Ocera Q&A part 4

Q: How much are events in the stories based on your own life, or aspects of characters based on yourself?
A: My real-life inspirations are many, sometimes quite large, sometimes quite small. Let's start at the beginning.

Ruth is based on my own mom. Like I said earlier, her dad is based on Andy Griffith in the Andy Griffith show. He's also based on my mom, oddly. Ruth's own mom is... ALSO partly based on my own mom, but I see her physically resembling Mrs. Weasley from Harry Potter. Felton is based on places in Washington, Idaho, and Tennesee where I've lived, sights, smells, weather and all. The weirdness with the animals at the beginning is inspired by various events at the WA and ID farms I lived on: in Washington, animals got sick and died constantly and rather mysteriously, of ALL species (livestock, and cats and such too). I actually reference my horror story based on that place, "Ferndale", in "Sunshield". The incident with the chickens is partially inspired by my duties as the chicken-keeper in Idaho, and when I discovered my cousin's chicken dead one morning. It was more sad than actually creepy, but discovering dead animals is unpleasant in any circumstances.

Some descriptions of Ocera's caverns are based on my trips into caves (guided tours; I'm not a spelunker). My physical descriptions of Theksarsi are all based on what experiences I've had with animals, either personally, at zoos or just on nature documentaries: the hissing, splayed-clawed posture of alligators and lizards, the quick pulse and rapid eye movements of birds, the body language (folding of the front paws, flicking of the tail) of cats, the way you pet a horse on the muzzle, and the weird warmth of another living being. Touching an animal, especially an unfamiliar one, is very weird and alien, the heat and texture of their skin and the strength and speed of their pulse beneath it. You are very distinctly aware of how different and yet how alike they are to you then.

Ruth isn't just my mom though. She's got parts of me and my friends, too. But mostly she's a mother figure. She's the strong, primal force that is motherly love, how fiercely it holds on to the little things it must protect -- be that their child or their sibling.

Her dad is also based a bit on my own dad. Actually, my dad is present in a lot of characters in a lot of subtle ways. Specifically, the line about her Pa having not cried since Roger's birth is based on the fact that the last time my dad openly cried was at my birth. So I have never, ever seen him cry.

Dech is obviously a lot of me, a lot of the old me, the much angrier me more prone to misaimed violence and tempers from nowhere. He's also got the part of me prone to deep, self-loathing introspection, constant angsting about past mistakes, and waxing in lengthy soliloquy *gestures to this entire document*. He's also people I know. And like all of my characters, lots of him is made up. He is made up of his past. He's an exaggerated poster child of both abuse victim and perpetrator -- a dual role many people fill. He is both my attempt to reconcile with the horrors inflicted on innocents, and my attempt to gain an understanding of the very people that cause such harm.

Teliah is also all of that, on the opposite side of things. She and Dech's relationship is inspired by a quote from Ender's Game that went something like, "His anger was hot and it controlled him; my anger was cold and I controlled it." Both she and Dech are actually control freaks of a different sort. Their childhood arguments are based on a lot of arguments me and my friends have been a part of. A Hedgehog's Dilemma exists among abuse victims, and it gets worse if you're family and not strangers. Attempts to make peace can cause even more anger and hurt feelings. Both parties lash out and are incapable of healing themselves or helping each other, and end up blaming each other's methods of coping as the reason for their own suffering. Sometimes the urge is strong to oust and emotionally wound a fellow victim because their way of dealing with the pain is different than your own, because you want to validate the way you've been living your life the whole time. If they're unhappy, it means they're wrong and you're right. If they're happy, you have to admit you might not be dealing with things correctly. It's a complicated issue I wish I had the ability to explore better in their shared story.

Very specifically, these quotes are taken from real conversations, almost or exactly verbatim:
"He had gone to her, hoping to form some kind of friendship exactly because they'd gone through the same thing, and here she was telling him his pain wasn't valid because he didn't have it happen enough!"
"Used to it?! You never, EVER get used to --"
"I could tell right then that Dech must have loved his father, but still hated him. Only a child could feel two ways about their parent like that."
"You cannot escape. As far as you go, the cage will always be there."
"They'll see my memories, all over my sleeves."
"He didn't want to hear about the Church."

