Project Elfhome - Afterword

AFTERWORD

Judging by the number of “Making of,” some people like to know how their favorite stories and movies and such come into being. Judging by a handful of reviews on Amazon, some people don’t. Apparently the people in the latter camp like to think that authors are godlike people that can spin out a vast complicated story arc across multiple books, writing millions of words about a cast of a thousand named characters, in one massive, preconceived plot that doesn’t need to be tweaked or improved upon.

For those of you that enjoy such things, I’ve written down notes on the various stories. Why I wrote them, how I thought they were going to turn out, and how the plots were detoured to what you actually read.

For the rest of you, skip this. Trust me; you don’t want to see behind the curtain.

I’m going to talk about all her sections as a whole. The very first one I wrote for her was her meeting Tinker. I don’t remember what inspired me to attempt it but I do remember that the story flowed. The scene came out with this amazingly strong voice. What surprised me most was that it was in first person and an attempt to rewrite it to third person failed.

I loved the bit but couldn’t figure out what to do with it. The problem was that Stormsong doesn’t actually “meet” Tinker until the middle of the first novel, and at that point she blends into the crowd. I couldn’t extend the drabble into a story because it would go against canon; Tinker had no idea who Stormsong was and that couldn’t change.

I wrote it after I’d finished Wolf Who Rules and have always wished I could have gone back and tweaked the novel to reflect the drabble. There is a slight but not glaring canon conflict that Stormsong doesn’t mention this meeting while talking to Windwolf after the fight with Impatience. This can be dismissed by the fact that Stormsong didn’t think it would be wise for Tinker to include her in her First Hand.

I wanted to write more from Stormsong’s point of view, so I tackled her first meeting with Windwolf. Again, boom, the story flowed. Still there wasn’t enough plot there to be standalone. I didn’t have the time to invest into making it something bigger.

By this time I was working on Elfhome and I vaguely salvaged parts of the first drabble during the chapter Panty Raid.

The last bit I wrote for her was the journey to New York, written soon after I’d finished Wood Sprites. I thought about expanding this into a complete story but that way lies madness. Stormsong couldn’t find out more about the twins since she doesn’t mention them for three books. Nor could she find out that Sparrow was a traitor. Coming up with a true story that didn’t trip over those points would have been hair-pulling insanity.

Fans kept asking me to write something from Pony’s POV. I attempted to write something from after he met Tinker, but that didn’t work. He’s too on-camera during all the books. What ended up happening was simply a retelling of what the readers already knew. I was bored silly trying to write it. Everything that was interesting was too short to be called a story.

I decided to find a pivotal point in his life that didn’t include Tinker. Once I approached the story from that mindset, it was obvious that the story would be about him deciding to accompany Windwolf to the Westernlands. I wanted some trigger event so that when the moment came for Pony to choose, it wasn’t static “thinking” but an emotional response to some thrilling action.

Originally I started with Pony kneeling in the dirt, happy that he’d won the fight, but worried about the Wyvern’s judgment. It became obvious that I needed to back up and show the cause of the fight: Clove and his weak eyes. The bonus to this was I actually showed the fight. Action is always a good thing.

I had written that Lain’s pivotal moment in her life after her accident was during the first Startup. The first scene flowed up to the point where Lain is shown the saurus. At that point, however, I lost the thread of the story.

I made a lot of random stabs at it. In one version, Lain rescued a soldier that had been trapped by a steel spinner spider. In another, Lain set up elaborate quarantine systems. In a third, she was rescued by Windwolf and was healed by magic to the point she could walk with crutches. At some point I decided that I wanted her to be isolated and forced to realize that her brains were what mattered.

How to get her alone? It didn’t make sense with the setup I had in place that she would go into the forest alone. I didn’t want her to be stupid. I decided that I could bring in Yves to give him more airtime, show off some of their relationship and explain how the empire of evil reacted to the first Startup.

