New Release! Chapter 12: Effigy

Chapter 12: Effigy

How many versions of herself is Nieve willing to burn? As the sands of time slip through her fingers, Nieve will have to learn to clench her fist and strike the match.

This is also the devlog for Chapter 11. Sorry about that!

I’d like to use this month’s devlog to talk about the process of making this book, where we’re at now, and some excitement about the future.

Beyond Bringers was conceived of as a fanfic that I wrote while I was making camp in a cafe nearby subvertebra’s workplace. We weren’t always roommates! I worked remotely at the time, and I would make trips to visit. So this is what I was doing while waiting for emails all day. In two days time, I’d written an outline that became so much more my own thing than its original intention. I feel like I’ve mentioned this before, but it never hurts to reiterate.

Once I’d realized this was going to be my own project, I got this foolish idea that it would be my “easy” book before I started working on some of the series projects I’d already been playing with. I looked at the outline and felt so assured that it was going to be easy and then I went back through my archives of past work. Character designs, scribbled out ideas, settings, themes, I keep all of these things in sketchbooks and assorted notebooks because ideas only come to me when they come to me- and then they are gone. [I’m definitely not one of those people who “only record the good ones. If they’re good they’ll stick”]. This is the most important part of my creative process for a marathon project like a book. If I’m spending years of my life on something, it HAS to hit many of the themes that matter to me at the moment.

I decided Beyond Bringers was going to be a novel about control, morality, and defining the self. I also knew what I didn’t want to write. While Beyond Bringers is an adult novel dealing with adult themes, I wanted the “defining yourself” part of the book to speak to anyone who reads it. I don’t advertise to minors and I do my due diligence to make sure the book is clearly marked, but I’m no fool. I was a teen once, and I found ways to read above my age bracket. It’s not an endorsement of it so much as a fact. I did not want to write a book that forgets that. I want this book to be about the push and pull that every person feels deep down, to ask the question, “In spite of everything you do, have done, and will do, who are you?” My intentions are to forget the rigidity of labels and language and play in the space where words mean many things, and the labels we give ourselves barely contain our multitudes.

We’ll see how well I succeed! as the book is still not set in stone.

Once I had all my ducks in a row, I started writing. It was… November of 2019? I made some great progress before I needed surgery in January of 2020, and that threw a big wrench in my plot. I looked at all my characters again on the other side of tragedy and thought “but are they real?” I spent many years leading up to that surgery waiting for it, begging for it, going to multiple doctors appointments while barely passing my college classes and sobbing to anyone who would listen that there was something wrong with me. Then I got it, and what was wrong with me was, in fact, proven by that surgery, but it didn’t fix it. That wasn’t the first surgery I’ve ever had, but I was hinging a lot on the idea of being able to save my body, and if not save it, stop it from getting worse. I didn’t let that stop me. I took the experience and I threaded it through all the characters, weaving their histories closer together. There is so much pain in the world, it’s so easy to define ourselves by it. This is a novel where everyone is trying to write something, anything else. I don’t want to wax poetic about everything wrong with me. I like a little mystery. What I share here is to give you an idea of what became the backbone of the story. The tragedy of a body, being a complex ecosystem of cells, yet being entirely alone and drowned in the cacophony of their miscommunications.

I’ll leave breaking down the rest for a future post, when the story is over and I’m looking back.

Beyond Bringers is not the easy project I set out to create. It became so much more than that. Five years and many health issues later, I’m writing to you in the gore of what’s already been committed to the page and promising you there’s so much more.

We’re at the mid point now, just about half way through. Many of the characters who originally had a much smaller role in the story have necessitated complete rewrites at this point. The original manuscript serves its purpose, it’s a great framework, but I’ve been going back and forth with subvertebra for the last month or two banging out a new outline for what’s left. It’s exactly the same book it was before, but so much stronger.

I welcome and look forward to the challenge of deepening the meanings, building new connections, and bringing this book to all of you.

-V

It was Nate and Xander who taught Farron to use a sword <3