This novel was born from a super nerdy place called role playing. I admit I’m a super nerd. I’m in the IT profession after all. I hesitated a long time before I took the final leap to super nerdom but I’m glad I did. Our game master tasked us all with picking from a race we liked and then form a character out of it. My character’s name was Lorelei (German for Siren) and she was initially good. She was of a winged race which is what drew me to her, an adult, and of course beautiful, but she was no fallen angel.
Over time she began to really grow on me and became three dimensional. Our game master encouraged us to build a past for them and rewarded us for weaving that into the story line. So her story was this. She came from another world and somehow fell into this world, a fantastic world created by our game master, and she was unable to speak the language and she had no memories of her past. And as I realized later, for good reason. Some of them would suffer from a disease that drove them to violent madness, simply called the fever back then, and she had it, but her amnesia protected her.
Of course one day the memories came back and so did the disease. Once a generally good character she slowly turned into a conflicted woman struggling to control the dark urges brought on by the disease. And to make matters worse, she later acquired a demon bound sword that could change between sword and bow. But one day the group disbanded but Lorelei remained with me and I decided, after she refused to stop talking to me, that her story had to be told. So one day I caved and decided to write a trilogy but I struggled hard to find her voice. She insisted that I write it in first person but I’m not a fan of this, and she can be quite scary, so I struggled to find her voice in third person. Finally I found it but then I had the daunting task of writing her as a young woman, showing how she became who she is now.
Her back story has changed, her race name has changed and I asked permission of my game master to use this character but her outcome was the same. She was infected with what now became the mind bending disease called the Renai. Just how do you start a character who becomes so conflicted, as a young innocent girl? This took me some time but I finally got going and joined a critique group whom I can’t thank enough. Without them I wouldn’t be where I am now with a completed novel, now out with test readers, and ready to find an agent.
So Rise of the Winged Assassin was born. As I mentioned her story is out with trusted test readers and I’ve begun looking for agents on Query Tracker, an online tool for this type of thing. If you’ve finished a rough draft and don’t know what’s next, check out Veronica Roth’s blog on Good Reads. She’s started a blog on editing the rough draft and it’s fantastic. I adore her and her books DIVERGENT AND INSURGENT and I’m dying waiting for the next one.
I plan on keeping this blog up to date on my progress. Hopefully it will insprire you.