It Used To Be; August 7 2021
Happy early anniversary to me! August 10th marks the 1-year mark since I signed my contract with Scarsdale Publishing. In that time, I finished the two other books in the trilogy and did the first round of heavy, heavy edits to book #1.
Perhaps because of this looming date, The Rebirth of Qistedei has been on my mind a lot. I really can’t wait to finish polishing the stories to make them the best they can be, and then share these books with the world. There’s a lot of stuff in these books that I still hold close to my heart, and they’ve evolved so much since what they first were…
And that’s what I thought I’d talk about, this week! Despite my better judgement, I want to discuss the very first version of Kanae, written back in 2008.
That’s right. 2008.
Kanae herself started off heavily based on Yuna, from Final Fantasy X. Sweet, soft-spoken, and a martyr to the core. Her entire character revolved around one and only desire: to help others. This became a problem when actually writing her as the protagonist of a story, because she didn’t go on any kind of emotional journey, herself; there wasn’t a goal for Kanae herself to reach. She was just there to elevate the people she loved.
And she loved everyone. There wasn’t a single character she didn’t make friends with, in the end, even when that conclusion defied logic. Nowadays, I think that can still be done right – Steven Universe did a good job of having the power of love triumph – but I, personally, didn’t do a good job of it. Villains were suddenly bending their goals and methods to avoid upsetting one girl.
The other characters had a lot of refinement to go through, too. Kanae’s longtime lover and fellow Ornament, Ymi, was a soldier the first time around – a combat-ready mind-reader, deeply plagued by the thoughts of her enemies slain on the battlefield. She was, in essence, the characters of Ymi and Niac combined. I still think I could have done a lot with this version of Ymi, but unfortunately, my first pass was angsty for the sake of angst. The only ray of sunshine in her life was – you guessed it – Kanae, and her devotion to Kanae bordered on slavish as a result. It wasn’t a healthy look, and she flat-out wasn’t fun to read or write.
Then there were the twins, Quin and Torin. Torin, I may have mentioned, was written out of the story somewhere around draft 5 – he wasn’t adding anything to the story, only existing to fall in love with Ymi. They were identical, adopted after being abandoned at birth, and their mutual fear of being left behind again manifested very differently; Quin was flippant and flirtatious while covering up his real emotions, and Torin was blunt and honest while keeping people at arm’s length. I still miss Torin’s character, but he really didn’t do anything but fill the niche of ‘token heterosexual’. Quin, on the other hand, has largely remained the same!
When I started out with these characters in 2008, I had no plot. I figured I could drop them into a vague setting – and boy, was it vague – and have them interact until a story appeared.
Needless to say, it didn’t work. I kept hitting roadblocks and quitting drafts somewhere around the 20k-30k mark, realizing the story was treading water.
Skip ahead 9 years. I’d been stewing on these characters the whole time, and realized the biggest missing factors were a unique setting and individual character motivations. I developed the Ornaments, realized Kanae was one of them, and separated Ymi and Niac into two characters. In 2017, I wrote the first completed draft of The Rebirth of Qistedei.
It’s wild to think of how much it evolved in the 3 years it took to find a home with Scarsdale Publishing, and how much it’s changed in a single year as well.