Harziyax is based on the DSM-IV definition of Antisocial Personality Disorder. He would be voiced by Rampage from Transformers: Beast Wars. Go ahead, look up some clips, I'll wait. You'll see...

Nilah is based on the sexy Drow role-plays a friend and I have. We're sort of obsessed with pretending Drow culture is all about lots of sexy revelry, and Nilah is a representative of that. Of course, she also represents a real kind of person, who really does simply find sensuality the best or only way to establish relationships, even, paradoxically, platonic ones.

Timber... is based on a lot of things. His stories are drawn from too many of my own. The theme of leaving your home behind forever, chasing unreachable dreams, trying to do the right thing for your family and end up doing worse in the process, are themes that have followed my lineage for a long time. Sometimes I think of him as my most flawed character. He never does anything outright bad (except when Ig made him kill the Thek kit), but failure to do the right thing can be just as bad.

If Ruth is Tenacity, Dech is Wrath, Teliah is Pride, Harziyax is Gluttony, and Nilah is Lust, then Timber is Sloth, from the most traditional point of view: the apathy, sluggishness, and aknowledged failure to do one's duties, especially spiritual ones. His dreams of the Sun turning away from him are based on nightmares I've had of God turning away from me, and psalms about lying in a grave with God looking away. His entrapment in a double-layered Hell, one layer of human schemes and one of raw bestial violence, is a theme drawn from my most deeply disturbing dreams, struggling to reconcile fear of physical pain and fear of spiritual corruption.

He is a tragic Christian tale, almost a Job's tale: in a way, he does attempt to adhere to his dogma, and in the act of stepping up courageously, earns himself the worst fate imaginable, and his reward of a happy afterlife may be seen as a copout to some. Is he supposed to represent the best kind of religious man, who stands stoic in the face of tragedy while doing what his god and heart tell him, because in the end, it's worth it? Or is he the worst example of what religion can be, a faceless, demanding deity guiding you only distantly and cryptically, leading you on like a horse with a carrot through torment after torment?

He is also of course drawn from my studies of PTSD and war veterans, and a lot of his behavior is drawn on my fears for my friends and family in the military. I fear that this next deployment will not leave them as intact as they left. I fear for all their sanities. His story is my greatest fear. I don't know if I could deal with a family member coming home as thoroughly messed up as Tim. There are traces of one of my own uncles in him, too. An uncle that used to be a really swell guy until he went to prison and came back a very vicious, mean man. A man's pride will prevent his healing, especially in a small, rural community where everybody would find out...

A person usually knows on some level the right thing to do, and the best way to help themselves. But they are often too weak to do it, especially if lacking a proper support system.

Igneous' abuse of him is pretty much a case of abuse and harrassment in management, simple as that. Whether you see their arrangement as an office job or a military structure, or take the subject to appear purely mean or outright sexual (the mindrape was FULL of that subtext, and no Ig never actually did anything to Tim, but as for doing it to people like Kerrigan and Nilah...) it is up to you to decide how much to read into it.

Akizu's death scene was based on my grandfather Alan. I held his hand and read stories to him. When he died, I went and held his cold limp hand again. I described exactly how it felt both ways. In the scenes of Tim's parents' deaths there are traces of my various cats' deaths, the kind of feral horror the sight and feel of a dead body invokes.

Tim going limp and having his brain immediately jump into overdrive and fry out as the demon grabbed his wrists and dragged him across the floor is very much like a scene involving my abusive grandmother when I was a child. Tim's scene ended highly violently. I was fortunately saved before anything happened to me. There's supposed to be a trace of irony in the later statement about how his years of training wouldn't suddenly disappear, because they literally just did. When all of a sudden the person that's hurt you is holding you and pulling you away to do it again, common sense falls with your heart into your feet and it's all you can do to keep standing sometimes -- if that.