Isolating her creates a new problem. The narrative becomes a monologue, which is difficult to keep tension high. Lain experiencing first contact with an elf also satisfied the idea that this was the first time elves and humans meet on Elfhome. I wanted Lain to have an actual conversation with the elf, so it limited who she could meet. I didn’t want it to be either Windwolf or Stormsong since she obviously meets both of them for the first time in the first two books. Using Lightning Strikes allowed me to expand on Blue Sky’s backstory and flesh out a character important to the series and yet never shown before.

Yes, the story does end slightly abruptly but Lain has had her epiphany. The reader of the series is sure to realize that Lain manages to get to Pittsburgh while it’s cycling back and forth between Elfhome and Earth. Once there, she refuses to leave and sets up in her house on Observatory Hill.

This was the first short story I’d ever sold. It was written after Tinker was released. Russell Davis had e-mailed me and asked me to write something to include in a DAW anthology he was editing called Faerie Tales.

I was in the middle of writing Wolf Who Rules. I didn’t want to try to fit the short story’s plot into the events of the main storyline (that insanity would come later). At first I thought I would do some first-contact stories with new characters. I started a few but they trickled off, not to be finished.

I realized I needed a character that I was comfortable with to build the story around because I was on a tight deadline. I pulled out an old character who originally had been a space marine. What would a space marine be doing on Elfhome? I decided that she could be a big game hunter. The bigger the game, the better, so I decided that she would go one on one with a wyvern.

I couldn’t get a handle on it until I stumbled upon the idea that her “native guide” would be a sekasha. I had been raised on Tarzan movies where the big game hunter was always a brave, tall white guy and the “native guide” was this fearful, weak and small male that ran away at first sign of trouble. As a kid, I didn’t realize how racist this was. Here was the chance to address that stance by making the two characters equal.

Unfortunately I didn’t keep canon straight. Originally the female sekasha was Crow Song. In the books, however, I state that all of Windwolf’s Hands are in Pittsburgh, that he had only lost Hawk Scream and Lightning Strikes, and only Stormsong speaks English. I decided to change the female to be Stormsong as the easiest way to match up all the elements. Certainly the female acts like Stormsong in the story. (So sorry for any confusion I caused people who read this in its original form.)

Some stories are gifts from the muses. They just come. And sometimes they aren’t, and you need to build them from the ground up. And sometimes they’re a weird mix of both, stalling in some places and sprinting ahead in others.

When I moved to Hawaii, I started to meet very memorable people. A new friend impressed me in the complexity of her life. Her father is a professional Bigfoot hunter. Her mother was Hawaiian Chinese Portuguese mix that could have sprung from the pages of Joy Luck Club. She’s an avid fisherman and into outdoor sports like snorkeling and kayaking, but she also loves to shop for clothes. Every time I talked to her, she had a story of great misadventure as she rushed out to save damsels in distress.

One night I had a dream that my friend was on Elfhome. Yes, she would fit right in! But what would her story be?

Fans had been asking about the Water Clan. I decided I would bring one to Pittsburgh; she would need a human defender in the face of all the technology. Still it wasn’t clicking.

Around that time, Teddy the Porcupine videos were hitting my newsfeed regularly on Facebook. If you haven’t seen these, go, now, watch them. They’re a hoot.

One day the muse hit me with “a lesbian, an elf, and a porcupine walk into a hardware store.” Boom. For some reason, adding a porcupine made all the difference in the world. Why? I don’t know. I wrote the hardware store scene but it didn’t have an inherent conflict in it that centered on Law. So I decided to back up. At Wollerton’s, Law and Bare Snow were already a couple. How did they meet?

I made a few stabs at their first meeting being a totally random event. The very first attempt, Law left home on her eighteenth birthday and meets Bare Snow squatting out in the middle of nowhere. Yes, the story centered on Law, but lacked conflict.

In a different story, I’d played with the idea that Tooloo had tapped a hapless pawn and sent them off to do impossible things. Originally the pawn had been sent to Onihida to free Impatience from the oni. I realized that the story wouldn’t be placed in Pittsburgh, would require massive world-building and wouldn’t be a short story. I abandoned this project.

