I want there to be a love interest

While in the hospital, Rawiya also meets Halvis. and I want Halvis, Hal, to be important to the other side of the story. Halvis gets caught up in this secret society that works to hide the reality of the sidhe's existence. He was out hiking when the eclipse started, and found himself in the center of some fairly serious stuff. The society, low on members anyway, uses this change to recruit him rather than to erase him or his memories. In so doing, they reveal to him much more than he ever expected to learn.

This was a difficult thing for me, I did want to use this as a way to help inform Rawiya, and thereby the readers, of what's actually going on. But like I've said, I feel I revealed too much too fast. Of course, there's also the issue of Hal doing exactly what he's not supposed to be doing, revealing the secrets that he learns. I ran a difficult risk with that, and Rawiya expressed some legitimate concerns. There should have been more blow back from what they'd done, but really I should have been more careful in how I handled it.

As far as their relationship goes, I did want them to be good together. I wanted moments of cuteness, and closeness. I want Rawiya to develop a healthy attachment to Hal. But I have to admit, the difficulty for me in doing this is that I don't have a lot of experience with it myself. I also haven't read a lot of girls journals to get any idea of what they might actually express or how.

One of the reasons I was hoping for reader interaction was hoping female readers might speak up and help me with that side of expressing things. Through questions, or helpful suggestions, or whatever. I could use those things to help prepare future journal entries to answer the kinds of questions they asked, to take into account the suggestions offered.

In any case, as things unfolded and Rawiya learned about what was going on and what Hal was now doing, I want for this to cause issues. See, I didn't want Rawiya to learn about Candace right off. In fact, what I wanted was for Rawiya to meet another Fairy who is openly (to her) fae. This was another event that I wanted to happen soon, I just hadn't quite figured out how.

Through this other fairy, I wanted Rawiya to learn about Hal's organization from the fairies perspective. I wanted Rawiya to know that the fairy feared the organization, feared that they would find him and take him away never to be seen again. Because of this, Rawiya found herself keeping a secret from Hal. Not just about this new friend of hers, but by this point she should be able to recognize that she can see things that others cant. Things that are actually there, she's not hallucinating. And knowing that, she'd be worried that Hal's organization might take an interest in her. So she starts keeping from Hal the things she sees. Well, she'd have already been, considering at first she thinks she's hallucinating, she was keeping that a secret from everyone. But with everything happening, it becomes harder and harder for her to hide that, because what she does find she has difficulty with, is recognizing when others can see what she normally does. When a fairy shows itself openly Rawiya finds herself acting like its not there, only to then realize everyone else can see it and is responding to it.

But the biggest thing is when Rawiya finally learns that Candace is si. I wanted there to be a definite point at which she discovers that Hal's organization, and thereby Hal, is working against the fairies. Preferably by Hal taking her fairy friend into custody or otherwise telling Rawiya to cut contacts with him. Or maybe Hal learns about the fairy and reacts badly to him, even without knowing that he's a friend of Rawiya's. This puts her on alert and strains their relationship, and even more so because Rawiya stops being comfortable with Hal at her and Candace's place.

I want the story to have a heroine

As I have already said, Rawiya was meant to be the eyes through which the story is told. She's an important part, but she's not who the story is about. Candice is who the story is truly about.

I very much enjoy the story concept of the hero or heroine being amnesic, not remembering who they are or that they are the hero. The Long Kiss Goodnight is one of my favorite movies, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is second favorite only to Planescape: Torment. I love the idea that the hero has the skills, doesn't need to be trained, but has to remember them. In so doing, they learn who they are, and sometimes that isn't who they were. It's a different sort of discovery, rather than training for and molding into what they need to be.

So when Rawiya meets Candice, Candice doesn't know who she, herself, is. A lot of the story I wanted to tell was about her discovering who she is. But I wanted to put a twist on it, Candice doesn't want to know.

This was probably the hardest part about telling the story from Rawiya's point of view, I couldn't just tell Candice's point of view. And Candice isn't one to just confide in people, but I was working up to that. There were some specific events I had in mind to happen once Rawiya had moved in with Candice and things settled in.

