Tag Archives: Southern Discomfort genesis

This Saturday, Southern Discomfort goes live, though the Kindle version won’t publish until the 18th (I don’t know why). This will be the last post about the supporting cast, focusing on my grieving daoine sidhe, Olwen McAlister and the community she and the late Aubric founded, Pharisee County Georgia. Spoilers ahead, though nothing that I think ruins the book (one reason I’m not blogging about my villain, Gwalchmai — I think I’d have to give away too much).

As y’all eventually learn, Olwen and Aubric McAlister were daoine sidhe — elves — who like most of their kind spent centuries flitting between England and their otherworldly realm, the Hither Country. When the Puritans came to power after the English Civil War, however, they saw the fae as demons and sought to drive them out. Ringing the church bells, for instance; in themselves, they’re harmless but rung with malice towards elvenkind, they create agony. The sidhe closed the gates to their realm and fled into a further plane, the Thither Country. From there, they can never return.

Aubric and Olwen were different. They liked life in the mortal realm so they fled to Ireland, outside the Puritan reach. There they lived outside a small mortal town where people respected the old ways. All was well … until Cromwell’s forces invaded and crushed the Irish. Olwen and Aubric fled again, across the sea to the New World, taking with them the townsfolk in a magical boat. They arrived and wound up settling in Georgia before it was even a colony.

As Katharine Briggs’ Encyclopedia of Fairies makes clear, the fae of British folklore are not pleasant people. I developed Olwen and Aubric — whom Gwalchmai has murdered before the book begins — with that in mind. They’re immortal; from their perspective any pain they inflict on mortals will be over in an eyeblink; who cares about the suffering of mayflies? Their own suffering, by contrast, is a long-lasting thing. They hold grudges and they take revenge when they’re crossed, and it’s easier than you’d think to cross them.

By the time the book starts, Olwen has been watching over the people of Pharisee for three centuries and it’s mellowed her. She might be disdainful of outsiders’ lives but Pharisee folk? They’re hers. She will protect them, as she’s always done. She’s as close as I’ve ever come to a “morally gray” character, as so many book ads put it. The good stuff she does is noble and compassionate, the bad stuff is very bad. I think I’ve done a good job acknowledging both.

Then there’s Pharisee itself. I made the right call in casting Maria, an outsider, as my protagonist. She doesn’t know what’s going on, she’s primarily concerned with herself rather than Pharisee; I thought at one point about turning Joan Slattery into the protagonist. I realized if I did that, the exposition would get awkward: Joan already knows everything about Pharisee. Sharing information with the reader would take either me providing info-dumps or Joan having “as you know” conversations. An outsider slowly learning the truth, works much better.

However the more I worked on the book, the more I realized Maria wasn’t enough. Even adding Rachel, Liz and Joan wasn’t enough. Because this wasn’t just the story of the individual residents, it’s the story of the entire county (primarily the town of Pharisee). What it’s been like for them flourishing under the guidance of Olwen and Aubric. How they’ve adapted as outsiders have become residents, buying up property and turning it into a bedroom community for Atlanta commuters. What happens when Aubric, one of their rocks for 300 years, lies dead.

So my POV cast is quite large. Sheriff Slattery. Father Michael, the senior Catholic priest. His brother Harry, the head of the county commission. Military attorney Captain Jeff Carpenter. Dr. Aaron Moreno, one of the new physicians in town. His daughter Susan. Some of them know the truth; some don’t. Together they make up the mosaic of Pharisee. Which Gwalchmai is on the brink of smashing to pieces.

I’ll be announcing the book release Saturday, with links.

My cover is by Samantha Collins, the other artist is unknown to me. All rights to images remain with current holders.

My Southern Discomfort supporting cast was heavily shaped by one creative decision and one awkward realization.

The creative decision was setting it in 1973. Originally I’d had my protagonist driving into town with a friend (an approach I discussed last week did not work); once I settled on ’73, it seemed logical they’d show up by bus. Which meant someone would have to meet them. Enter: Joan Slattery.

The awkward realization was looking at my first novel-length draft — this was originally a novella but it kept growing — and realizing it was an awfully white book. Shouldn’t I have some POC in the cast? Of course there were ways to work around that. The community founders were Irish (and elves, of course) and I could see them discouraging outside visitors let alone new residents. That would keep the town lily white into the present.

