In case you forgot what it looked like!
The Sales Pitch
25 Ways to Kill a Werewolf came out on Tuesday 12th August (Squeeee!) from Fox Spirit Books [External Link]. The paperback is available from Amazon (here: [External Link]).
Ebooks are available from Amazon (here: [External Link]) and will be available from Spacewitch [External Link].
The Background Posts: On Character
Elkie Bernstein herself was the third thing to come to me after the title and the location. Essentially, what happened was I put together the basics of the premis and then asked “What kind of person can manage this?” I needed someone who would have a certain amount of physical resilience and opportunism in order to take advantage of any luck I felt like throwing in their direction. FOr preference, they would also be outdoorsy and familiar with their surroundings. This would give them an advantage and slightly more believable luck.
Everything else? Well…
All Characters Are Mary Sues
A Mary Sue (or Gary / Marty Stu) is a character who is there for the author’s wish fulfillment. You can find a good explanation here: [TV Tropes: Mary Sue External Link] They’re a stand-in, the person the author wishes they could be or wants to be or hopes to be in that situation. (If, you know, werewolves should exist and start tearing around the British countryside.) The typical sign that a character is a Mary Sue is that they’re just so talented, skilled and lucky. They’re too much.
In the main, though, I think the accusation of being the author’s avatar can be applied to most characters if only because they are an internal fragment of the writer. We have to be able to imagine them and give them a consistent character, which means we have to be able to reason out behaviour and make sure everything goes in the direction we want. To reference my Grand Unified Theory, a writer makes up an asteroid (a person) of roughly the right shape and material for what we require, we put them in the right orbit of our Life-Simulation to be able to achieve what we want, then we throw things at them.
Of course, Elkie was given a lot in common with me by simple virtue of giving her a large chunk of my childhood location – give or take some details. And as she stayed outdoors, I can’t deny she’s the kind of person I wouldn’t mind being – she is pretty kick-ass – but my realisation that I couldn’t cope with urban life came after I’d left those kind of opportunities behind. I hadn’t even realised those opportunities might be open to me. Elkie, on the other hand, doesn’t have the opportunities to go the other way available to her. I won’t let her.
We have other things in common, too. Some of which I didn’t intend. I hadn’t realised quite how much I liked chocolate hazelnut spread until I started writing Elkie and now I’m wondering if it is actually an addiction.
Belonging But Not
There was, for a while, indecision whether the main character would be a woman. I prefer to write women – I guess I find it easier to write something I identify with but it’s usually an unconscious decision – so I was leaning that way in the first place. On top of that, I already knew that my werewolves would all be male, so there was an urge to balance out with the main character being a woman. What I did know fairly early on was that I wanted the character that became Elkie to be an accepted outsider in her village, like I was.
I was born elsewhere and we moved in when I was very young. My older sister had more problems, which may have been more to do with the characters in her age group, but I seemed to settle in okay during the primary school years. I wanted that and for it to continue for my character. Why? Because it’s a shorthand way of including diversity bearing in mind that the rural location and the set-up meant there wouldn’t be many characters and most of them would be white. Along with implying bilingual english-welsh speakers, having a main character from elsewhere makes the fictional community just a little more rounded and diverse.
I am aware that sounds very privileged and ignorant – and I am. I’ve been trying to capture something of how I grew up, which is in a rural UK area with connections to smallholding and farming. Although things will hopefully be changing to make the villages more diverse, they’re still white majority areas and the furthest from (nominally) Anglican you’re likely to run into on a regular basis is a Catholic or open Athiest. This does not mean that there weren’t Chinese, Indian, or Pakistani families but there weren’t many. Also, fewer people white, Anglican or otherwise, are involved in agriculture these days.
I suppose I could have done that with either of the key three characters but I decided to go with the hero. As with the language issue as discussed in the location post, it gives another reason why the point of view character can believably step back and go “hang on a minute, I better explain what’s happening” instead of assuming that everything is understood because she knows what’s going on.
By chance, I was listening to BBC Radio 2 (yes, I’m embracing middle age) when there was a program about Elkie Brooks (Wikipedia: Elkie Brooks [External Link]). I always liked the name Elkie and it was mentioned in passing that it was a Yiddish nickname or short form, so I stole it, to give me a female hero with a (lapsed) Jewish background in North Wales.
ASIDE: For those of you who like coincidences, “Elkie” is a Hebrew or Yiddish short form of “Adelheid” (or “Adelaide”) meaning “Noble kind; of the noble sort”. Another short form is “Adele”, the name of our feral leader at Fox Spirit Books [External Link]
Admiring The Abstract Sculpture
(Another reference to the Grand Unified Theory)
I’m quite pleased with how Elkie turned out. The shape of her character is pleasing to my writer’s eye. In fact, I’m enjoying her so much that I want to write more works with her. Whether they’ll see the light of day remains to be seen, though.
She still has the niavety of being raised in a small world with most people just trying to get through their day without rubbing everyone else too much. It makes it a lot of fun to show her more things and explore the Fur-Skins world with. I never really know how she’ll react to different problems except that she’ll do her best to handle it and survive the experience. It’s that attitude (which I chose in the beginning and, unfortunately, I don’t seem to have myself) that makes her come out swinging and opened up the opportunities to win against werewolves.
The 25 Ways To Kill A Werewolf Background Posts
I thought I’d make it easier to jump from post to post so the series is linked at the bottom of each post. The three posts are:
- 25 Ways To Kill A Werewolf: On Titles
- 25 Ways To Kill A Werewolf: On Genre
- 25 Ways To Kill A Werewolf: On Location
- 25 Ways To Kill A Werewolf: On Character (this one)