What if Tooloo called Law and arranged for her to save Bare Snow? Tooloo is quietly blocking the Skin Clan right and left. The fact that Bare Snow is Water Clan finally became vital to the story. If she’s found in the wrong place, her presence could trigger the restart of the clan war. I wrote out Tooloo calling Law in the middle of fishing and had Law go off to find Bare Snow. Her location was a natural extension of canon: Windwolf had been attacked in Fairywood and gone on foot to Tinker’s salvage yard. If you wanted to start a clan war, putting a Water Clan elf in Fairywood was a logical way of doing it.

Originally Bare Snow had been a normal, innocent female. I got as far as Widget hacking the DMV when I realized that wouldn’t work. As a trigger to a clan war, there had to be more of a reason to suspect that she was behind the ambush. Also a normal person wouldn’t chase after bad guys. Law had a history of going toe-to-toe with guys stalking women but her taking on an entire horde of bad guys didn’t make sense. It needed to make sense that Bare Snow couldn’t go to the Wind Clan with the news that Windwolf was going to be attacked. There was also the oddity of Bare Snow coming to Pittsburgh all by herself with no promise of joining a household.

At some point I remembered that I had set up that Windwolf’s grandfather, Howling, had been assassinated. What if Bare Snow’s family were the assassins? What if the Skin Clan had been behind it? At that point, it all worked. I rewrote the scenes so that Bare Snow was now a well-trained assassin whose mother had a price on her head.

But what was the story really about? The emotional heart of an action story is very difficult to figure out sometimes. For a long time, it eluded me. I nearly reached the end before I knew what it was. From Law’s name to her profession to her choice of pet, I had gone with extremely quirky choices. (And yes, some of that reflected the inspiration.) Unconsciously I’d been having Law pick out things that were logical and wonderful for her, but that people around her hated. The heart of the story was staring me in the face.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember what triggered a story. I vaguely remember talking to June Drexler Robertson about wanting to do a story in Pittsburgh that didn’t center on Tinker that dealt with the day-to-day life of humans trying to cope with magic and monsters.

I think if I had to list the very, very root of it, it was the scene in Tinker when Oilcan and Tinker are warning Ryan of the dangers of Elfhome’s native life. They mentioned a list of safety rules posted at the observatory’s dorms. (Don’t leave doors open, report any strange animal no matter how cute and harmless it seemed, don’t go into the swamp without a flamethrower…) At some point later I tried to sit down and write out those safety rules. It wasn’t as interesting as I thought it would be but it had promise of growing.

I don’t remember how it went from “normal Pittsburghers” to a DYI TV show but I recall giggling madly. For some reason, the first thing I thought of was Alton Brown in a pith helmet. I allowed him to go a little manic, influenced by MythBusters, and freed from the constraints of “Don’t try this at home.” (Okay, so maybe a little Bob Ross too with “and a happy little tree lives here…and it’s trying to eat you.”)

Having gone off the deep end with Hal, I needed someone to balance him. Someone behind the scenes, calm to his manic, careful to his blithe enthusiasm, and heavily armed. I decided that Jane would be the opposite of everything that was Tinker. Tall, blond, intelligent but not a genius, liked to settle her problems with her fists, and had the world’s most plain first name. (The last name of Kryskill comes from the family that actually built Hyeholde Restaurant.) She’d have a large, sprawling family: grandparents, mother, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, and cousins. She would even have a pet: a big, well-trained guard dog.

The idea screamed for a take on a “fish out of water” story. I wanted outsiders coming to Pittsburgh and the natives having to deal with the fact that the newcomers don’t know how to deal with the local dangers. (Basically I cycled back to the seed idea of Tinker and Oilcan’s explanation to Ryan.) I decided the Pittsburghers were doing a gardening show a la Elfhome and that the incoming crew was doing a more rarefied animal documentary.

Mind you, most of this was at a subconscious level and happened in the course of one afternoon during the conversation with June.