Candice, as you may have already guessed, isn't human. She's fae, sidhe, of the fair folk. In so many mythologies, the immortal can become mortal. Like an Angel cutting off their wings, or otherwise losing them. The fae though, they are elemental beings, they are forces of nature, they simply exist. Becoming mortal isn't as easy as removing a part of their being, they have to forget who they are. Candice was fae, she's not any more.

But this is a tricky thing. It doesn't all happen at once. At first its just your memories. But you still retain the aspects that are fae. So while Candice couldn't remember who she was, she could still see the world through fae eyes, she still maintained the attitudes that were long since established in her psyche. She needed to forget those things too, and that requires time and influence. She needed someone to model for her how to be human.

Now this gets into motivations and needs that I'm not yet ready to reveal. For now I want to dwell on why Candice might be mortal.

One thing about the fae is that if you know their name, their true name, you can summon them, track them, even control them. Summoning them is as easy as saying their name three times. Which is why you must be careful to use a sidhe's name, even saying it the first time will make them aware of you. And just because you've summoned them, doesn't mean that you are protected from them or have any control of them. If you haven't prepared yourself, you may not even see that you have summoned them, after all they won't be seen if they don't want to be.

A fairies name is as much a part of their being as their nature, it isn't just their identifier. Part of forgetting ones self is to lose ones name. It is perhaps one of the worst things you can do to them, you remove them of their nature and leave them mortal and vulnerable. It is a death sentence.

But once the fairy loses their name, they can no longer be summoned, tracked, or controlled. The sidhe can voluntarily, and in rare circumstance will, forget themselves.

I wanted to spend time getting to know Candace. I wanted to show how her attitude changes as she slowly forgets her nature. When she first comes to in the hospital, she's still fairy, she just doesn't remember. So she still acts like a fairy would. She's practically captured, constantly under guard, and she hurts from injuries that should have long since gone away. She can't hide, but she also can't escape because she can't remember how. So she's indignant, even when the people around her are trying to be helpful. There's one more aspect to that, but I won't reveal it yet.

What changes is meeting Rawiya. Up until she does, Candice is simply surrounded by people who are constantly pestering her. Asking her questions she doesn't know how to answer, her in laws are horrible towards her, and the doctors keep poking, prodding, and telling her what to do. She's not able to see where she is or what's going on around her. But when Rawiya wanders past her room, even though she's staring at Candace, she looks away embarrassed and tries to leave. Candace reaches out to her, asking for help, and finds someone not expecting anything of her. As they talk, Candace comes to learn the nature of where she is, it's not a prison but a place of healing. Rawiya is like her, injured differently, but on the mend. In her fairy mind of trying to figure things out, Rawiya becomes the person after which to model. And this is why Candace latches on to her.

The time I wanted to spend getting to know Candace was time I wanted to show her struggling with her nature. As much as anything, I wanted to use this to create an air of mystery around her and help tip off that she wasn't human. I wanted her to be curious about the world, indicating a change in her perceptions, but at the same time her joy and fancy would work to highlight her nature.

After Rawiya moved in, I wanted her nature to become more apparent. Sleeping all day and being up all night, her affinity for cooking, and her difficulty with technology.

The one event that I was working up to, was for Rawiya to come home and find Candace dancing. Candace is lost to her dance and isn't paying attention. So caught up in her nature, her wings reveal themselves. Normally to any human this wouldn't be an issue, but Rawiya isn't like other humans. I was going to use this event to highlight how she sees things that others can't.

Prepared for it to happen I had already written this:
“It might be easy to say they were dark in color, but that would almost be wrong. As I sit here pondering how to describe them, I find myself thinking about how ancient peoples described the night sky as a blanket covering the world. If such a silken blanket were to actually exist, her wings would have been cut from the same material. They were translucent in a way, you could see through them, but it was as if what was seen through them was seen in the dark; like the lights were turned out and you were seeing by the light of the moon and stars.”

Of course, Rawiya still isn't completely aware that what she is seeing is real. So she writes it off, though it becomes important later when she admits to what she's seen.

