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.