by Sophie Littlefield, author of Horizon (book 3 of the Aftertime series, Luna Books, February 2012)
Coming to the end of the AFTERTIME series was a remarkably emotional event for me. I’m not supposed to say stuff like this, but this series kicked my butt harder than anything I’ve written so far – and I love it the most. I’m proud of all the work I’ve published, and grateful to every editor who’s helped me shape my books, but this series forced me to dig deeper and work harder to get the emotion on the page than I ever have before.
At the same time, I’ve known from the start that this series isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. When I received my author copies, I gave one to my friend Lynn with the caution that she wasn’t to actually read it: I knew it was too dark, too creepy, too sad for her. I knew that my target readers would share my love of dark themes and deep character building and non-traditional relationships.
Some authors have time to consider reader feedback when writing subsequent books. If a series has stretched over many books or years – even decades, in some cases – readers’ reactions to the characters and storylines, their interpretations and suggestions, often determine the direction of a series.
In the AFTERTIME series, there simply wasn’t time. I wrote the first draft of AFTERTIME in fall and winter of 2010, and my agent inked the deal with Harlequin the following April. Adam Wilson, my editor, sketched out his thoughts about creating a trilogy, and we came up with the skeleton of a series arc. The deadlines were challenging, because the first book in the series was to come out barely a year later, and the second and third three and six months after that.
With only three months between releases, I had to have most of the series finished before the first readers ever turned page one. This meant I could only guess at how people would feel about my very damaged heroine and the choices she made.
Earlier today, as I cleaned my office (one of my release-day traditions, along with lunch at Nation’s Giant Burger and a manicure), I came across my notes from my early conversations with Adam. At the end of the notes was a series of questions and concerns I came up with before diving into edits. As I read through them again today, I was surprised at how some of them ended up being resolved. I thought you might enjoy a peek behind the scenes.
Cass – how dark?
How dark, indeed? This was the thought that never strayed far from my mind from the first time I heard Pink’s song, “Sober.” That song was the inspiration for the entire series, and I envisioned a young woman devastated and crushed by addiction – but not without hope. I knew I had to keep the ember of her determination lit throughout the series if I was to keep her sympathetic. The trick – the challenge – was to let it dim so far that everyone, myself included, really believed it might go out.
I really put Cass through her paces, a fact that few reviewers missed and some did not care for. Others, however, appreciated that her struggles – while dire – occur in real life. Childhood trauma, loss of a parent, sexual molestation, addiction, self-harm – every time Cass made a step forward, I was there to pile on complications and temptations and devastations. (Then, of course, I had to write my way back, but that’s a whole different problem.)
Ruthie – character?
To provide Cass with a reason to keep going, I gave her a daughter. I knew Ruthie was a toddler, somewhere between two and four years old. A child that age may not have a fully developed on-page character, but she had to be unique and compelling in her own right. I started with a physical description – I imagined a little girl like you might see on a Victorian postcard, pink-cheeked and cherubic – and then considered how she might have reacted to the horrific events of the apocalypse. Ruthie is by turns silent, fearful, clingy, tentative – but also occasionally mirthful, mischievous, loving. She is, after all, Cass’s daughter and I thought it was important to show that she inherited her resilience.
What does Smoke want?
Smoke appeared early in AFTERTIME, and from the start he was heroic, and the sexual tension between him and Cass sizzling. But that wasn’t enough. I had to figure out the motivation for both his willingness to help Cass on a near-impossible mission – and for the decisions he make that separate them in REBIRTH. This took quite some time, as it turns out, and I wasn’t 100% certain of the details until I was well into HORIZON. I had clarity about Smoke’s emotional palette, just not the details of the events that created it. Luckily, this resolved itself in one of those midnight-oil epiphanies with which we writers are occasionally visited.
Sex – zombies?
Not zombies having sex – they don’t, silly, everyone knows that! No, the dilemma is how to make it believable that people would still be in the mood to get it on, when outside the gate, flesh eaters are trying to force their way in. This is a tricky challenge, one that many urban fantasy authors struggle with. To be successful, the author must create such overwhelming attraction between characters that the reader is willing to go along. And as every good romance author knows, that sort of attraction is built from strong, credible motivation. So the question really was, what backstory elements have prepared my characters to be receptive to romantic love?
Tactile pleasures
The five senses are never more important than one is writing about the end of the world. It was easy enough to come up with horrifying details – the smell of decaying flesh, the sound of snapping jaws, the sight of wrecked cars spilling the dead onto the pavement, the taste of canned soup after you’ve subsisted on weeds for weeks – but it was more challenging to come up with details that conveyed pleasure. Without these, AFTERTIME might have been unbearably dark, so I worked hard to get them right, and they are among my favorite details in the book. Things like the feel of a smooth stone in one’s hand, the smell of rain-refreshed dirt, the sound of a child’s laugh, the sight of a seedling pushing green shoots through cracked pavement.
The last of my release-day pleasures is choosing a book from my TBR pile, climbing into bed, and digging in. Reviewing my AFTERTIME journey has me in the mood to explore someone else’s fictional world, and I’d love to hear your ideas. Would anyone like to share their favorite dark dystopian or fantasy book or series?
Sort of obvious, but The Hunger Games — really looking forward to the movie in March! And I loved Aftertime
~Amy from Hqn
The Giver by Lois Lowry. It is a classic!
I really like Ellen Connor’s Dark Age Dawning series.