I want the story to be about the way things are

This is difficult to do, because the story is in large part telling about what happens after the fall of O Véu and the return of the fae. These are big things, but I wanted them to happen gradually. The way I was doing this was perhaps too gradual. I knew I wanted things to take time, but I struggled with feeling they were taking too long and having too much revealed when I would mention what all was happening. I used Halvis to help reveal some of what was happening outside Rawiya's little world, and I feel I went overboard with him.

But that slow change was what was supposed to help me lay out the way things were. And I feel looking over things that I failed in that regard. I didn't emphasis the worldly problems we already have, in particular global warming and the rise of fascism. I was focused too much on Rawiya's day to day life, and to be fair that's kind of what a journal format leads too. If anything, this is why I'm rethinking the format I want to use. I hoped that people would already be aware of the larger issues at hand, and that I could simply mention them in passing to help keep my story grounded in reality without having to dwell on them.

I was hoping though for reader interaction. I felt that using a blog format might encourage people to interact with the journal and maybe even to interact with Rawiya personally. But honestly I wasn't even really getting readers to begin with, much less the readers that might want to respond. I had hoped that having people who interacted with my story would give me a way to incorporate more friends than just that of Max.

My greater dreams was that people might incorporate the ideas presented into their own stories that would make the whole thing alive. People making up stories (or even relating actual experiences that they had) telling about encountering weird things that might be explained by the fae. I'd even incorporated an experience of my own as one such odd occurrence.

In any case, the main elements in my story of "the way things are" was Rawiya's family and long standing friend Max. But as I already mentioned, I didn't want them to be distractions so I took them for granted and kept them at a distance.

Dad is a hard working man who keeps busy and is usually at work. Mom was more the homemaker, but I didn't want her to be so limited, so she had a history of work elsewhere that I touched upon. I wanted the feeling that she was a homemaker but where able she'd help out at various public programs. I wanted her to be an artist I think and to have ties with the community.

Efe was a nickname I'd given to Rawiya's brother. I never did come up with a proper name, but kinda felt I didn't need to. He was off serving, which gave me a good excuse to not mention him very often, but I wanted to keep his ties strong, which was why I'd tried to maintain some letter writing and the occasional phone call. I wanted to use his position in the service to provide some contact with what the military was doing in response to everything that was going on. But I knew this would be difficult, mostly due to lack of contact when things did happen, and his inability to report on anything. In my introductory letter I only mentioned Fayette's Aunt and Uncle, I had purposely left that vague because I wasn't sure which Aunt or Uncle Fayette would spend most of her years with, or even whether Efe would survive.

Which leaves Batel, who's in college at the time of the writing of the journals. I wanted Batel to have a relatively normal life, and to be able to provide a personal touch to the oddities that people would be experiencing over the coming years. It'd give me a way to express things happening elsewhere while keeping the important bits happening in the immediate. To that end I had hoped that Batel would travel after graduating college. And to be honest I was leaning on her being the Aunt and mother of the cousins that Fayette is "currently" playing with.

Max is the one who I kept close, she was Rawiya's best friend as of the writing of the journals. But of course she was going to college while Rawiya was working and saving up to do the same. This gave them somewhat strained contact, Rawiya had weekdays off regularly while Max schooled during the week. So I tried to work in a break between classes that would allow Max to join Rawiya for lunch once in a while.

I wanted Max to be an opposite to Rawiya. Where Rawiya is reserved and quiet, I wanted Max to be outrageous and boisterous. I wanted Rawiya to be scared and uncertain, I wanted her to grow from that. And I wanted Max to be adventurous and self assured. So when something was happening in the mountains, Max had to be the one to go check it out.

I feel I didn't give Max as much of a spotlight as I should have, and I mentioned this before. So I was constantly trying to find some way to bring her into the story. I still do whenever I think about this.

In my head I see Max as a freckled red head with a mischievous smile. I see her tall to Rawiya, but not necessarily tall in a more general sense of things. Merida springs to mind as I write this. I see her as outgoing and perpetually in the company of a different boyfriend. To me she has a magnetic personality, people want to be around her. But she is uncompromising and unwilling to settle, and so people get hurt. Max just moves on, and doesn't look back.

These were the people that I wanted to establish Rawiya's life with, they were her foundation. Which is why I feel I do them a disservice by keeping them all so distance. It felt like I'd already moved on from them, and wasn't giving me the ability to move on.

