My new fantasy book has been out for a couple weeks now, and my friend V.C. Lluxe was kind enough to read it and give me her feedback.
I thought the conversation that unfolded was interesting. No surprise there: Like me, V.C. Lluxe has been a super-prolific author over the course of her career, and she has a well-developed sense of story. She’s an extremely cerebral person who isn’t afraid to color outside the lines in search of fundamental truths.
With VC’s permission, I reposted a big chunk of our conversation, edited for length and coherency.
Please note that this spoils a LOT of “Atop the Trees, Beneath the Mountains”, including critical character deaths. You should probably read the book first if you care about spoilers.
I never care about spoilers, so it wouldn’t stop me, but that’s your choice.
(If the article looks like it ends here, click “comment” to expand the post. I need to fix my website so this feature works properly. Thanks for your patience.)
V.C. Lluxe (VCL): When I first started reading [Atop the Trees, Beneath the Mountains], I was really struck by how much it feels as if you’ve been pulled into a fully realized world that is both similar to our world and yet different. The detail is insanity. It’s like being transported. I said at one point I thought I wouldn’t want to leave, but one other thing I really liked is that it’s one of those books where the entire world is changed–a big story, so the characters arc, but the whole *world* arcs, so by the time you do leave, at the end of the book, you’re leaving from a world that has been transformed, and that makes the parting feel different. You feel–well, I felt–like I had exhaled a big breath.
SM Reine (SMR): I’m so glad you got that feeling. I wanted the end to feel monumental, although it’s actually pretty quiet altogether. There’s no fighting; it’s a long denouement. And still monumental!
I wept writing the end. This book made me cry a few times — I had REALLY big feelings about it.
VCL: I think the emotion really comes through. It feels big, too. Monumental is a good word.
Also, the intricacy of everything can not be understated. What’s really breathtaking is how much tight the plot is for being 300,000 words. As the book was tying up, all these threads that I had legit forgotten about suddenly came back and everything made SENSE in this way that was frankly mind-boggling. Even down to the fact that at the beginning Esor is hearing all these awful wailing noises that no one else seems to hear, and it had extreme significance.
I am curious how much of that was planned in advance, just out of curiosity. There’s a big mystery about who Esor is and why he’s significant, and there are about seven big GASPY twists, but each one has the effect of illuminating things more, until everything is explained. It’s fantastic.
SMR: This book grew over a few years, so I had time to weave everything together nicely. Some parts I knew about really, really early in the original drafts (like the wailing sounds) and persisted through years of revisions. It’s amazing looking back at my earliest drafts how a ton changed but some things stuck real hard.
As for the “seven big gaspy twists” — it’s probably about nine. I wrote the book in ten distinct episodes!
VCL: It *is* kind of amazing, how, for a book that is 300,000 words, it really does just follow one thread, not four or five different things. No one splits up and goes off has weird Treebeard digressions. It’s just, like I said, TIGHT. So all of the supporting characters really are there to support the main thrust of the story, but they also all feel like fully realized people who have complex characterizations.
SMR: Fantasy DOES leave a lot of room for side quests. I wouldn’t mind taking advantage of it. I’m planning to expand this book into a series and add a ton of material. If I made it a ten-book series, I’d be basically doubling the overall length to 600k (ten episodes of 60k words each).
There’s just a lot I wrote that didn’t get into the book. I have more about Mishun and Ahnor. I wanna tell more of Astin/Vaseri’s story, and I want more Ilare POV. I didn’t get into Xeta’s affair with the librarian Medista in the book, and that’s so messed up I have to include it.
A side character named Vinbor an Vindalor got totally cut from the last draft, but I also have thousands of words in scenes about him!
VCL: Whoa, that is awesome! You were so immersed. I’m kind of jealous. I want to go do that, get that immersed!
SMR: Seriously, this was my pandemic. I just vanished off this planet and dived into fantasy.
VCL: There’s sort of a love triangle, and the book description says that two villains are fighting over the male main character, Esor, but only one of them is ever really villainous, I think.
SMR: It’s definitely true that Mishun never feels like a villain, but writing book descriptions is difficult. “Two hot villains fight over him” is so much catchier than “this is a long metaphor about how a real-life dying empire might be able to claw itself out of trouble if we can find our way toward mutual values of healing and stability.”
VCL: Yeah, not a criticism! He’s obviously thought of as a villain. It totally works. It is very catchy. 😃
I found the Corvin-Esor story more volatile and transgressive and exciting, though I did not mind that it didn’t end happily, because it seemed very *right,* as if there was no other way that it could possibly have gone. I loved how Esor tried to change Corvin, and Corvin tried to change for Esor, but it wasn’t enough, that love just couldn’t conquer how deeply the darkness had been knotted inside him. It felt very true.
There is one scene towards the end, after Corvin is dead, when one of his brothers has a memory of how he is realizing how Corvin’s unbridled violence is eating him up, and this felt very wistful and true. Some things, no matter how regretful a person is about them, are not things that one can quite come back from. So, I liked this, a lot.
Mishun is the other love interest, and he’s sort of gruff and good and steady, and he kind of grew on me. At first, I was all, “Moar exciting transgressive badness, plz,” and then, again, it was like letting out a big breath, and everything was… nice. And relief. And settled. And good.
