G is for—Gangsters
When I first got the idea which would
become the Hexslinger Series, I was deeply in love with Martin
Scorsese's epic Gangs of New York. I did scads of historical
research, wrote a bunch of fanfiction you can probably find pretty
easily (as usual, I was almost the only person doing so), and started
putting together a completely different book that I will probably
return to, though not immediately. But nothing caught fire. Maybe it
was the scope, or the fact that you need to be far more careful in
terms of metropolitan geography than you do when writing a Western,
because in the latter case it's an option to just claim the
interiors of Arizona and New Mexico are mainly empty space unless you
tell the audience different. By the time I got to A Rope of
Thorns, however, I had to come up with some new hexes, and my
mind defaulted to Gotham. Thus was born dapper pimp Three-Fingered
Hank Fennig, late of the Glorious Know-Nothing Order of Native
Americans, along with his three lovely Missuses, Clodagh Killeen,
Eulalia Parr and Roberta Schemerhorne. Fennig, being well-used to
gang dynamics, supports Rook and Ixchel overtly while studying them
for flaws he can press on if needed, especially her; his true
interest is in the city Ixchel sees mainly as a flabby meat
by-product of her quest to restore the Mexica Fourth World, not least
because it's the only place he and massively pregnant Clo could ever
raise their probably-hexacious baby without being afraid they'd be
tempted to suck it dry. And in A Tree of Bones, these
considerations only become stronger, making Fennig and company a
surprisingly integral part of the plot.
H is for—Hex City
Like I said before, storytelling is
alchemical; nothing stays the same, and really, nothing should. So
while I'm not entirely sure if I knew from the start that I was going
to shatter one of the key assumptions of the Hexslinger-'verse by the
end of A Book of Tongues—the idea that “mages don't
meddle” because there are simply no circumstances, ever,
under which they might be able to work together—when A Rope of
Thorns rolled around, I found myself in the unenviable position
of having to figure out how a place like New Aztectlan/Hex City would
actually function. Who would seek it out, and why; how would
it be constructed; what would be the division of labour; how would
the mechanics of the Ixchel-imposed Oath be enacted. I had had the
impression that there were occasionally circumstances under which
hexes would agree to work together, but that those were few and far
between because at any moment, either of those involved might turn on
the other. But once the Oath itself was sketched out—in A Rope—I
began to see the ways that it might be modified or twisted to fit a
bunch of different circumstances. Thus the “problem” of both Hex
City—ie, the fact that its inhabitants want it to survive more than
they want its founder to triumph—and how the Oath might be
translated out into the wider world of hexes who don't happen to be
New Aztectlites becomes front-and-centre in A Tree of Bones,
with hopefully interesting results.
Tomorrow: I and J!
No comments:
Post a Comment