Nigel came from June telling me about Nigel Marven and Chased by Dinosaurs. She mentioned a segment of Nigel letting a poisonous spider walk across his face. I decided to name my naturalist in tribute to Marven, but I decided not to watch any video featuring him so that my Nigel wouldn’t be a copy of him. I think Monty Python was more of an influence on my vision of Nigel. Riffing on the name Chased by Dinosaurs, I decided his show would be Chased by Monsters, which suggested a natural end to the story.

Just as I was working on the story, I happened to see the video of Aimee Mullins doing a TED Talk. Aimee was born in Pennsylvania with a medical condition that resulted in her lower legs being amputated when she was an infant. Despite this, she went on to be world-class athlete, actress and fashion model. She really inspired me. I decided that Nigel would have the same condition. It was only later that I decided to make use of his lack of feet: evil writer that I am.

With all that in the mix, I sat down and wrote the two obvious scenes. The first one establishes the PB&G crew, its show then unnamed, filming one of the monsters I’ve mentioned in the books but hadn’t shown. The strangle vine had to be aggressive enough to warrant heavy weapons, thus the whole octopus plant on LSD came into being. Jane gets the phone call informing her of the babysitting job, and then in the next scene, she meets said newbies.

Originally I wanted Jane to be working on a show whose name was a riff on a real television series. The first one that leapt to mind was Victory Garden. I went off and researched it and decided it was totally not what I thought it was. So I went with Pittsburgh Lawn and Garden. While typing the show name for the twentieth time, I decided to abbreviate it. By changing “Lawn” to “Backyard,” I could make it sound like a PB&J sandwich.

By the very nature of Pittsburgh on Elfhome, the arrival of Nigel and Taggart had to be on a Startup day. I couldn’t bring them in after July since July was the last Shutdown. Bringing them in prior to July meant they wouldn’t be struggling with the big world problem of the war between elf and oni, and that seemed pointless. Anything they discovered about the oncoming war would have caused problems with information already stated in the books. So obviously, Chased by Monsters arrived in July.

It meant that the biggest news story was Tinker’s kidnapping.

It set up a “you’re a genius” in terms of plot since I established that Mercy Hospital was the only human hospital in town and it’s right beside where Tinker takes the nosedive during her kidnapping. By hurting Hal, I gave him front row seats to everything. Wow. Cool. The story just flowed out.

This triggered a problem though. By seeing Tinker kidnapped, why wouldn’t this be the news story that the crew followed? Yes, it was out of their field, but a woman’s life is at stake. As the author, however, I couldn’t have them focusing on it because they couldn’t influence the events. But by the same token, I wanted them to learn something big that justified doing a story from Jane’s point of view.

I stalled around the Neighborhood of Make Believe scene, struggling to figure out how to make it a big story without stretching the fabric of the published book’s universe. Eventually the “ah ha” light went on and I realized that Tinker’s kidnapping had to be a catalyst for Jane to cope with the angst of a similar event in her life. Thus Boo was born. It was a kind of have your cake and eat it too setup.

In Wolf Who Rules, I wanted Tinker to talk with Tommy Chang prior to saving him from the Wyverns. I had in my mind that he would be a major player in Pittsburgh but I had the problem that he’s not the sort of person Tinker normally would interact with. I made him the race promoter to give them a common element. Tommy seeks Tinker out to find out how much her being made into an elf changed her mentally. Like Maynard, he wanted to know where she stood in the political landscape. He couldn’t, however, just ask her flat out like Maynard could, because that would indicate he was part of the conflict. The conversation about racing, then, was all just a cover.

At the time, I was ordering promotional materials through an online printing site. Their e-mails for proofs came from the address of Team Big Sky. It seemed too perfect not to use. In a throwaway line, I set up that Team Big Sky was John Montana and his little brother, the half-elf, Blue Sky.

