Q: Why the weird chronological format of Sunshield?
A: I tried to start at the beginning, I really did. I still have the first failed attempt saved, which started off with a curt history of Felton's founding and moved on to talking all about the Steads and... it was just really boring, and it wasn't working. I didn't want to give such a concise viewport onto those events. I thought for a while on where I would start the story, and realized that instead of giving long, drawling, cruelly detailed depictions of events out in Ocera (like with the samename story) I wanted to make it a drama about Timber adjusting to 'human' life again. And I also wanted it to start off not from his PoV, hence Akizu.
Ocera got us first-person narratives between the three victims of the worst of Harzi's abuse and really harsh introspectives on the interior workings of their minds, depictions of events as they unfolded, and the immediate reactions to those events. It was always about people finding different ways to deal with their traumas whilst in the thick of the hostile environment. It was basically a drama about an abusive family. Going forward in order was necessary. Things happened when they happened. It's a pretty vicious and sometimes painful read. You see three young innocents break and go dark, doing more and more awful things over time.
I'd like to think that all along, even a reader of How They Met and the Karen stories would have hopes for Dech turning out alright and repenting, maybe even after his first "snap" and raping his little sister. How does one possibly write a character doing that and not have the audience throw the book down in disgust at the alleged "protagonist"? I don't know but hopefully he hated himself for it enough to make the readers hate him a little less. And then he slaughters just about everyone in the palace at the end anyway and refuses to rescue his mother out of shame. If I started off in media res and went back to fill in past events with flashbacks, they would lose their impact. Watching that evil grow in him I feel was important. His darkness means nothing if we don't see him born first, and his innocence is cheapened if it's introduced retroactively.
But with Tim, all his shit happened already, really. I did NOT want to write a tale about his misadventures in the wilderness. I think we're all numbed to those atrocities by now anyway. And his tale was not about a slide into darkness, but merely turning away from the light. He didn't go mean, but he went weak. He became ashamed and afraid. His story is, basically, about an aging veteran having a crisis of faith. It isn't about women and children stuck in a violent family. It's about a man who's failed his family in the act of trying to save them.
Writing about a sufferer of severe PTSD was going to be tricky, so Akizu filled the role of the outsider looking in, trying to decode Tim's actions and understand him as the audience tries to do the same. After reading Ocera it isn't difficult to fill in the blanks. Creating that dark setting with Ocera made it possible to skip all that detail in Sunshield.
But I couldn't leave it out entirely. It helped to break up the scenes and fill in time-skips to have "blips" of flashbacks and nightmares. A dialogue lacking description, a bunch of paragraphs made up of fragment sentences skipping through stages of his life in quick jumps, like photographs in a scrapbook, nightmares with vague, dark imagery.
We heard Elesonya's name dropped first, and nothing else. Then later we finally saw screenshots of their relationship in fast motion, and the first mention of sex in the whole work. Setting up Tim as, in fact, a once-sexual person was necessary for the next scene with Nilah trying to seduce him. Maybe the readers are wondering why a widower's decided to stick himself in a dry spell when free tail is ready and willing. He's just completely shut down on a physical level that Nilah's advances only anger him.
Then suddenly, 'Kavishirsi'. I don't say anything concretely there. I never do anywhere in the story. But if the reader didn't piece it together by then they certainly did after.
Then the first "repeat/mirror" scene: Harziyax's death, this time from Ig's PoV. In my other stories I use arc words and repeated phrases as call-backs a lot, but this is the first entire scene shown start-to-finish again. It sets up a precedent of such things.
Akizu dies and takes with him my author-voice. He was the reader's eyes. He was a nice person trying to figure Tim out to try to help him, but never lived long enough to learn enough. But suddenly Igneous is in charge, Tim barely gets any closure over Aki's death, and Ig is already being an overbearing ass for no reason. Akizu took the brightness out of the book. That little wedge of friendship on the plate got thrown away and the narration was left all alone with Tim's troubled thoughts, like we were locked into his sadness too. I intended a sense of growing claustrophobia from that point on. All of a sudden the palace is small and prison-like, or is supposed to be anyway.
We get a rather extended few chapters taking place over two days, involving Tim and the Seer, Tim and Nilah, Tim and the Theksarsi and then Tim and Igneous. He starts off acting fairly rationally. Spooked in the night, but calmer afterward. He's doing okay and is about to settle his fear by look at the Thek directly. Facing his fears and seeing them in chains.
But it all goes to hell and I get to cut loose with my first strong bout of "psycho grammar" as Tim's brain goes off the deep end and his PTSD shines through. Then Igneous brain-rapes him. By the end of the chapter Tim's torn up, covered in blood, tired, humiliated and knocked unconscious. It's the halfway point, where things suddenly get worse and Igneous' really evil side shows through. The reader is supposed to feel sort of dirty and frightened, too.
The best place to go from there is an extended flashback. You can imagine maybe that while Tim was KO'd, he dreamed about his past (he didn't then, but the feeling is supposed to be the same). I get to look at Felton's culture in more detail, how harsh it was, what their religion and holidays were like, how they all came to be there and what sort of people they produce. I got to look at a younger Tim before he was broken, and show how he and Ellie first started to really draw close, and why he became such the quiet, driven, militant person he was when Grace was taken.
The Cleric's speech was crucial, too.
After that ended, I yanked us back to the less forgiving current events. Or rather, future events. Like I said, flashbacks fill timeskips. We get a "mirror" of "Weak to Water" from Ocera, Dech's interrogation chapter. We get more dreams and nightmares, and I show us Roger's ghost. All along, the grammar is breaking down tremendously. I admit that I get nervous that I'll look too maudlin or overdo it or make it just too difficult to read. But why write if I'm going to hold myself back? The protagonist was cracking under the stress of his poor environment and Igneous' verbal, mental and social abuse. So the grammar cracked too. Periods started falling out, words started to stutter and repeat themselves, capitals dropped and exploded alternatingly.
Repetition is a strong theme moreso here. Tim repeats words when distressed and emotional, out loud and in his thoughts. The poem I wrote for him, "Nothing, Nothing Ever Happened There" shows some of that. The flashbacks are a type of repetition. The mirror chapters, too. It's like a record being scratched, over and over again in his head, more frantically as he breaks down more. By the penultimate chapter, nearly every single phrase is copied from earlier in the story or one of the other stories, used in new contexts.
I'm mildly disappointed with the fight scene really. But maybe it was always meant to be like that. From Dech's PoV in Ocera, his attacker was this random person who seemed like a "final boss" and was just some strange, angry old man who seemed to know his mother. He seemed really driven, full of conviction. But then from Tim's PoV it's just an inevitability and it all means nothing to him anymore.
His "death thoughts" crumble up the grammar even moreso until finally his afterlife, a chapter I've been wanting to write since the halfway point. I didn't touch on everything I wanted to here. It was a way to wrap up loose ends and give Tim a "happy" ending.
And that's that. I've been wanting to write this long explanation for a while, too.
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