Author’s Note 001

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All of the following is completely optional to read. This is no narrative. It in no way affects the story. I’m mostly going to ramble for a few words.

And that’s that.

Book one closes.

Thanks for reading. I do hope you enjoyed, I certainly did.

Book two will continue as scheduled. No intermissions, no interludes. Tune in next time for 002.001.

My main goal with book one was simply to finish. And I’d say I did so. It is a coherent story, at least from my position. I do hope it was coherent for you as well.

For book two, I am going to try to give some limelight to other characters and develop some of them a little more. Eva might take a short backseat. We’ll see more non-Eva characters as POVs. Probably. Still hammering out some details though I have a few chapters written already. It is a little something of an experiment so I suppose we’ll see how that goes.

Book two will finish out the remainder of the school year and then on to book three where Eva will be the unquestionably main character once again. But that’s a ways off yet, so I won’t promise any details I might change later.

As for book one, it took a little while to get off the ground, I’d say. I can already see things that I would change were this not a web serial. The early chapters especially.

Chapter six, I do believe is the weakest chapter. Few things actually happen that progress much of anything. Devon is made to look like a buffoon a bit too much, though I may blame that on Eva handing him potions that don’t mix well. At least in my headcanon.

It wasn’t until after I finished the entire thing and started on book two that I realized Eva fell victim to the ‘main character runs off alone despite nefarious people being around and after her’ cliche. It seriously didn’t even register with me until just now. I’m going to claim that Weilks had her stalked by ghosts and they were purposely waiting for her to be alone. Maybe that will alleviate some of my worry.

I do like the end of the book, that is to say the last few chapters. In my original plan, Eva was simply to be captured by Sawyer. A capture she promptly escapes from in a manner similar to how she actually escaped. At some point, I realized that these big bad necromancers were treating her with kid gloves despite killing several people during the Halloween chapters.

Halfway through writing that chapter, I decided that had to go. This isn’t some story with ineffectual villains. Sawyer and Weilks are unrepentant murderers who kill for their own gain. They’re not going to just leave Eva in some cell somewhere.

So the Sawyer torture scene came about.

I had a table set out full of injuries. Some were very minor, such as Eva’s hair. Others were more severe than her eyes. The eyes was probably the worst along side a full limb being removed. In the end, I decided on her fingers and eyes. After I decided on torture being a thing, she was always going to lose her toes.

The removal of her eyes caused quite a few changes, though nothing too specific. I had already alluded to her being able to sense blood, so I didn’t think it was too big a jump for her to sense blood within people. I’m always nervous about ‘eleventh hour superpowers’ as I don’t think they’re done well too often, but I thought that might be a reasonable.

No more talk about her eyes, though. There will be more on that in book two.

Her hands being replaced with Arachne hands ended up being another thing I had slight reservations about. I don’t want to make light of those with actual injuries in real life, but it is hard to write a protagonist with no eyes, no hands, and no toes. Perhaps in the future as my writing improves, I’ll take a stab at a legitimately crippled character. For now, I needed to at least somewhat rectify her injuries. I do think the hands will come into–well, I’ll leave that talk for future books. Wouldn’t want to spoil much of anything.

Speaking about injuries and their causes, I almost had a villain chapter. Sawyer and Weilks were mostly going to talk about their plans and how they were going to accomplish them. I ended up scrapping it only a few hundred words in. Rest assured, there were plans there and they would have succeeded had they not been disrupted.

There’s probably more I can talk about, but I think I will stop it here for now. This isn’t supposed to be some long thing.

I will leave a bit of trivia about some things in the first book.

-Brakket Academy is so named because of my placeholders. When writing, I will type something like [Protagonist] if I haven’t come up with a name. [Academy] was the placeholder for Brakket. In my head, I called it Bracket Academy and decided to change the c to k.

-Eva was not the original protagonist. That honor went to Jordan. Juliana also did not exist in the original outline.

-All names of Brakket Academy staff are references to other works. The exceptions are Zoe Baxter, Wayne Lurcher, and Martina Turner. In the future, ‘main’ staff such as Zoe will have nonreferential names. I plan to continue referencing works I enjoy with nonessential staff.

–For example, Isaac Calvin and Franklin Kines are references to Isaac Asimov’s Robot series character Susan Calvin and Frank Herbert’s Dune’s Liet Kynes. Not all references are in this pattern. Some are far more obtuse than others. I dislike coming across super obvious references when reading, so I’ve made a lot of them very obscure. Good luck figuring out Nurse Naranga.

–These references are name only. Don’t expect the characters to act like the character or person they are referencing.

-Different characters refer to other characters in different ways. This is an absolute nightmare to keep straight between the multiple POVs. Eva, for instance, refers to characters how they introduced themselves to her. Peers tend to introduce themselves by first name only while those in higher standings, such as teachers, often introduce themselves by their full name.

-Several locations are based on real locations I’ve actually visited in real life. Brakket Academy, the abandoned hospital/retirement home at the start, and Eva’s prison are some of them. Quite a high number of states in the US have old, abandoned prisons. Most, if not all of these have been turned into walk through museums. Check around you and see if you’ve got one too. They’re fun to visit.

–Death is mentioned as a character more than once though He has yet to show up. While my Death may differ in personality and appearance, I highly recommend Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. Mort is one of my favorites and deals with Death a fair amount.

Stats:
Chapters: 28 (+two Extras)
Wordcount: 124,536 (according to WordPress’ built in word counter; including Extras)
POV counts (max of one count per chapter(including Extras)):
-Eva: 24
-Zoe: 6
-Juliana: 4
-Arachne: 4
-Devon: 2
-Wayne: 2
-Irene: 2
-Nel: 2
-Lynn: 1
-Shalise: 1
-Shelby: 1

That’s all, thanks for reading book one. I hope you enjoy book two.

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