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.