Musings

Note: In the following weeks, Monday posts will be about The Trust Hole, simply because that's what I'll be working on rather than anything in Primorlen.

Why The Trust Hole? What was so enticing about the little business card I made up that sent me speeding away on the express train of NaNoWriMo, far away from my previous ideas? What caused me to ditch weeks of careful plotting and re-plotting, character outlines, my preferred genre, and a character I was thrilled to be writing about again? What about Alen and his dystopian world grabbed my attention and held it securely for an entire month of frantic noveling?

Just that. Alen himself and his off-kilter world. There was something wonderfully appealing in the idea of a completely normal boy thrust into a not-so-normal world. But a familiar world. And perhaps that is what caught me. Alen and Molson City exist in the modern world. There are Russians, and Poles, and Swedes; shotguns, grenade launchers, and Glocks; old cars, squeaking screen doors, muddy streets and broken street lamps. But at the same time they exist somewhere beyond time and space. There's a talking tiger, a man with a bionic eye, fighting robots, an entire complex that operates night after night without attracting police attention.
And in the cross-section of normal and not-so-normal I found something wonderful. In the conflux, there arrives the question: what makes normal? And as a extrapolation, what makes different? In a place where freaks fight robots for a living, what defines freakishness? What defines specialness? And that is the key to the entire riddle.
For the minute I wrote Alen's first lines, I knew he was special. He was unlike any other character I had written before, far more introspective and quiet. Pride was something he struggled with only occasionally. Whereas in my last novel, Freeborn and Freegiven, each character struggled to realize they couldn't go it alone, and had to face their pride and do what they did not want to, Alen's struggle delved into the very depths of worth and purpose.
And in the theme of worth I found my greatest message yet told. Being in our own world, Christ was real and tangible, and in the filth and grime of the Hole, His light shone out clear and cold.