SMR: I honestly preferred writing Corvin too. I have a very deep love for Corvin. I didn’t know he was going to die until he started writing it! That was the biggest surprise to me. When I realized I needed to do it, I felt…a lot. And once I wrote he was dead, I went and laid down and cried for a while. (So much crying while I wrote this book…)
Sometimes character deaths do that to me because I just know I’m never going to get to write new material about their future again. It’s a tangible loss! I spend a lot of time fantasizing about my stories, asking myself questions about them, and when I kill someone it is *final*. It’s the end of a whole genre of fantasizing. I miss dreaming about Corvin.
VCL: Yeah, writing is not for the faint of heart, for reals. I hard relate to sobbing over my made-up people and worlds!
SMR: Mishun being relatively boring was a calculated choice. I think we, as a species, are attracted to the excitement of drama because of (insert lecture here blah blah blah neurochemicals from stress and release blah) but it’s not actually good for us. It’s a bit of a drug. Stability lets us heal.
I wasn’t familiar with how dark TikTok romances get about heroes, and it made me question how thoroughly Corvin faces consequences. Heroes are out here getting redemption arcs for things comparable to Corvin’s behavior. Some don’t even get redemption arcs! They just stay BAD and people like that!
It just wasn’t the story I was telling. Corvin doesn’t heal – for reasons that are both inside and outside his control – and his harm upon the world has to be stopped.
It ties into certain sociopolitical messages I hoped people might take away. Mishun is cast as a villain because he is within the context of both societies: He’s the Warlord pillaging the Republic, and he’s also a Dwarrow gathering so much support he threatens to become a king. He could collapse the entire peaceful anarchy of the Mountainhomes. But he’s never *really* a threat because, on a societal level, they have chosen a few important values for survival: valuing peace, valuing non-hierarchy, valuing their basic rights, valuing sometimes intrusive regulation for the greater good.
Corvin has no real regulation; his brother has to die for him to escape the horrible abusive job Amalen inflicted on him. He’s harmed and then he turns that harm against others. In his society, he is never stopped. He keeps getting rewarded. He almost becomes Magistrate! If someone had interceded with Corvin much earlier, he could have survived, he could have healed, he could have lived happily ever after with Esor.
I chose not to reward the villain because it felt important he dealt with consequences. I don’t know how popular that will be.
VCL: So, my entire writing career has been about writing evil love interests, pretty much. And I’ve done all the things. I’ve done redemption arcs. I’ve killed them off. I’ve had them utterly corrupt the fmc [female main character]. I’ve just flat-out rewarded evil.
I got to this point where I felt I had to admit to myself that when readers would express annoyance that I had given these bad dudes comeuppance, like, a part of me kind of agreed with them. A part of me felt like *I* wanted these bad men to win. And I spent a lot of time struggling around with this, not sure how to feel about this because it made me squirmy.
Last summer, I happened to pick up this book about the psychology of sexual fantasies (I think it was quoted on a Contrapoints video, and it sounded interesting.) So, there was this whole bit in it about how women who are dominant, powerful women have sexual fantasies about being dominated. And the reasoning for this was that there’s an element of sexual release that selfish, a sort of place where it can’t be about only giving pleasure to your partner, but where you have to take it. And if you are A LOT, you want *permission* to be a lot, so a man who is dominant and brutal and super strong can *handle* you.
I started wondering if these romance novels with the super evil love interests were really *about* actual relationships or if they weren’t just very complex sexual fantasies. Women wanted to be given permission to express desires that they felt ashamed of or felt were too much or felt were unfeminine. And the best way to do this was to put this *onto* the MMC.
I think, in these romance novels, the evil love interest is as much the woman having the fantasy as the female love interest is. It’s getting to be both top and bottom at the same time.
Now, all this said, I do think we tend to misunderstand our own fantasies and take elements from stories as truth. So, I think we have a responsibility as artists not to create art that excuses violence or subjugation or is permissive to very bad things. So, recently, when I write these things, I try to find ways to give everyone permission to have as many sexual cray-cray fantasies as they want, while also trying to preserve *some* level of a moral center.
SMR: I don’t think too much about moral modeling in sexual fantasies. Villain-oriented fantasies make perfect sense to me. For me, it is natural to desire something destructive. I am aegosexual, which is on the asexuality spectrum. I don’t like having sex. I am libidinous, though, and that means my fantasies can go to any weird/disgusting/wrong/problematic direction partially I don’t want to do any of it in reality.
I also don’t personally have any desire for books that are uncritical sexual fantasy. There’s gotta be a lot more going on because the sex parts are not the desired focus, but a means to telling a story.
So I enjoy writing all the sexy villainy stuff, but I don’t really want that to reach its intuitive conclusions as a sexual fantasy. It’s not a moralizing thing, though. It’s just writing autobiographically. Esor isn’t *me*, strictly speaking, but…you get it, you’re a writer.
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I always enjoy chatting with V.C. Lluxe, and I was so grateful to get this level of feedback from her about my book. Let me tell you…this person has a fascinating brain. I totally recommend checking out her books, two of which are linked via the covers above.
You can find my book, Atop the Trees, Beneath the Mountains, on Kindle Unlimited through April.