters sitting in my writing folder, a handful of my dearest home-made blorbos, and the thing dominating a great many of my waking hours.

As I'm gearing up to start anew on a fourth draft, I am filled with a tantalizing mix of dread and excitement at the prospect that I don't really know what Devil Hunter Clara is. With each draft, the shape of what I want it to become shifts a little more, like chunks of marble falling away, coming ever closer to its final sculpted form. It's characters become ever more familiar to me, and I grow in confidence about what I do and do not want it to become.

Before me is the blank canvas and all the lessons I've learned so far.

The Before Times

I suppose I should say a little about how we got here. I've wanted to get into writing for almost as long as I can remember, but like many things in life I just kinda,,, never got around to it.

Of course, I had little snippets here and there, lots of ideas for stories, characters, worlds, plans and plots a'plenty, a few I even made halfhearted attempts at penning, but nothing I would say was anything resembling a readable work. I say this not to be self deprecating, I literally mean that the only thing I had that wasn't a note or a character sheet was maybe three pages of illegible scribbles in a forgotten notebook somewhere (something inspired by the hunger games -back when that was the new smash hit- that I attempted to share precisely once, then never touched, mentioned, or even thought about ever again). That all changed early last year.

To make this part brief-ish (lest I ramble forever) I got back into text based roleplaying. I'd made attempts in the past, but those were as shallow and brief-lived as my other foirés into writing. This time though, it was with someone for whom I harbor a not insignificant amount of love, and who assuaged some of my perpetual anxieties (I've played the role of dungeon master in our tabletop games so roleplaying with him was quite a bit more comfortable and familiar than with previous attempted writing partners) and it just sorta clicked. I went from timid wallflower watching from the sidelines to writing thousands of words at a time in longform response basically every couple of days for a few months straight.

I fell in love with the process of it. Taking my strange and broken wreck of a character and putting her in situations™ of her own making again and again, it's hard to describe just how enthralled I became. Eventually we had to slow down our roleplay correspondences (life happens) but now I had an itch to scratch. So I did the only logical next thing, I loaded up a blank .ODT file, and I got back to writing.

The Long Loooong Journey (First Draft)

The first couple paragraphs got kicked up somewhere around fall of last year. I wanted this newest project of mine to be unshackled from any established setting (or fall victim to world-building paralysis as my other project around this time did, a different story for a different blog perhaps). I wanted to get back into The Zone™ and hit that writing flow again as reliably as possible, so the star of the show -as I envisioned her then- shared a lot of surface level traits with the roleplay OC she was loosely based upon: The same hair, the same eyes. Soon though, she took on some more important traits, the same bone-deep transfeminity, the same blood curdling powers and a need to control them. Likewise, the setting was chosen out of convenience: urban fantasy, a familiar world with an underbelly of demonic monsters and a secret order of those that hunt them.

This was all still in the loosey-goosey figuring out the basics stage -nothing written yet. I had one image in my mind of what I (at the time) wanted Clara at her peak to look like but I wanted to figure out how she got there. How would a terrified teenage trans girl go from being a complete nobody, a total shut in and loner, to being the legendary demon slayer I envisioned? That is largely what the first draft (now totaling around 94K words) aimed to answer.

To my great surprise, such massive overhauls take time, if written out and explored in depth. I had a loose outline, a timeline of her evolution from A) confused and afraid inductee to this strange magical underworld, to B) semi-capable pawn in someone else's game to C) Fully Capable Loose Cannon (and perpetual headache to her demon hunting partner Zaid, more on him another day) to D) a rogue agent, even more feared than the demons she was once employed to hunt, and finally to E) Spiraling badly and becoming something of a complicated hero teetering on the very razor's edge of becoming an out and out villain-protagonist.

The problem with writing a teenage protagonist struggling to come to terms with powers beyond mortal understanding, however, is that they are a teenage protagonist struggling to come to terms with powers beyond mortal understanding. Jokes aside, out of all the outlined above, 94K words in and I was still sitting somewhere between points A and B. For all her exploration of the secret underworld, she was still largely a scared teenager tenuously wielding power outside of her control. I was learning a lot about her and Zaid, what makes them tick, as well as their extended cast of tag-along weirdos, but as I approached the 100K mark I grew more interested in actually sharing my story someday. I simultaneously grew more aware of the enormity of my task I was setting out on if I ever wanted to reach my image of Clara Prime following my current outline and at my current pace.