Later I got to thinking about these two characters. Obviously they shared a mother. Who was Blue Sky’s father? Did he know about his son? Did he care? It seemed likely that if the elves had so few children, they wouldn’t be indifferent to a half-breed bastard. The two castes that created the most conflict for the world were domana and sekasha. Since Windwolf was the only real candidate for a domana father, I decided to go with sekasha. I wanted Tinker involved in the story, which she wouldn’t be if the sekasha was alive, so I made his father be the male killed in the backstory told in Tinker.

I had wanted to do a story where Forest Moss found redemption in a human female. Originally I imagined that he would get mixed up with a woman that ran a brothel. She was a ruthless businesswoman and the arrangement was strictly for profit alone. I couldn’t find a story in it; nothing to hang my hat on.

As I had wrapped up Elfhome, anti-abortion sentiments began to sweep the nation. It was tied tightly to people who wanted no sexual education in the classrooms and no birth control given to young women. It triggered something in me and I felt I had to write my response to it.

My biggest problem with these purity pro-lifers is that they want to create school situations and laws that address only the perfect setting. In their perfect setting, girls don’t need sexual education, birth control pills, and abortions because all they need is to say “no.” In a perfect world, these purity pushers would be right. The world, however, is far from perfect. Horrible, terrible things happen. Things beyond a young woman’s control. The most innocent event is that a massive wave of unfamiliar hormone-driven impulses get the best of them and suddenly they’re faced with utter ruin. This gives them no Plan B except to spend the nine months carrying a child that they didn’t plan, might not want, and have no way to care for.

In the United States, one in every five women has been raped, with forty-four percent of those rapes happening under the age of eighteen. In a high school class of three hundred students, thirty of the girls will be raped or sexually assaulted. Look at a graduating class (if the girl is so lucky to graduate) and in any cluster of ten seats, there sits a girl whose life is potentially destroyed by her attack. Add in the lack of morning-after pills and abortion, plus a society that tells her she’s impure if she’s not a virgin, and it’s nearly sure that the life she wanted is over.

This purity-only mindset is like sending out warplanes without weapons or parachutes through enemy territory in broad daylight. Any intelligent person can tell you that is a stupid plan that will wipe out your military. Yet this is exactly what is being pushed for young women—go out among men with no knowledge or means to protect themselves and no way to save themselves if attacked.

I decided to write a story about a girl who lost the war. She fought hard but still found herself pregnant and on the run from an abusive man. She is the good girl who has been pushed to the edge of the cliff and is now out of options. Once I knew what I really wanted to address, the story wrote itself.

I left Olivia on a cliffhanger of being homeless with an insane elf in the middle of a war zone. I really wanted to get her to the point where she actually had someplace to live. I had fun running Olivia all over Pittsburgh, followed by mobs of elves. Perhaps too much fun. Eventually I started to wonder what the point of the story was. Originally Olivia ate at the O, went to the real estate agent’s office and ended up at Phipps. Only after Forest Moss was called back to combat did she go downtown with Jewel Tear in tow. All interesting events but originally without a focus and thus not with a whole lot of building conflict.

Eventually I realized that I wanted to focus on two things, the first being Olivia’s growing realization of all the strings attached to the deal she’d struck. The second was setting up what would be the bigger conflicts ahead for her. I shifted the order of the scenes and inserted all the scenes at the University of Pittsburgh and the shopping trip at Giant Eagle.

This story does a lot of heavy lifting in that it was written to tie together Elfhome and Wood Sprites and several of the earlier Project Elfhome stories and sets the stage for the next book, Harbinger. That’s a lot of work for a novella.

I’ve discovered that fans refuse to acknowledge that characters lie or see events through different filters. For example, Windwolf states that he was “stunned” by the saurus and Pony states that Windwolf was “knocked unconscious.” Fans claim this is a mistake, ignoring the fact that unconscious people don’t realize they’ve been out of it for more than a few seconds and Pony couldn’t actually have witnessed the events, else Tinker would remember a second sekasha at the scene. I didn’t realize readers wouldn’t follow this logic, or I would have made it clearer when Pony makes his claim. Having learned this lesson, I realized that the twins couldn’t interact with any of the known characters prior to the end of Elfhome without fans calling it a mistake on my part.

