Even after setting Southern Discomfort in 1973 (as I mentioned last week) my protagonists didn’t seem to catch fire. They didn’t work for me at all.
In the very first draft (again, as I blogged about last week), my protagonist was a tough guy, marginally legal, from the Big Apple. A Southern friend from Pharisee County brought him south after Aubric McAlister’s murder to help find the killer. Several drafts later, my hero became a woman radical in the 1970s. She’d been part of an anti-war terrorist group, though strictly bombing buildings, no killing innocents. When they decided to cross that line she called the cops. That left her completely isolated — the authorities didn’t trust her, her friends on the left thought she was a traitor. Her one remaining friend, a Southerner from Pharisee, invites her south when he heads home for Aubric’s funeral. Not to help with the case but to get her somewhere nobody would know her so she could chill for a while.
I finally realized the main reason none of these characters worked. In most of the drafts they learned the secret of Pharisee — it’s run by a pair of centuries-old elves — in the first couple of chapters. Plus having a buddy to guide them into the county’s mysteries gave them someone to lean on. That reduced the pressure, at least initially. It made them too comfortable.
Second lieutenant Maria Esposito is not comfortable. You can tell from the cover.
The difference from my earlier protagonists is that she’s never comfortable, not from the first moment we see her. The incident three years ago in which she stopped Vietnam Veterans For Justice from committing a murder went horribly wrong: it turned into a firefight that wiped out everyone but her (later I changed that to add a couple more survivors). Despite trying to stop the murder, it was added to the charges against her for previous terrorist acts. She relies on a fake driver’s license, never gives her real name and tries not to attract attention, though her dark Sicilian skin and kinky hair make that hard at times. She’s almost completely isolated from the people around her — a common theme in my writing is emotionally cutoff people learning to reconnect.
Even though she’s on a Greyhound bus full of passengers, she’s effectively alone when she arrives in Pharisee. And discovers the freak torrential rains — nature is literally mourning for Aubric’s death — have stranded her there. Instead of traveling to Atlanta and vanishing into its crowds, she’s stuck in a small town … where the FBI are investigating the recent murders of Aubric and rising black politician Richard Cannon. Just the place for a federal fugitive, right? And then Olwen McAlister, grieving widow, announces she’s had a vision — the only way Aubric’s killer goes down is if Maria helps.
That would be a nightmare even if this were a mundane thriller. Then the supernatural troubles start. In this version (which went through multiple further drafts, I should note) Maria has no idea what’s happening. That makes it more terrifying and keeps ramping up the pressure. Plus she has no friendship with anyone so she has no reason to stick around. She has to spend the first night at Olwen’s — the sheriff made that very clear — but after that she figures she can skip town before the FBI notices her. When Aubric’s killer starts threatening her, Maria has even more reason to run. So she does … but as you’ll see, she doesn’t get far.
Setting things up that way led to other changes. In earlier drafts when Maria discovers there’s something monstrous threatening innocent people it inspires her to stay and fight it. The more emotionally numb Maria of the final draft isn’t so heroic. She keeps trying to run and only changes her mind when Olwen offers her something she desperately needs. Eventually Maria chooses to help for heroic reasons (“I thought I’d gotten rid of my ideals. Turns out they’re a monkey on back.”) but it’s a long slow path.
Onto the spine of her character arc I added lots of other details. Her feelings about other Italian-Americans, many of whom looked down at Sicilians. Her chain smoking. The late Grandma Sophia, a superstitious woman whose warnings about black magic sound a lot more reasonable as Pharisee gets weirder. Her experiences, good and bad, in ‘nam. While it didn’t start out that way, I ended up with Maria’s character arc becoming as compelling (I hope) as the story itself. So that’s a win.
Cover by Samantha Collins. All rights to image are mine.
