Go, Alejandro, Go!

I might have mentioned back during my post about the panel I did at the Tucson Festival of Books this year that one of the questions I was asked was why I choose to write my stories from a first-person perspective. I usually respond by saying I like the readers to discover the clues right alongside the main character, and that I find it far more interesting (both as a writer and reader) to be inside the thoughts of my detective as they piece together the puzzle to solve the mystery. It also feels far more personal to me, allowing the deep emotions of the character to be exposed in a way that is sometimes challenging to achieve from a more traditional third-person perspective.

That’s not to say that I haven’t written material from a third-person angle. Both of the holiday shorts I’ve crafted so far — Baubles and Snow Drifts — were intentionally done that way because I wanted more of a cinematic feel to those stories, with more vibrant backgrounds than I can sneak into a typical Sean or Vasily narrative. Don’t get me wrong: those two are pretty good at describing a setting, but it comes across a bit differently — hits a bit differently — when the scene reads as though an omnipotent camera was panning through a wide shot.

The conversation at the Festival panel was very much top of mind this past weekend while I was working on my latest novel. Silenced. As the series has progressed, Alejandro has moved well beyond being just a love interest for Vasily; while their relationship remains central in the ongoing character development for my detective, Alex seems to find ways to be more involved with each case — but in a different way than how Rosie is able to insert herself into the action. Masks has one of the more chilling examples of this; I had that in the back of my head, too, when I settled in to write a set of scenes in Silenced that directly tie to the mystery Vasily is currently trying to unravel.

My original concept had been a long phone call between the two of them; for reasons I don’t want to spoil, Vas has to fly to another state to follow a lead, and while he’s out of California, Alex has a run-in with some Very Bad People who may or may not be tangentially related to the case. I will hasten to add that in no version of the plot did Alex get hurt, but the incident is physical in nature; as I began to transcribe the conversation where Alex relates what happened to Vas, I began to realize it lacked some of the punch I was hoping for (pun intended). Alejandro is a good storyteller, but something was lost in translation; I tried a few times to correct the problem only to realize I needed to come at it from a completely different angle.

With the work I did on Reflection in the Shadows, I knew I was capable of shifting viewpoints between chapters and made the unexpected decision to tell that part of the story through Alejandro’s eyes. I also knew from having written him as the lead in Baubles that he’d only come to life from the third-person perspective; what worried me more was whether the reader would be happy going from Vasily in one chapter to Alex in the next and then back to Vas as a bookend. I’ve ready plenty of novels where this is a normal pattern, but honestly, I was a bit freaked out about doing it. Still, it seemed like a good time — and the right place in this particular novel — to give it a shot.

Decision made, I found the words suddenly began to flow; Alex was, predictably, in no mood to be taken down by some flunkies and (no surprise) takes the day. Re-reading what I had after it was done, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked inside the overall architecture of the story, and that Alex gets a moment to shine all by himself. Vasily is also, predictably, quite unhappy about what happens to Alejandro, but is too far away at the time to do anything meaningful about it; I’m fairly certain that will bubble into a later chapter once he returns to California, though I’m also aware that Alex — as much as he loves it when Vasily goes into Full Protect Alejandro Mode — feels like he’s quite capable of taking care of himself. It’s not really a source of friction between the two of them, but it does underscore some of the dynamics at play in their relationship.

Hopefully you’ll like what I did!

One more thing before you go

Masks appears in a few days, which usually means I do tidbits from the forthcoming novel. I completely spaced on this, for which I am incredibly sorry; I’ll try to make it up to you by doing something similar the week after the book launches. We should also have a podcast ready in late April; my usual schedule got thrown off wildly after spending so much time on Reflection in the Shadows, which means I feel like I’m incredibly behind this year. I appreciate you hanging in there! In the meantime, feel free to grab a copy of my latest novel.