Only rationalizing an all-white book still left me with an all-white book. Easier — I’m used to writing women but I haven’t done much with POC in stories past — but it felt cheap and cowardly. So I decided Pharisee did have a large black population, like many Southern communities. That meant having to think about race relations there, past and present. Enter: Liz Mitchell.

In my final draft, my protagonist Maria strikes up conversations with Captain Jefferson Carpenter — Vietnam veteran, JAG, part of his right arm gone — and Kirby Slattery, who left Pharisee to pursue an art career. It’s Joan “Squiddly” Slattery — as a kid she loved Hanna Barbera’s “Squiddly Diddly” cartoon — who meets Kirby at the bus station. And acting on guidance from Olwen, ends up identifying Maria as the person Olwen McAlister has seen in a vision, the one fated to bring Aubric McAlister’s killer to justice.

One publisher’s reader said Joan was the most interesting character and ought to be the protagonist. I dig that. She’s sweet, sunny, stubborn when she gets her dander up; like Maria the crisis in Pharisee forces her to step up and become more than she’s been before, though in a different way. Joan proves herself a hero. And also, I think she’s a very likable young woman. In romance-novel terms she’s the sunshine to Maria’s grump (though no, they do not have a thing for each other).

Liz Mitchell came along a lot later. My primary black character was a reporter hired by the Pharisee Beacon to cover black news in the county, a concession that white people doing all the reporting didn’t cut it in 1973. Slowly he discovers there’s more going on in Pharisee than he thought. Nobody in my writing group found him terribly interesting. Nor any of the subplots involving the paper.

I’m not sure what prompted me to shift focus to his sister, but it proved an inspired idea. Though in the finished draft, the reporter’s nowhere to be found. Liz is the daughter of Bridget Blake, one of the “black Blakes” who dominate business in the black community. There are white Blakes who run the white business community, another branch of the same family. They don’t like each other much — there was a big dispute over whether an interracial marriage 80 years earlier had been a marriage or merely a hookup, which determined who inherited a big pot of money — but hey, business is business.

The older Pharisee blacks, remembering when lynching was common throughout the south, are very appreciative they live in a community where the McAlisters didn’t allow that. Nor did visits by KKK night-riders pose a threat — part of the county’s legend, the “Pharisee mystery,” is that nobody in the Klan’s three attacks on Pharisee ever returned. Or so the Klan says, but who’s going to take that crazy talk seriously, right? Bridget was one of the first of the younger generation to think the county could do better: end Jim Crow, integrate, don’t be so afraid of drawing attention (something the McAlisters fear greatly, as the book explains). She locked horns with Olwen despite them being friends; after she went off to college she never returned.

Liz grew up with her mother telling stories about growing up in a town with elves. She took them in the same spirit as if she’d been told “When I lived in Canada, Santa Claus used to invite us over for Christmas dinner.” Bridget never went back but after her death, Liz and her husband moved to Pharisee because it’s become a bedroom community for upper class Atlanta blacks, close to the city but quieter and with less crime. And Liz and her four-year-old son get to meet her extended family there.

Liz was perfectly positioned to be a POV character. She has roots in the African-American community but she doesn’t know Pharisee’s secrets (yet). In a county that’s been largely resistant to women’s liberation, she’s a feminist. Because she was friends with Richard Cannon, who was killed along with Aubric McAlister, she’s angry. The mix worked.

FBI Special Agent Rachel Cohen is another POV character in my ensemble cast (I won’t be listing all of them). One of the first women to become an FBI agent, she has one spectacular case on her record, stopping a FALN (Puerto Rican independence militant group) terrorist bombing. Kenning, her superior in Atlanta, put her on the McAlister case less because of her success than because she’s inexperienced. She fails, every woman in the FBI looks suspect. Rachel is very conscious of the pressure she’s under. As a Southern woman, she’s supposed to wield an iron fist hidden in a velvet glove; she’s forgetting the glove.

I think a key scene for Rachel is when Joan’s father Sheriff Slattery calls her in for help with what appears to be a lynching. Cohen’s horrified but as she tells the sheriff, she’s there to solve the McAlister/Cannon murder. She cannot divert resources to solve a local murder. Nor does she believe Slattery’s argument that the killings all tie together (spoiler: they do). It’s a harsh decision but it’s the professional one to make. And she’s a professional.

My next post will deal with the characters around whom everything revolves, Olwen McAlister and her mysterious foe Gwalchmai. Stay tuned.

Cover by Sam Collins. Rights are mine.

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.