Just cut to The Good Shit™ already! (Second Draft)

My second draft started as much more experimental. I was unsure if I wanted to abandon all my precious progress so far, but I assured myself that it's not like I'm deleting it, I'm just trying out other things! Where the first draft was told in third person, largely following Clara but occasionally switching to Zaid when I felt it was more appropriate or impactful, the second draft started out entirely in first person, all in Zaid's eyes.

Here in the second draft we don't follow Clara's rise to power, instead we follow a version where she's not only reached the vision I had of Prime Clara's power in the outline of the first draft, but eclipsed it. I surprised myself in abandoning her somewhat singularly focused powerset (mostly relying on hemokinesis and some baseline demonic abilities, with a handful of other powers laboriously fought for deeeep into the outline). This more powerful Clara was fittingly more mature (still with her occasional dips into tantrums self aggrandizing tirades and mischief being a problem on purpose) and this version of Zaid was aged up to match, with his feigned veneer of confidence becoming an actual foundation of competence (with his trademark bone deep fissures in that foundation owing to the stresses of, well, basically everything leading up to that point in his life)

Besides our protagonists becoming competent and well rounded from the word go, the other major difference was a shift in their dynamic. In the first draft Zaid was somewhat of an unwitting pawn of the highly dubious and very unoriginally named secret organization (go ahead and guess what it's called). Their first meeting was in the end of the prologue where Zaid saves/ kinda sorta kidnaps Clara (she was unconcious and in need of medical attention, its totes fine). In the second draft Clara is already a prisoner, and Zaid has to prove himself to her to be allowed the privilege of her company. Rereading it earlier today (the impetus for me starting a fourth draft and writing this post) their dynamic feels a lot more playful* and fun than in the first draft! *Zaid is def having a bad time, but where the first draft often comes off as a lot of bickering punctuated by moments of something closer to horror than power fantasy, the second draft has a certain fascinating momentum to it, a real verve, y'know? I actually really like this version of Clara and Zaid. She's got all the arrogance and with just a hint of zaneyness that I love, and he's just the right mix of playing it straight, utterly tortured, and surprisingly, he actually manages to come off as fairly intelligent, always thinking quickly and making the best of his very, very poor circumstances.

Unfortunately, I realized after 15k words that first person with occasional POV switches just would not work for the story I wanted to tell in the long term. Thus,

In Medias Res (Third Draft)

While the first draft drags their meeting and growth out far beyond my current willingness to detail, and the second kick starts it, the third rebukes beginnings and doesn't concern itself with their first meeting during its brief stint, instead centering when Clara first dropped the mask. In this timeline the two have been working together for a little while, but Clara has been concealing the full extent of her abilities. This Clara was the scary powerful Clara from the second draft, but then said fuck it and has been pretending to be a 'just some schmuck' demon who just so happens to talk about herself with the same self-aggrandizement of your average chuuni.

The return to third person limited POV (close to equal screentime in each of their brains) does wonders for the flow, and we've moved entirely out of the secretive bases of the still genericly named 'The Order' (Yes, that's actually what it's called in all three drafts. Yes, its stupid and vague on purpose). The first draft is largely enamored with the physical spaces of its giant underground secret complex (and the single bedroom they share there), and the second draft intended to quickly leave its own remote hidden castle setting. The third still has them mentioning it as Zaid's employer but it has an altogether more mysterious presence (its only tangible actions being some encoded transmissions giving them vague orders, with a tacit implication of funding) The second and third drafts are roughly equal in length (with the third draft currently clocking in around 18k across two complete chapters, a third semi-complete, and a fourth that came to me like a vision, hastily scrawled to be worked in later)

Overall I do like this version of the duo, but it hews a little too close to the bickering of the first draft rather than the vivacious dynamism of the second. I mostly chalk this up to an issue of pacing. The third draft was fundamentally as much of an experiment as the second, and I've learned as much from it as its predecessor. Both were penned by the seat of my pants without any sort of outline, but the second was almost entirely contiguous, while the third feels somewhat disconnected because of frequent scene breaks. I had intended to make it more episodic, following a sortof case-of-the-week type beat, but I was more interested in the characters than the cases so I barely put any planning into them. I was perhaps too focused on getting straight to the juiciest parts...

