Squeetus summer book club: Enna Burning, chapter 12
Part 3: Prisoner: Whew! Okay, let's do this. I think this part can be uncomfortable and intense for some, so feel free to hold hands if you need to.
Enna's dream: I love weird, fever dreams (if they don't go on too long). I had more fever dreams in Goose Girl early draft with young Ani sick but later cut it. But I think the image of the birds flying and breaking a mirror sky I stole from those cuts. "Cornstalks sprouted ears of fire, and the fields caught it and burned green." I love that.
The imperfect heroine: I think it's a lot easier for readers to root for Ani in Goose Girl than Enna. I think especially with female characters we're more comfortable with the good girl who stuff happens to, who shows courage in the face of terrific obstacles that aren't her fault, than we are with the girl who makes big mistakes. I think both kinds of heroines are valid.
Sileph: Man, this chapter...I don't even know what to say about this chapter except it does what I hoped it would do. Reading it now, I feel what I think Enna is feeling. She is complicated. He is complicated. Life is complicated.
Looking at rewrite notes for one draft, I have a full page of notes on parts 1,2,&4, but only two lines for part 3: "Need to see the progression continue here, the yearning becomes much stronger, due to the king’s-tongue and then the long times when she is forced to keep it in against her will" I wonder if this section was easier for me to write for some reason, or at least her arc and sequence of events made sense from an earlier draft, so I didn't have as much revision.
Writing the first draft, it was around this point, Enna a prisoner in a tent, I had to put the book on hold for some time. My husband and I had both lost our jobs in the recession. I was revising The Goose Girl (which I’d sold but the amount was very small, not enough to live on even for a couple of months) while we were both job hunting. I found work first and so went off to work again as an Instructional Designer. Working full time and editing Goose Girl nights, I had little time for Enna Burning. Eventually GG was done and I got back to Enna, finally rescuing her from that tent!
Melissa asks, "I love listening to audio books especially the Books of Bayern and of course Austenland. As an author do you have any say in the cast or the sound of each book?" No I don't. Full Cast Audio has always been so kind and will consult me on pronunciations of names or my opinion about a male or a female narrator, but I'm not directly involved. Which is fine.