I am sure you may have noticed. Angelfyre is written a little differently.
When the idea of Angelfyre took hold in my mind some years ago, I had no clue where it would lead me. I explored different paths, fantasized the possibilities to the n-th degree, attacking every angle I could to bring her to life. I even entertained the possibility of building a life-sized prototype despite the impossibility given she was beyond any technology we currently possess. All the while, the fantasizations blossomed, a story evolving until the stark realization that the only way to prevent this tiny universe sprouting from the fertile soils of my brain from flying away was to firmly anchor it with the written word.
Angelfyre came at a time when mainstream cinematic story telling seemed to be faltering. I had become ever more disinterested in the hosepipe of meaningless drivel being pumped into the muddy streams of Netflix and Amazon Prime. Fortunately reading still held a luster, being a long time Terry Pratchett fan thanks to my wife (a consumer of books worthy of an Olympic medal, if such a category ever existed). But writing? Now suddenly a whole new dimension had been opened. I had set foot on a novel alien world, and I became obsessed. A story took shape in my mind, originally different to the one that eventually found itself on paper, but one offering a beginning. I toiled with ideas, grappled with plots, danced with characters, and wrestled with words.
Oh, the words. Having not written anything of a fictional nature since my days in high school (my writing earned my highest graduating marks in English), I was hopelessly out of practice. Most of my output had been of a technical nature during my career in natural sciences, penultimately capped by a PhD thesis that had just been completed and submitted for examination prior to my turning focus to Angelfyre.
As I began anew with my writing journey into the world of literary fiction, I soon lamented how badly the words were failing me. How does one take such vivid machinations of the mind and cement them in prose? As I forged ahead, the cuts and stings from a thousand poorly chosen words and abysmally strung phrases revealed a bitter truth: The words were not failing me. I was failing the words.
I started the first chapter of Angelfyre in the more traditional writing style: past tense and dialogue tags. Then I tried another way, something tantalized by the musings of more adventurous writers: dropping dialogue tags entirely. Heresy, you say? Bah! I think nothing more of it, forcing dialogue and narration through a bitter divorce to each live alone within their respective paragraphs. Enshroud with a façade of present tense to add further editorial trauma, and suddenly the whole thing felt oddly cinematic. It was different, dastardly so. I stuck with it, smug in mind that I was about to throw the proverbial habanero into a sauce of predictable expectations. I could hear the swearings of the betrayed already, and so I donned my pirate hat, drew my cutlass and hung from the foresail sheets as I leered at the imposing fleet of those published in traditional prose. Arr! How I smite thee!
The first draft of Angelfyre took shape in just six weeks. The story was down. The draft done. The obsession anchored. A perfect collision between words and paper.
And then reality. The style chosen, an absolute bastard to heel. What a spectacularly glorious trainwreck it was. The core problem was painfully obvious: dropping dialogue tags left little from stage direction to draw focus to a speaking character. While this had some clear strengths, this road was not without its landmines. Let’s take something in traditional writing style:
“She’s right.” Gwyneth replied, scratching her nose.
And instead, in present tense stage direction, use:
Gwyneth scratches her nose.
“She’s right.”
A character would need a pre-dialogue action of some kind to direct the readers’ attention to them. Simple? Maybe not, for redundancy is a devilishly sly mistress. But it was challenging and endearingly different, and being one to avoid the mainstream by any means necessary, I doubled down on the abomination. Many rewrites and a talented editor later, something digestible was borne.
To echo the words of John F. Kennedy: I chose to go to the moon, not because it was easy, but because it was hard. And it continues to be hard, to this very day, where I am almost 800 000 words into the story. Dear God, what have I done.
But I know I have succeeded, because you’ll pick up any book in the Angelfyre series, read a random passage, and know for certain…
This is Angelfyre.
And not a single LLM can touch it😊
– From the Writing Desk of Uncle Lydan