Archives for January 2014

The gender reassignment surgery, so to speak, that turned Detective Buck James into Detective Becca James, was a success. And it went fairly smoothly.

I think the reason it went so smoothly was because of Becca’s part in Bandit’s Moon. (I’ll heretofore refer to the character as the woman she is, not the man she was…) She appears in about a chapter and a half’s worth of story, spread out over three chapters. Half of chapter four, half of chapter five, and half of chapter 22. And she has specific functions to play in what is essentially two appearances. Story functions.

That made it easier to rework her – she wasn’t a new character, who might go off the reservation and take the story in another direction that wouldn’t match up with what followed. She had a role to play, and whether she was a man, a woman or a talking Shetland pony, her interaction with Welles would be about the same. She’d do her job early, step off stage, then come back on later and do another job…then leave again. Feet slapping or hooves clopping.

Also, as I said when first contemplating this, she’s the same police detective she was when she was Buck. An old friend of Welles, a plainclothes officer before the vampire apocalypse working in the same police station as Welles did before the war. Buck worked in Vice. Becca worked in Vice. The specialty of both was prostitution stings. Buck would play a customer, a john, and arrest hookers. Becca would play a hooker and arrest johns.

I did switch where Becca was from. As Buck, the character was from Arkansas, as Becca from Michigan. I could have actually let Becca come from Arkansas as well, but I decided to change it up for dialogue purposes.

The Night and Day series takes place in the south. There are, throughout the series, a fair number of people who speak with a southern dialect or southern speech pattern. In Bandit’s Moon there are even more, especially once Welles starts interacting with the racist Humans First Front. I’m in no way saying that all southerners are racists, or that racism in the US is predominantly in the American South. It’s not. But many of these particular racists in Bandit’s Moon were members of racist groups in the south (the Humans First Front was organized in an internment camp outside Atlanta).

So you’ve got all these people talking with a southern twang, so to speak. With specifically southern speech patterns. And Buck James, from Arkansas, was one of them. Now as Becca James, that’s gone.

I did add some touches to her dialogue, but I probably will do a bit more with that when I get into the first runthrough. Refine it, give her more of her own distinctive voice. That’s actually a bit easier when creating a character from scratch in the initial writing instead of reworking one as I’m doing here, because in this case I’m more or less following a script. Becca’s job is to reveal this information or that information.  Hopefully within roughly the same amount of words so I don’t have a chapter either blow up or shrink too much. So I’ll be paying some extra attention to those three half chapters when I get to rewriting and polishing, to better define her character through her words.

But today, it’s time to move forward with the story and stop thinking about Becca James. Which I’ll do after a quick trip to the tobacco store now that the snow and ice are melting and the roads are passable once more. I figure we’ll be above freezing within the hour.

I like women and I like strong, often complex, women characters – human and vampire. And I think, overall, that’s what you’ve seen in the Night and Day series. Takeda, Sarah, and Cynthia (with all her quirks) in Night and Day, them plus Lita Martinez and Anna Thodberg in Bleeding Sky.

And now we move on to Bandit’s Moon. Because of the focus of the book (described in countless other posts), we don’t see many of the women who appeared in the first two books. There are three important female characters in the book, but one is “quirky” because of Asperger’s, one is a racist whack-job, and one is..well, loose, as they say.

So while are are, in my opinion, well written, none are the kind you’re going necessarily like. Which honestly makes me a little uncomfortable.

It’s not that I feel that you have to like all the characters. Bandit’s Moon has it’s share of unlikeable characters. In fact, I’d have to say that many of the characters are not particularly likeable (except, of course, for Welles, who you hopefully at least kind of like). And by like, I don’t mean you won’t like the part they play in the story, or how they’re written. I mean it in the general sense – you wouldn’t want to hang out with many of these people. And I can say, certainly from my own perspective, that I wouldn’t want to hang out with any of the women characters in this book.

My thoughts, at the moment, are that the current female cast of characters could make me seem mysogynistic. Which is certainly not true (the nature of an aspect of the story could also make it seem, to the very dimwitted, that I might be racist as well, but hopefully most readers can differentiate between character beliefs and the writer’s beliefs. If you’re wondering, I also do not drink blood…well, human blood…okay, I don’t actually “drink” blood, but I like beef medium rare, so I probably get some blood with my meat…). But somebody just coming into the series with Bandit’s Moon might not have the first two books behind them, and might think the “portrayal” of women in the book matches my perception of women.

I do have a way of “fixing” it – not rewriting any of the women characters because they all, regardless of unlikeability, are important to the story – but changing the gender of another character.

It wouldn’t be a huge change – well, for him it would be, but I mean in story terms. He’s an old cop buddy of Welles, still a cop, and he’s one of those unfired guns I talked about last time, who appears and does one thing early in the book, then returns and has a different role to play. I’d have to rework a scene or two and change his description (obviously), but it wouldn’t be a huge chore. A lot of what he does is cop and old friend related, and that can work as a man or a woman.

But do I want to? Is it necessary? He’s fine the way he is, and I don’t feel like I have to pander to someone who might make a judgment about me, the writer, based on the characters (little unknown fact – Shelly Hodge, Dick Nedelmann’s partner in Night and Day was originally a man in the first draft – I changed him to a her in the second draft just to mix things up a bit). On the other hand, I’d like people to enjoy the books, and if they think I’m some kind of misogynist, that might detract from their enjoyment.

So I don’t know…it’s something that’s been churning in my brain as I get into the final stretch on Bleeding Sky, and it’s nothing that I have to worry about right now. I’ll make a final determination in February when I start the editing and polishing. We’ll see what happens.