15 Dec 2016

The Soul Blade Chapter 11 - The Commentary

Brenna gets interviewed by the police again, in The Soul Blade Chapter 11.  The commentary catch up is complete!

Brenna is having the worst day of her life.  Her emotions are changing every minute.  Her crush has arrived in his wonderful uniform asking her about her attacker, and Brenna is trying to remain focused.  On top of that, Matt's giving her a very mild scolding about calling him instead of 911.  Dr. Womack may have a point.

Brenna's thinking comes out here.  Her reasoning is essentially mine as  I try to figure out why she knows that Tricia attacked her in relation to the dead body she found back in Chapter 3.  I hope the reasoning is sound.  Brenna pales next to her sister, but Grace never had to deal with a constant distraction because of hot classmates.  Brenna is as smart, The reasoning is sound based on what Brenna knows.  That is a key issue to remember when writing - the main character does not have the information that the author does.  Her knowledge does have Detective McCoy wondering how she knows what's happening.  Brenna Halliday, prime suspect.

The bit with Kirk was a background gag.  Since I "borrowed" the name, why not "borrow" some character bits?  McCoy turned out to be the lead detective on the case.  Kirk does get a few lines, but his role is more or less to do interesting things in the background.  McCoy does want to discover how Brenna knows what's going on and how she knew where to find the body.

Tricia gets a scene that I later regretted adding.  When there's a villain who is genre savvy, it makes setting up clues far more difficult.  Tricia knows what she's doing.  Being genre savvy, Tricia also knows when it's time to pack up and leave.  The ashen man, who now has a tag to refer him by, can at least let Tricia know who she's up against.  He knows the one weakness; once you know who the Bladekeeper is, it's easy to avoid her.  After all, Bladekeepers deal with ghosts, not murderous mages making deals with devils.  Kill the Bladekeeper and another steps into her legacy, and now there's no easy way to find her.  Keep her alive and avoid her, she's not really a problem, being just one woman.

Of course, the above means that the Bladekeeper would be very busy.  One Chosen One against a near-infinite number of restless ghosts doesn't sound very balanced, even given Brenna's approach to dealing with them.  A sequel idea I had for Brenna's story would have her get invited to a site in Europe along with a number of other women with mystical abilities.  While the Soul Blade runs in Brenna's family, but the other women also have their own legacies.  A gathering of Chosen Ones.  There will be an ulterior motive to the gathering, naturally.

Tomorrow, a confession and a first date in The Soul Blade Chapter 12.
Also tomorrow, over at Psycho Drive-In, Young Frankenstein.
Saturday, over at The Seventh Sanctum, Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie.

2 comments:

  1. I don't think this is the worst day of Brenna's life. The previous day her hormones went crazy, she got thrown through a wall, and she had a blowout with her mother. Today she went shopping, survived an attack on her life with merely a wardrobe issue, and managed a conversation with Matt. Seems better to me.

    Incidentally, Matt, a guy who hasn't been around Brenna for years, says "You sounded scared when you called." He could figure that out, but (in Ch 10) her own sister kept riffing on sex until Brenna swore? (I'm not sure Brenna's the one who's obsessed, Grace.) Also, after Matt speaks to the receptionist, she suddenly gets referred to as "Tina" despite no introductions. The guy's got abilities.

    I'm not sure I follow why you regretted adding the scene with Tricia. You kind of had to show her reaction to the attack, in my opinion. Was it her snide remarks? The mechanics of being the Bladekeeper? One way to rectify the "Chosen One vs Infinite Ghosts" is to say there's something that naturally draws them to her within a radius, rather than her needing to always go to them.

    The places where you're splitting the story apart seem to be working well, by the way.

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    1. True. More of a bad week, with a lighter day. She's recovering from her worst day ever, though with bonus crazy woman attack. And seeing Matt does brighten her day.

      Matt heard a tremble in her voice, a different pitch. He's dealt with scared people in his career. (Grace likes to push Bren's buttons. She knows where they are.) That is a slip on my part; Tina should have been better introduced.

      More of giving Tricia too much information so she can work around it. I do find a way to get Bren back on track, but it shouldn't have been a problem in the first place. Having ghosts drawn to Brenna does work, and they do seek her out (see also, Bert), but a ghost terrorizing a hamlet in the Czech Republic isn't going to make a trans-oceanic trip to say hello to the one being that will move it on. Having multiple Chosen Ones at least spreads the workload. It was the one detail that kept nagging at me with Buffy.

      Thanks. The splits have meant that there are shorter chapters and longer chapters, but there wasn't a better place to make the cuts.

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