(You can find Part 1 of this article here.)

SPOILER ALERT from this point forward.

Remember how in yesterday’s post I said that in writing, things seldom work out quite  as we’d planned?

Oh man, did “The Codex of Desire” hit me over the head with that lesson, MULTIPLE TIMES.

Although the matriarchy-versus-patriarchy conflict was built into my earliest concepts of “Codex”, the original plot was oriented towards the main male character (Tir’at), and his feelings and actions. In that sense it was a standard “Big Man Hero” narrative — and I think that if I’d written it that way, the whole thing would have turned out elegantly enough, but.. well, probably a bit boring, to be honest.

Maybe a whole lot boring.

NOPE! The Writing Machine inside my head had completely different ideas, which it failed to share with me initially. I pounded out the first draft during 2015 and 2016, put it aside for one year and three months, then went back to re-read it in early September 2017 — yep, I could still stand to look at it, which is always a good sign. My hero was still engaging to me— always an EXCELLENT sign. I was poised to move ahead with telling Tir’at’s story, primarily from his point of view…

… but that didn’t last very long. In fact, it only lasted until mid-September 2017, when I took a “Why High Concept?” seminar with Lori Wilde during SavvyAuthors.com‘s SavvyWriterCon 2017. Lori had us all write out one-sentence pitches for our novels, and when I posted my first set of possible “hooks”, she told me outright:

“The slave girl is the protagonist. Make her the focus of your pitch.”

And just like that, lightning struck, the angels sang, and I realized:

Oh my God, I wrote a female Hero without even knowing I was writing a female Hero!

And that Hero was the lowest ranked slave in her society. But she was also the individual who got the action moving and KEPT the action moving, with Tir’at’s arrival in the Tribal settlement as her “inciting incident”.

So — Tir’at was NOT the Hero at all.

Do you know what Tir’at was?

He was the Damsel in Distress, that’s what — right down to being kept prisoner in a tower!

Okay, trope inverted without me ever intending to invert it. By now my head was spinning, and the vertigo only increased when I started thinking about what I’d actually written in more depth.

Who was Tir’at focussed on? Who got HIM moving? That’s right: the female Poet and the female Most Potent Chieftess, with the female slave Girn’ash supplying intelligence, suggestions, and plans to help him achieve his overriding “Oh, I’m so desperately in love with La’leet!” goals. He wasn’t just the Damsel in Distress, he was the Damsel Helplessly In Love, his “male” rationality completely overcome.

My male main character might have been the fulcrum that the novel moved around, but the actual powers that motivated him and manipulated him for their own purposes were ALL FEMALE.

And then the second realization struck:

Oh my Goddess, I inadvertently wrote a feminist novel!

And from that point on, my approach to writing “The Codex of Desire” changed radically, I believe for the better.

Want to know more? Tune into the “Femisphere” broadcast on September 20th, 2018 — or you can also catch it on replay through the CKUW archives, starting a day or two after the initial broadcast. 🙂

Any questions you’d like answered right now? Feel free to pop them into the comments!

One of the first interview requests I received in response to “Codex” was from the University of Winnipeg feminist radio show “Femisphere”. My spot will be airing live at 8:15-8:55 AM CST on Thursday, September 20th, 2018, and I’m looking forward to discussing the feminist themes which are such a big part of my novel.

SPOILER ALERT from this point forward.

In the “Codex” universe, an alien presence known as the Interstellar Codex arrived on Earth 67 million years ago. The Codex released a genetic engineering retrovirus into a large population of small (approximately raven-sized) raptor theropod dinosaurs who lived in the mountains of an area which would later become part of Western Alberta. Some of those dinosaurs sickened and died; others were unaffected by the virus; but in some of them the virus “took”, and reworked them at the genetic level to provide them with more efficiently structured brains, longer and more agile hands, and the ability to learn (and communicate using) the written word.

This last gift gave the new population their name — the Culture of the Word — and they relocated to a large nearby valley, leaving behind the surviving unaffected dinosaurs, who proudly called themselves the Tribes of the Inspiration and relied on spoken stories, poetry, and songs as a repository for their shared knowledge.

Possibly the biggest difference between the two populations, however, was imposed by the Interstellar Codex through a written decree: in the Culture of the Word, male must always be dominant over female. This was a mind-bending change from the ways of the Tribes, who had been matriarchal since the earliest dim memories marching back into the ages before they gained the powers of speech.

In “The Codex of Desire”, Tir’at~Esk, a proud Courier/Scribe of the Culture, is captured by the Tribes and plunged head-first into a society where he is expected to behave as a subordinate — and worse, he has caught the amorous attention of the Most Potent Chieftess Ev’ora, who is determined to coerce him into her harem. (She must convince him to submit willingly, since no male can be mated against his will and expect to produce viable issue,) Ev’ora has a lot riding on convincing Tir’at to mate with her: she hasn’t kindled in many months, and no Chieftess who is barren is permitted to continue as leader of her Tribe, much less of all the Tribes. Tir’at is therefore her “Illustrious Guest”, and she grants him a beautifully appointed “nest” for his comfort as well as the most delicious of foods and the most delectable of perfumes… but he is her prisoner, no matter how luxurious his prison.

When I started writing “Codex” (during National Novel Writing Month in 2015), using only the barest of notes, my plan was clear: Tir’at was the hero of this story, a brave and noble Warrior who proudly resisted the debased desires of the Most Potent Chieftess, and whose love for the Poetess he sees performing at a banquet is both clear-headed and pure. There was a sentence about a character named Girn’ash, the slave girl who served the purely plot-determined device of (somehow) uniting the two lovers and who would die for Tir’at in the end, but nothing more was said about her or planned for her. Above all, the story was Tir’at’s story, and he was always strutting around at the centre of events.

Here’s the relevant paragraph from my initial outline:

So far, the following background elements are shaping up to be important for me… in brief, the plot involves small intelligent feathered theropod dinosaurs and a tale of war, imprisonment, love-at-first-sight, secrets, lies, hatred, betrayal and murder in a social setting similar to the samurai vs ninja conflicts of 15th century Japan. Tir’at is the MMC, a brave young warrior of the Culture of the Word who’s been captured by the primitive Tribes of the Inspiration; La’leet is a beautiful young poet of the Tribes, whom Tir’at sees singing/dancing and falls instantly in love with; and Girn’ash is an ugly low-ranked female servant who has fallen secretly in love with Tir’at, who will end up conniving to bring him together with La’leet — and who will wind up dying for him, all in vain.

In short, Girn’ash was a throw-away character who existed only to assist and to glorify Tir’at’s story arc. Well… in writing things seldom work out quite as we’d planned. More about that in tomorrow’s post.