I have this story I want to tell

I wanted to tell the story through the eyes of Rawiya, someone who has a unique perspective on events as they unfold. To that end I wanted her to be able to see things that other people cannot. In order to explain this I came up with the idea that she had a tumor growing in or near her visual cortex that altered her ability to see. I wanted her to be able to see things that noone else could, to see the fae that normally remain hidden from people unless they want to be seen. The idea was that this tumors presence made is so that whatever magic the fae use to hide wouldn't work on her. She could see the fae, but she could also see through their illusions.

The fae though have not existed amongst us for a very long time. It's not like they just went into hiding and never revealed themselves, 'cause there are ways to find them. They were made simply not physically present. And so people couldn't just not see them, they couldn't even find the fae when they looked. Over the generations, the idea of the fae faded to myth and legend, and today the common person knows only a fairy tale version of the fae, something so different that when the fae do show up they still aren't recognized for what they truly are.

Because of this, when Rawiya first starts seeing the fae, she wouldn't know what she was seeing. Nor would she have ever seen them before because they weren't there before. This would be a new thing for her, and because noone else around her would be able to see it she couldn't be sure she wasn't just hallucinating. So I also wanted to suggest that the tumor might cause her to hallucinate, if not just make it difficult for her to make sense of what she were seeing, or to simply cause her to go blind. I wanted her to be unsure of what she was seeing, unable to trust that it was real.

If Rawiya is going to be the central perspective, I needed to give her a family and a life. I was using a journal format, so I felt she didn't need to write down her full name all the time if ever. So I've never actually given her a surname, or even a middle name. Even her parents have just been Mom and Dad. I don't know if that's a bad thing but if I want to change the format of the story, to tell it in a different way, I may have to come up with those things.

And Rawiya has two siblings, a brother whose nickname is Efe, and sister Batel. I didn't want them to feel unimportant, but didn't want them to be a distraction to the main story, so they were both older and had gone off, Efe was army or navy I think while Batel was in college.

Rawiya needed to have an established life, which included friends. Again, not many, so Max was her one good friend. But I fear I am not presenting Max as important enough as she should be for being Rawiya's best friend. I lean on the idea that Rawiya's life is moving on from the simplicity of High School, and so her ability to interact with her friend is more limited. I don't know if that's a mistake or not, and so I've been wondering how else I can bring Max into the story.

Since my format was to present this as a journal, I didn't want to spend too much time describing Rawiya. I mean, if you are writing a journal, are you going to spend your time describing yourself or are you just going to take your appearance for granted since it's not a novel for others to read? As such, I left Rawiya's description to be addressed in comparison to others. So an so is taller than me, has lighter skin than me, or darker skin than me. I got new clothes today, a blouse, jeans, or a cute vest. I've never met someone with darker hair than mine, but Candace's takes the cake. But I worry I spent so much time on that that I was giving the impression that girls spend all their time caring about their appearance. An impression that I didn't necessarily want.

I wanted the story to start with an important event, so I chose the eclipse that was set to happen that year in August. A date, amusingly enough, that has significance to my own life completely unrelated to the story. I always worried that readers who knew me might think I'd picked that date because of it's relation to my life, but the honest answer was no, it was simply when the full lunar eclipse was set to happen.

The idea that I wanted to reveal was that the lunar eclipse was a targeted event, used to invoke magic that would break down the barrier that had separated the fae from our world. But of course I wanted that revealed to the reader as it was revealed to Rawiya, so no immediate explanation was given. Though I think I handled it poorly and heavy handedly with Halvis. I think I used him to reveal too much too soon.

Since Rawiya's tumor effected her in a magical way, the idea I was running with was that the magic involved in tearing down this barrier (O Véu) was so spectacular that it cause Rawiya to pass out, and continued to effect her for a week afterward. As such my story, her journal, opened with her waking in the hospital and spent a week or so there while they ran tests on her because she was continuing to have issues. Not only with her dizzy spells, but bad enough that she couldn't gain her sense of balance to even stand up and walk.

This also gave me time to introduce a couple of other characters who I wanted to be important to all this. Candace, who I wanted to become a close friend of Rawiya's, and Halvis who shortly after would become her boyfriend.