Twenty Questions Character Interview: Wolf Cowrie

This week, I'm going to add a new occasional feature: Character interviews! I can't guarantee that this will be anything approaching regular, but it should be a fun exercise, and informative for both me and my readers.

I will be using Auto Crit's "Twenty Questions" method, described here. I will be answering the question in-character as Wolf in italics.

1. If you had a free day with no responsibilities and your only mission was to enjoy yourself, what would you do? I don't get any of those. I guess I'd go out hunting--just me and nature--or maybe go to the local saloon for a drink.
2. What impression do you make on people when they first meet you? How about after they've known you for a while? I'm a half-Sioux in the frontier. Most folks know me by skin color first and by reputation second. Most folks might write me off as short-tempered or even rude, but when you've been through all the stuff I have you learn how to get to the point real quick. That said, if you manage to get me as a friend, I'm about the best feller to have on your side when things get tight.
3. What's your idea of a good marriage? Do you think that'll happen in your life? Marriage, huh? Do I look like the marrying type to ya? Well, if ya insist. my idea of a good marriage is a feller finding a woman who completes him, and the other was around. A rough feller like me couldn't exactly hook up with a high-class lady--she's gotta know how to handle herself. I used to think that I wasn't gonna get married, not after Kimimela. Now, though... things are starting to look up. I still love Kimimela, you understand, but she's gone. I gotta keep moving forward now. I guess it all depends on whether I can step out with this lady I've been fancying without her Pa feeding me a shotgun.
4. What are you most proud of about your life? (If they answer with something other than a personal statement, like a business achievement, ask "What about on a personal level?") My proudest moment, I think, was finally taking down that son of a bitch Russeau. I'd been hunting him for five years, and now I've got my payback from him for Kimimela. [He runs his hands through his hair.] It wasn't all sunshine and roses after that, but I got him good. A close second would probably be earning the respect of the people in Goldwater--which is nothing short of a miracle considering the place is up in the Black Hills.
5. What are you most ashamed of in your life? (Again, if necessary ask "What about on a personal level?") I still ain't proud of the fact that I couldn't save Kimimela. I mean, some nights I lay away wondering... was there something more I could have done to get her back after she'd been turned into a vampire. [He looks down.] I keep wondering if I could have saved her rather than just had her head off and been done with it.
6. If you could spend the day with someone you admire (living or dead or imaginary), who would you pick? Doc Meadows, I think. He seemed a bit limp-wristed when I first met him, but he save my life, and he's tough when push comes to shove.
7. Do you think you've turned out the way your parents expected? [Laughs.] Probably not. The thing is, I don't think my Pa ever found out my Ma was a skinwalker, so he'd be all shocked to heck if he found out I was a shapeshifter. My Ma, though... I think she had it in her head that I'd grow to be a respectable Sioux man rather than a wandering gunslinger and monster hunter. Then again, none of us predicted Russeau, so where it is.
8. What do you believe about God? (If they believe in God, ask "What do you suppose God thinks of you?") I believe that there's lots of things out there that can help a good man if he's in a pinch. The white folks got the God they pray to in their churches, and I got the Great Spirit that Indians follow. Hell, for all I know they might be the same thing. As for what either of them thinks of me... [scratches his ear thoughtfully] Well, I like to think I've been doing the best I can with the hand I've been dealt. I ain't pretending I'm an angel--I've done some bad things in my life, but all of them needed doing. I've been getting rid of the monsters and such that would be hunting down His people, using what I have and what I know to protect people. I'd like to think that He figures I'm doing a good job of that.
9. Is there anything you've always wanted to do but haven't done? What would happen if you did it? [He purses his lips thoughtfully.] Whelp--strange as it might seem, I've always wanted to live a peaceful life. You know, settle down with a nice woman, maybe have a couple of kids. I don't know what kind of kids we'll have... whether they'll be more like her or more like me, but... [shrugs] Worth a shot anyways. Trouble is, the lady I got my eye on--and her on me, by the way--is a white woman, and even if I've got me a reputation as a hero in these parts there's still gonna be people who won't like me stepping out with her, let alone marrying her. They'd have some loud arguments against it, in fact, and she might get caught in the middle. That could get real sticky in a hurry.
