Inspiration

Some­times inspi­ra­tion strikes at the odd­est times. Some­times, though, it comes when I call it. Maybe inspi­ra­tion is a cat.

Because this post will con­tain some spoil­ers for Salyx, I’ll put the rest “below the fold”, as all the kidz say theze dayz.

Wow, does that last sen­tence make me sound as old and crotch­ety as I think it does? It does? Oh well.

Any­ways.

Like I said: Salyx spoil­ers below.
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Still with me? Okay then. You Have Been Warned.

Salyx has a vil­lain who isn’t real­ly revealed as a vil­lain till the third act. I was toy­ing with why she becomes a vil­lain, try­ing to find moti­va­tions beyond the sur­face one that I’ve already estab­lished, and I hit on some­thing that seemed to send her in the oppo­site direc­tion: I thought, what if she falls in love dur­ing the course of the nov­el? Well, but then her rea­sons for turn­ing nasty are less­ened even more, since the root of her dark­ness is the death, decades ago, of her beloved husband.

Hmmm, says I. If my vil­lain’s moti­va­tions are weak to me, read­ers ain’t gonna believe them either. I don’t want her to be the vil­lain because I need her to be a villain.

Then, tonight, as I sat down to start some writ­ing on the sto­ry, it hit me:

Her new lover dies too.

That easy. And it fits with the sto­ry, too, because the plan­et is a young colony, and its pop­u­la­tion is still strug­gling with the after-effects of radi­a­tion sick­ness suf­fered by the first colonists, thanks to flawed shield­ing on the colony ships.

So. To work!