Where to Next? (thoughts going into draft four)

That's always the question, isn't it? Big lessons, it's absolutely got to be in third person limited, the metaphorical camera is just so much easier to navigate in and out of their heads that way. I've sortof bounced off of the idea of them solving generic monster-of-the-week style cases, at least the way I framed them in the third draft. I just can't get myself invested in the day job part of their super-powered day job, not when the beat they were on was so vastly overshadowed by the tensions (of various sorts) between the main pair. Going forward, we'll have a lot less procedural investigations and a lot more over the top violence. I'd still like to see them engaging in some deductive investigation, its fun in spurts, but at its core DHC isn't aiming to be Holmes and Watson, its aiming to be about toxic romance, powers beyond mortal ken, and the frayed edges where the two meet.

Speaking of Zaid's employment status, It was an odd problem to have in the first place, considering that Zaid's motivation has been so singular and driving since at least the second draft. (The exact same motive was present as early as chapter 3 of the first draft, but bafflingly, I had chosen to leave it as already resolved and largely in his backstory?? This is my first serious project of this sort, so some ametuer mistakes are expected, but it's still baffling) It's apparent to me now that they don't need 'busywork'. So, this next draft should follow them on their 'main quest', not fucking around on side quests waiting for permission to actually do something.

To that end, I'm heavily considering axing The Order as a thing that either of the main characters are directly associated with. As dumb as it may sound, its not always easy to kill your darlings. The entire first draft (besides the prologue), 88 of the roughly 127 thousand words currently put into this universe (not counting the notes, which are similarly split) take place in its cramped hallways, and I find myself having grown inordinately fond of its little idiosyncrasies. Like a first kiss, it's hard to forget where the duo's strange approximation of romance began. But alas, as Clara faught to buck it's shackles, I must too let myself and the story be free of its tyrannical reign.

Oddly I find myself returning to a (paraphrased) snippet from another urban fantasy thing, specifically a bit from the rules of Eureka (the TTRPG). Your investigators aren't cops. They just can't be. You can try to force it, but this story just doesn't fit together when you have reinforcements, assets, and a chain of command. The Order aren't cops per se, but their narrative function is close enough to cause the same issues. I think they'll still be kicking around somewhere in the background, but not as an ally (not that they were ever more than two steps from enemies in the first place).

So where does that leave our duo? Well, the shift towards an episodic-ish style was partially inspired by a certain show with an emphasis on road tripping mystery solving/monster hunting, I could take a page out of a certain hunter's book and simply say that Zaid funds his single-minded investigative work through the careful use of a method known as 'lots of credit card fraud' (or I could handwaive how these misfits get money for food and hotels entirely) but I feel like this may be a problem better left grappled within the constraints of who the characters are and what they would do.

That leaves Zaid working odd jobs only because he needs to in order to keep perusing his own primary goal (Not because his boss paged him and told him to do it). That's Zaid's motivations laser focused in, but what about the charming woman for whom the series is actually named? Well, I'm a tad worried about leaving her at the frankly ludicrous power level I've established her at, but I think rather than nerfing her back to her teenager-era limitations, the more elegant solution would be to give her more opponents that require her frankly busted levels of 'oomph' to defeat. Parrying bullets with your blood-katana is kinda overkill for fighting run-of-the-mill humans, but it's not called normal human Hunter Clara, now is it?

So Zaid is 'self employed' and Clara is just as overpowered as she's ever been with all the baggage to match. So why are they even in the same room? The order provided a backdrop of casual callousness towards demons where Zaid was practically forced to keep Clara close (draft one Zaid tried his best to offer decency and agency to her but healthy boundaries and clear communication doesn't always make the best story to read, and the order wasn't too fond of it either) and in the second and third drafts she basically waited around for Zaid -or someone like him- to show up and let her loose to do some bombastic violence. Book one is called A Demon and Her Leash for a reason, after all. Currently I'm thinking that Zaid purposely went looking for someone like Clara, that after years of searching on his own he finally caved and sought a deal with a devil. Perhaps, in her own hour of shifting circumstances, Clara agreed to a less than favorable arrangement with her typical level of thinking ahead. (which is to say, not very much) Or perhaps the joining of their fates follows some other more fantastically twisted path. Who knows. I certainty don't, not yet anyway.

Thank you so much if you read this far. With any luck, someday I'll have more updates!

I think it's time I started writing a new chapter one...

#State of DHC #Devil Hunter Clara #DHC #writers on tumblr #Clara Morningstar #Zaid Conways

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