This created a huge timing problem. I wanted the twins in Monroeville to witness the orbital gate crash and Earth’s reaction to it at the start of August. If the Skin Clan had a back door to Elfhome, they would use it as quickly as possible. The elves had realized that oni forces were in Pittsburgh. Unless the Skin Clan reconnected their supply lines, their troops would be stranded without Earth’s resources. The nestlings, however, would be killed shortly after the Skin Clan took them to Elfhome.

All these factors meant that the twins had to cross worlds immediately. It left me with a gaping hole in my timeline. Where were the twins during the entire period represented by Wolf Who Rules and Elfhome? Because of the nestlings, if they’d gotten anywhere close to Pittsburgh, the tengu would know where the children were.

I either had to make the timeline unclear at the end of Wood Sprites or leave the nestlings’ fate still in the balance. I wanted the twins to beat the oni decisively after everything they suffered, so I decided to be very vague on how long things took in the last chapter.

After Wood Sprites advance reader copies came out, fans started to piece together a timeline showing when certain events happened. They started to contact me wanting to know how the book fit into Elfhome. This got worse when I posted the first scene of Harbinger.

It became clear that I would need to firmly pinpoint events.

Sigh.

Hopefully this short story explains everything. If not, here is a timeline that more clearly spells it out.

Louise called the gossamer to the cave shortly after Oilcan was kidnapped. Tinker does not see the gossamer go because she’s dealing with the chaos at Sacred Heart. When she finally pays attention to the airfield, the Wind Clan gossamer is already gone and only the Stone Clan airships are moored. Because of the Kryskills’ connection to the tengu, they’re some of the first outsiders involved. The phone call isn’t Team Tinker enlisting Alton’s help but the tengu asking him to contact Team Tinker and anyone else he knows that is trustworthy. (If you need a political reason for this, humans are considered neutral and thus could confront the Stone Clan elves without triggering a clan war. The tengu are firmly Wind Clan. They could only watch from a distance once Oilcan was found. Tinker had made it clear that she didn’t want the tengu engaging Forge and Iron Mace on her behalf. Team Tinker is Riki’s Plan B.)

As the gossamer heads out, Gracie is leading the tengu chasing after it. She knew via a dream that she was needed in Oakland. When the airship bolts, she knows that this was why she was in Oakland. Jin and Riki are caught up searching for first Oilcan and then Tinker. While the males are in Pittsburgh, they are out of contact with the people in the tengu village (which doesn’t have a cell phone tower). When Gracie finds the twins, she decides that this is news that needs to be told face to face to Jin, not trusted to a phone that might be tapped. (And trust me, there’s no code words to cover the twins and the babies and Joy.) It is Jin’s place to tell Tinker, so the tengu settle the twins at the village and wait.

Meanwhile, all the elves are distracted from Tinker’s side by the train on the South Side. Because of the bad cell phone connection with Alton, the wrong information is spread through the tengu. They believe that the oni planned to collide the inbound train full of elves with an empty outbound passenger train. Riki doesn’t know what really is going on when Oilcan calls him, looking for Tinker. All he knows, from piecemeal reports, is that the domana are nuking the hell out of South Side and there’s at least one derailed train.

Shortly after that, Tinker blows up Neville Island. Wind Clan elves show up to serve their domi and talk with one pissed-off Tommy. They don’t tell the half-oni squat.

Tinker, being Tinker, ignores everything that doesn’t connect to what she’s focused on at that moment. Yes, she knows that the Harbingers have showed up; she doesn’t think about them in the last chapter. Yes, she knows Jewel Tear was rescued by Tommy and is living with Oilcan; not a word about the battered female. She also knows that something happened involving the trains at Station Square. She doesn’t think about that either. (To be fair, she didn’t know that Oktoberfest was being held there and that loads of humans were in danger. She will freak once someone finally connects the two for her.)

Harbinger starts shortly after tea with Oilcan at the end of Elfhome. Jin has flown home and discovered the mess waiting for him.