10. What's the worst thing that's happened in your life? What did you learn from it? The worst thing that happened in my life? That would be when I went to Kimimela's village to ask for her hand in marriage... I had wedding gifts for her and everything, so her parents could see that I'd be a good husband, but... when I got there, the place was in flames. The people who lived there... all dead. Slaughtered. drained of blood. Massacred by the man that I came to hate with every fiber of my being--Russeau. I saw him, up on a hill, looking down at the ruins of the village... and he... he had Kimimela. She was in... some sort of a trance. I... I couldn't stop him from taking her. I tried, but he was too strong and I didn't know near enough about what he was. I keep thinking that I could have done something more... that I could've saved her, but... [He shakes his head.] That was the day I learned about the monsters in the frontier... starting with vampires. That was the day I started hunting.
11. Tell me about your best friend. (If you think it might be interesting, ask "How did you meet? What do you like about this person? What do they like about you?") I don't got many friends, but I'd say the closest I got to a best friend is Lucifer, my horse. Well, he's mostly a horse. I snagged him shortly after Doc and I took care of Russeau in Salvation, and whatever else he is, he's the only horse in these parts that's willing to carry me. [He smirks.] We had to have a bit of a discussion about that, but it's all settled. He's the devil incarnate on four hooves, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
12. What's the worst thing you've ever done to someone? Why? ("Why" is usually a good follow-up question to any response!) The worst thing I ever done to someone was shoot his wife with a crossbow. She'd been turned--not into a vampire but into some other kind of nasty hungry critter. There was no time to explain things to him, so I put her down real quick. I'll never forget the look on his face after. I don't think Lucifer ever looked at God with that much hate.
13. What would you like it to say on your tombstone? [He grins] "Look out, Devil--Here I Come!"
14. Describe your ideal mate. She'd be strong, pretty... [laughs] patent... and she'd know her way around a gun. [coughs] I got someone in mind, actually... [grins]
15. What are you most afraid of? I'm afraid that the way I live my life right now, hunting and being hunted by every nasty thing in the frontier, I might just lose everything I've come to love. Everything I care about. I try to get around it by traveling light, but being a local hero makes that kind of hard.
16. What's the most important thing in your life? What do you value most? [He looks thoughtful and settles back on his heels for a bit] The most important thing in my life? Well, I'd be lying right now if I said it wasn't Susannah Twohill. What we got... well, it's complicated because of a lot of things, but I'd go through Hell and kick the Devil between the legs for her.
17. What do you like best about yourself? Least? I like that I got the know-how to defend people from the nastier critters on the frontier, but I hate that I wasn't able to save Kimimela, in the end.
18. What do you like best about Susannah? Least? [He smirks.] Susannah's got grit. You can take that to the bank. She's not like the usual ladies you get in big towns from rich families, all hiding behind their fans and their money and hoping that the boogeyman don't crawll in their bedroom window and get em. Dang it all though... sometimes I just want to strangle her because she's brave, but she's stubborn, too... a real hothead. I could explain to her why something wasn't safe until the cows came home and she'd still tag along anyway. [He smiles fondly.] Maybe I'm crazy, but I wouldn't have her any other way.
19. How do you feel about your life right now? What, if anything, would you like to change? Right now, I'm at a bit of a crossroads. I could keep on with the monster-hunting, or I could settle down once and for all. There's no real hints about what the right direction is. I've been hunting for a long time, and it would be nice to have a rest, but... I'm worried the nasties will just find me anyway. Reputations tend to cut both ways like that.
20. Are you lying to yourself about something? What is it? [He thinks about this for a long while.] Well, I'd like to say that what I am--half-skinwalker--doesn't bother me at all. I mean, I've been this way my whole life. I can't imagine what it would be like if I didn't know how to shift. Sometimes, though, I think things might be easier if I was full-human. Heck, even if I was full-Indian a lot of things would be less complicated. 

