Just Too Hard To Ignore
When I was six, and first began exploring the massive world in my head, I drew pictures of a man called Arandes. The world was small then, in the same way the world is small when you’re a child and looking up at big adults all around you, not really understanding. The world inside my head was bigger and more profoundly vivid than the one outside, which seemed to be quite painful. Many people came and went in my imaginary life, but he was always there at the back of it all. Occasionally, he showed up in early work and then when I was eleven he disappeared.
Suddenly I was 20, and writing the first version of Amnar: 4785. I needed a name for a powerful and cryptic guard, and the name Arandes popped into my head. There he was again, after years apart. I put him in there and he was your classic almost anonymous hero, running into danger while others ran away from it. He wasn’t in the book much, and he just did the hero bit. Yet there was something about him even then, that there was more to him than the looks and the strength.
At 25 I was writing again, the second version of 4785. Since the anonymous guard Arandes who turns out to be a Servant worked in the first version, I used it again. Except that, from the first moment he walked into the book, he was a thousand times more powerful than before. I sent seven chapters to my friend Helen, and her first reaction was, “Wow, Arandes is sexy.”
I’d never had an emotional reaction to my work before because I always wrote for editors and authors who gave me analyses of how I used language and how I developed people. It was so cold compared to what happened when I shared my work and a universal appreciation of Arandes began. The book that was supposed to be about Io waking up to her potential and discovering herself was being gradually taken over, as the series progressed, by this man that I initially quite disliked. I called him a sociopath. He didn’t seem to have any qualms about killing if he needed to, fulfilling needs whether sexual or otherwise with whomever he chose. He intimidated me, so I intellectualised him. And he watched me, grinning and laughing at me sometimes. He’d probably say, “Oh, you’re being neurotic again! Silly girl!”
He’s what I suppose we’d call the classic male hero stereotype, but he’s also not. There’s something terrifying about him too. I watched myself embodied in various other characters, my differing responses: the swooning Runa, and the aggressive, bitchy Tascha. In Book Two he became the hero I personally wanted, rescuing Akeeri and treating her with a care that goes beyond heroic; not just picking her up and carrying her away from danger but appreciating exactly what she’d been through. Arandes had, it seemed, a connection with the Universe, or with life itself. He’s too sophisticated to be a barbarian, not exactly good and not exactly bad, the perfect friend but a lethal enemy.
Then Maali came along. Maali who loved and adored him while he loved and adored her. What was different about Maali? She wasn’t overly aggressive towards him, she cared for him and he cared for her. She treated his fighting injuries from the line, and she knew how to handle his every temper. She knew how to take his one-liners as jokes, and when to be serious. She could collapse on him, and he could collapse on her. When Lilatysia, his Guardian died, it was she he went to cry. Because he does, this huge man with his appreciation for swords and sex and whisky, he cries. I should post on my blog the scene after Maali dies, his sudden desperation despite all his understandings of the hidden workings of the Universe, he doesn’t want to lose her.
I fell in love. I’m in love with Amnar anyway, but with him especially. I hear him often, laughing at the things he sees through my eyes. He finds Earth a crazy place. He’s too clever to be swept up in politics, he sees through too much. He sees through me. Too sharp by far, he’s not the kind of distant hero women swoon over. To be loved by him is perhaps to enter into something where everything collapses; you have to be utterly real because he sees through all your disguises. He sees through mine. Sometimes, he seems to embody life in all its forms, however beautiful and ugly, good and bad, it can be. It took me a long time to let my guard down, to not be offended when he says “you’re facing the wrong way again” or bothered when he challenges my morality. I think that’s what he’s here for. He’s loud and riotous and you think you’ll find him wrapped around some woman or drinking with Sjaadan and then to your surprise he’s got his feet on the table reading a book about the development of the laws surrounding the First Tenet of the Establishment. Maybe this is what it takes to write at this level, to see the characters you make as real, to love and hate them and argue with them as though they were right there in front of them. The more you make it real for yourself, the more it is for everybody else.
