I should start off by saying this post might be a bit of a spoiler if you have not already read Downhill. If you haven’t yet picked up a copy of my latest work, please feel free to do so now… I’ll wait for you to return…
Okay, if you are still here, you’ve either read Downhill or are curious enough about Vasily Korsokovach to continue despite my warning. Last chance… going once… going twice…
If you’ve spent any time with Vasily, you probably know that when he first appears on the scene in Blindsided, Sean Colbeth describes him as something like a prototypical Southern Californian surfer dude, right down to the long bleached-blond hair Vas typically keeps in a quasi-professional ponytail. We find out later that the long hair was something of a protest by teenaged Vasily; though he wasn’t truly a fan of the length (or having to keep it in a ponytail when working out or competing in the pool), the very fact his mother despised the look meant he continued to wear it that way right through college. By the time we see him in Blindsided, the style has become such a part of Vasily he’s more or less forgotten the original reason for choosing it.
And as far as I was concerned, as the writer, that was that.
Except, it wasn’t.
There I was, minding my own business and writing Downhill last year; I’d long planned for it to be the reunion book between Sean and Vasily, but to my surprise, in the very first scene where we see the two together, something strange happened… but maybe I’ll let Sean take the explanation from here…
Deciding to put him out of his misery, my eyes went to his hair. “I like your new style,” I added, taking in once more the unusual way it had been cut. Gone was the long ponytail he’d worn for years; in its place, the sides had been cut short, but not shaved, and the top seemed to lean into his natural wave, looking quite literally as though he’d just woken up and done little more than run his hand through it. That there appeared little difference from how he looked that morning — having truly just rolled out of bed — and the way I’d seen him at the airport told me there was a good chance it was exactly how he styled it now.
Vasily smiled and ran a hand through it, more or less confirming my suspicions. “It was time for a change. And to be honest, long hair in the summer heat is a killer out in Southern Cal.”
Downhill (2022)
I’ve said before that these characters seem real to me, and this an excellent example of that. Way in the back of my mind, I’d long known that Vasily was unhappy with his hair — and that it was a manifestation of other, deeper issues he’d not entirely dealt with. There are some hints about this as the series progresses, some subtle, some not; but after I wrote that paragraph, I realized Vas had turned a corner. Not only was he finally happy in his own skin, he was allowing himself to be happy for the very first time in his life. It’s just one of several obvious ways that Sean picks up on the changes to his friend in Downhill, and we’ll see more of that in Duality later.
As I finished up writing Downhill, I began to realize I’d once more left a gap of a few months between appearances of Vasily and started to wonder what he’d gotten up to in that time. I knew I wanted to delve into some of those changes I’d hinted at in Downhill; I was also more than a little curious how his relationship with Alejandro had weathered the move to the West Coast. And — all right, I admit it — I missed Rosie Frankenhoffer, too, and all of the crazy energy she brought whenever she appeared in a story.
But most of all, I somewhat crazily wanted to know why Vasily had finally decided to cut his hair. What was the watershed moment? How did he decide on that particular style? And, more importantly, how did Alex react? Those are the sorts of weird questions I find myself asking as I write these amazing characters, and in Bygones, I’m fairly pleased with the answers I provided. So in some ways, I think you can accurately say that Bygones is an interesting byproduct of wanting to know more about my character.
All while still solving a mystery at the end of the day. 🙂