There's my first character interview! Would you like to see more of these? More questions? Different questions? Any particular characters you'd like to see interviewed? Let me know!

Confessions of a Character's Development: Wolf Cowrie

It was kind of funny how Wolf developed. When I was planning out Sheep's Clothing, the dynamic between the two male leads was intended to be sort of a Holmes-and-Watson-style partnership, with Doc Meadows as Watson (of course) and the bad-ass gunslinger as Holmes (which is why he ended up being so tall and lean). Things didn't quite turn out that way, of course, especially as Wolf started to evolve into his own character.

The first thing that happened was I made him a werewolf--or more specifically, I made him half skinwalker. A skinwalker is a nasty critter from Native American mythology that can turn into any animal it wants, so I had to handwave Wolf having a human parent in addition by saying that his mom (the skinwalker) was mildly fond of humanity. On the heels of that, it seemed logical to also make him half Native American (on his mother's side), and a whole pile of cultural knowledge went along with that.

In a way, this left him still in the same boat as his original inspiration, plus a bit of Simon Belmont from the Castlevania games--with a boatload of relevant information about his monster-hunting lifestyle and not a whole lot more. Rather than an intellectual or an altruist like the Great Detective, however, Wolf was out for one thing: revenge (Back to Simon, depending on the game). He might not have the education, but he has the intelligence and the anger to hunt Alexandre Russeau for five years. Wolf Cowrie is patient, and that makes him a very dangerous enemy.

Of course, by the time we get to Hungry as a Wolf, that mission is all over and done with, leaving Wolf twisting in the wind. He has a pretty complex backstory for what might otherwise be a relatively generic half-Sioux gunslinger wandering the Territories, and that makes him fun to write. He's still going to be a monster hunter--that's kind of what he does--but Hungry as a Wolf is more about helping him get his feet back under himself.

He evolves a lot during the course of this novel, and I plan for him to evolve more in the next novel I have planned, where he has to face the consequences of his past while he's planning for the future. I won't say any more than that except that you can't tear a bloody swath through the monster population for five years without getting some blood on your hands, and his collateral damage is going to trigger someone else wanting revenge.

Because that's how people rolled in the Old West.


Come check out my Kickstarter Campaign for Hungry as a Wolf here!

Black and White and Shades of Gray

Stories about good vs. evil are a perennial favorite. It's just a thing people have hard-wired into their brains that turn every conflict into Good Guys vs. Bad Guys, Us. vs. Them, Good vs. Evil. Stories of clear-cut morality in the central conflict are easy to understand, and easy to write.

The trouble is that they're hard as hell to write well, mainly because baseline humans don't come in Completely Good or Completely Evil. Trying to make every member of a group completely good or completely evil might work well if a certain tribe or nationality exists for the Good Guys to fight against, but doing this too often can get boring in a big hurry.

Evil goblins. Yawn.

Beautiful, pure-hearted elves. Ho hum.

As my tastes in fiction (and high fantasy in particular) have evolved, I've started finding the appeal in ambiguously gray characters. There's the hero who might do morally dodgy things in the pursuit of a noble goal. There's the villain who started out with the best of intentions, but couldn't stop his slide down the slippery slope of morality. Even Spider-Man realizes the temptations of having superpowers, and Darth Vader started as a good man.

Honestly, pure villains or heroes can get boring in a hurry. So you've got a white knight boy scout who always knows the right thing to do and goes around defending the innocent because that's what he does. So you've got an evil lord of evil who wants to use black magic to conquer the world because that's what he does. That might be great for simpler stories, but in complex, overarching epics, that lack of moral ambiguity gets old really quickly.

One of the grayest high fantasy series I've read recently is a Song of Ice and Fire, where you have a lot of factions working at cross purposes to get their own people on the Iron Throne, and very few of them are completely good or evil. You have innocents corrupted in the course of trying to escape horrifying events later. You have people set up as villains in early books, only to be revealed as morally conflicted and redeemable later. The only characters I can name off the top of my head who would fall squarely in the evil category are Cersei Lannister and her son Joffrey. Even then, Cersei is just ambitious and crazy and not as smart as she thinks she is, and Joffrey... well, has Cersei for a mother. And he's, like, twelve.

The best way I've noticed to avoid black-and-white morality in fiction is to get into the heads of both your heroes and your villains. Give the villain a reason for what he does besides LOL I'M EVIL. Maybe he does what he does to prevent something worse than him later on. Give the hero moral quandaries so he's not just LOL I'M THE HERO. Heck, Batman has done more than the Gotham police force to clean up crime, and even his allies (and Batman himself) sometimes question the measures he takes. Superman is the closest to a white knight that the DC universe has, but he has to worry that his superheroing might come back to harm his less-indestructible Earthling loved ones. Being completely good or completely evil should be hard.

Writing nuanced heroes and villains is a good way to add spice to your fiction and make your readers think. Your fans might side with one character or another for various reasons, but at least those reasons won't be exclusively because "he's the hero" or whatever. Writing in shades of gray rather than black and white also makes your story more interesting and enjoyable, and has a high likelihood of enticing your readers back for more.

And now, for something completely different...

Still making progress in my book sales (woohoo!), but I really hope they pick up soon. I'll be at Bookseller's Row at Archon 38 this year, my first time selling stuff at a convention, so feel free to come by if you're in Collinsville, IL the weekend of October 3-5 and pick up a copy!

And my sales progress:

1.3%

I'll be back next week with more ramblings and news! Follow my blog for regular updates!

Secondary Characters are People, Too!

In this week's post I'm going to talk about the secondary characters you might have wandering around in your work. If handled improperly, secondary and background characters will seem like part of the scenery rather than add to the flavor of your world. Why? Because it's so easy to have your secondaries just exist for the scene (or two, or whatever) they're in and then get stuffed back in the creative closet.

This is a mistake, but an understandable one. Your main characters--your protagonist(s) and your villain(s)--carry the bulk of the story, so naturally you want to focus on them. Your heroes have motivations. Hopefully your villains have motivations, too, that sound reasonable to them, rather than just having them wander around aimlessly being evil at people. But the people milling around in the background? Who cares about them?

Well, you should. You created them for a reason, and even if they're literally only there for a single scene to contribute a single piece of needed info to your hero, they need lives outside the story. This might seem like a lot of hard work that nobody's going to see, and you might be right.  BUT, that guy milling around in the background might turn out to be helpful to your hero at a crucial moment.

Remember that crowd of train passengers in Spider-Man 2 that Our Intrepid Hero nearly kills himself saving from Doctor Octopus? They came to his defense when Ock tried to finish him off because they saw that Spidey was "only a kid", like any of their own offspring. They didn't have much in the way of character development, but they helped the hero. They might have been listed in the credits as Bystander on Train #1 through #9 or whatever, but they had a reason to jump to his defense.

Now, unless you're writing a sweeping high fantasy epic or whatever, it's unlikely that you're going to break out in mass quantities of background characters. However, you do need to know who your named characters are, at least, in case you need an unexpected ally (or obstacle) for your hero at a key moment in your story.

Does this mean you need to provide a complete backstory for every single character who has even a walk-on part in your novel or short story? No, obviously not. That would be a lot of record-keeping, and a project you should only undertake if you're planning on lots and lots of ground-level world-building. Even then, just focus on a small handful of people in your fictional city of ten million, or you'll be so busy making characters that you'll never get to your story.

In conclusion, while the focus of your story should be on your main cast, don't neglect that background characters. Making sure that at least you know who they are beyond the context of the story will help you make them more rounded for the reader. Mapping out what secondary characters are doing while off-screen will also help you get them in the right place at the right time for some additional support for your main characters, and who knows? Heroic Bystander #2 might become a fan favorite as a result.