Ramblings on first and third person POV, and a deleted scene…

I didn’t choose to switch from writing third-person to first-person POV. Mac’s story came to me in first person; she talks, I write. I find writing in first person far more challenging than third. My tools of the trade are limited. First person confines perspective. In third person I have an array of options with which to develop character, plot and tension. I have the luxury of moving from head to head, offering multiple perspectives of events—including the villain’s—and can stoke reader anticipation of a coming climax by illustrating various angles of the approaching disaster, while maintaining the protagonist’s ignorance, intensifying the reader’s anxiety. (Movies often employ this device.) In first person, you have one person through which to accomplish it all: plot momentum, tension, emotion, sexual attraction, treachery, danger…

In first person, the reader sees and experiences only through the protagonist’s senses. As in real life, events unfold with a higher degree of mystery, and people and their actions are difficult to label black or white. There is a certain comfort in third person narrative, it offers a sense of security, an awareness of the bigger picture and our place in it (oh, to have that luxury in real life!) while first person, offering only glimpses of the bigger picture, instills uncertainty and an innate anxiety. If verisimilitude is valued in art, first person fits the bill.

My interest with the Fever series—unlike my Highlanders—was not the journey’s end, but the journey. I didn’t want to tell a story where the world was already in chaos and the protagonist was a finished product. I wanted to watch the world fall apart. I wanted to watch Mac fall apart. I wanted to watch the world change, through her eyes, with all the mystery and fear and wonder, and first person was the correct vehicle.

When I wrote my Highlander books in third person, I moved freely from head to head, and before writing each scene, I would ask myself two questions:

1. What do I want this scene to accomplish? (If it doesn’t move plot or character development forward, it’s wasted space, most of the time. I say, “most of the time” because sometimes it’s fun to read details even when they don’t go anywhere, especially if you love the characters and the world, and just want more of it.)

2. From what character’s POV will this scene have the most impact, thematically, emotionally and dramatically?

Sometimes I write a scene five times and still don’t like it.

Leiha hounds me for deleted scenes :) so here’s one that was still floating around on my computer. The following was my first stab at a scene from Spell of the Highlander in which Jessica hauled the mirror home to her apartment, and the reader gets a quick glimpse at the Keltar and their mates. Upon reflection, I was unhappy with all of it, and cut it. It didn’t meet the above criteria, and it wasn’t interesting enough in details to justify its existence. I ended up using a few pieces here and there in the final version.


_____

It was four in the morning by the time she got the mirror toted up to her third floor apartment. The bright side of things was because it was so early, none of her neighbors were up and about, and she had the elevator all to herself. Luck had smiled on her while moving it (the only time it had smiled on her recently!), she was pretty sure no one had seen her dragging it around. The last thing she needed was the police after her for theft; having both assassins and the police hunting her would be more than she could stand.

The not-so-bright side of things was she’d been awake now for twenty-two hours and her coffee had worn off right around the time she’d been using her car jack to lever the mirror into her Honda hatchback. Loading the artifact hadn’t been as difficult as she’d anticipated. She’d had to push down the front seat, tilt the mirror, and bungee-cord the hatch, but she’d managed to get it in most of the way. Getting it out had been more of a struggle, especially with him barking incessant warnings not to break it.

If I did, would you die? she’d asked, ablaze with curiosity. I mean, assuming you’re actually alive in any relevant sense of the word to begin with.

Aye, I’m alive. I doona ken if I would die. ‘Tis possible I would survive, trapped with no way out. Still they will come after you, he’d said pointedly. So best you take care, woman. You need me. Think of this glass as the doorway through which I must come to save you. Break, it, there’s no doorway. You’re dead.

She’d shivered. And now, propping the mirror up against the wall in her living room, she shivered again.

They’d bickered for the duration of transport. He’d been horrified upon discovering their intended mode of transportation. She’d had to spend twenty minutes, standing in the parking lot, glancing anxiously about, hoping no one would come along and find her holding a six and a half foot tall mirror, staring into it and arguing with it, trying to convince it that cars are not alive and do not eat people, and once I put you in it, I most certainly will, too, be able to get you back out again.

How could he never have seen a car?

It occurred to her how absurd it was to wonder that, when his very existence was impossible. Why would anything else surprise her?

They’d spent the rest of the trip arguing about her driving: Are you certain you’ve strapped the mirror securely? Cease ceasing movement so abruptly! Christ, woman, must you catapult forward after each cessation? Try nudging the beast gently. Are you certain these stretchy ropes will hold? Horses! What the bloody hell is wrong with horses? Have they all been slain in battle?

And when she’d finally cranked up her favorite Godsmack CD in an effort to tune him out, he’d let out a roar that had rattled the windows in her car: By all that’s holy, woman, what is that hideous noise? Cease and desist! I’ve heard naught so cacophonous in all of Unseelie!

Clearly, she wasn’t the only one with control issues.

In a fit of pique, she’d stuffed in Mozart’s Requiem (which she reserved for only her broodiest days, usually during finals week) and in moments, he’d been whistling cheerfully along. Go figure.

Shaking her head, she moved away from the mirror, leaned her bottom back against the arm of her floral-patterned, overstuffed sofa, crossed her feet at the ankles, folded her arms, and stared into the glass. And for the dozenth time she marveled: there’s a man on the other side of that mirror! Moving and talking and to all appearances, living and breathing! What portion of silver was visible around his tall, powerful form reflected bits of her living room back at her. How weird. What could that glass possibly be made of? Was it comprised of any recognizable elements at all? Anything found in nature? Or even anything found on earth, for that matter? She had a million questions about the composition of the mirror alone!

And his existence within it—she had a zillion questions about that!

He mimicked her posture. Folding his arms, he seemed to lean back against something she couldn’t see and stared at her. There was no mistaking the impatience in his scotch-gold gaze.

“Now, woman. Invite me out, now.”

Jessica sucked in a slow, deep breath.

He didn’t care at all for the hesitation. His eyes narrowed and a muscle twitched in his jaw. “Think you to renege on our bargain?” he said softly. “Doona think to play me, Jessica. Circumstances will require you invite me out at some point. Best do so now and freely, or risk making me more aggressive than I already am. I am a warrior by nature, lass. Doona goad me.”

She swallowed again. Audibly. “You won’t hurt me, right?”

“Nay.”

“In fact, you won’t even touch me, right?” she pressed.

He smiled faintly. “Och, nay.”

She frowned; she’d confused herself with her own question. “Does that mean “nay, you won’t” or “nay, you will?”

He laughed. “Och, aye.”

She snorted. “Okay, you’re not cooperating and this is too much for me to handle right now and I’ve got to get some sleep before I’m going to be ready to deal with you and whatever weirdness is going on so you’re just going to have to chill for a few ho—”

“Release me this verra instant, lass, or be prepared to suffer the brunt of my temper when you do!” He lunged forward, filling every last nook and cranny of the silvery surface. For a moment she was afraid he as would burst free of the looking glass without any help from her.

She flinched, closing her eyes. After a moment of silence during which she heard no movement and nothing assaulted her, she slitted one eye open and sneaked a peek.

Fortunately, he was still in the mirror.

Unfortunately, he was right: if she wanted to stay alive, she was going to have to let him out eventually. And either he would protect her as he claimed, or he was lying through his teeth and planned to kill her—the way things had been going for her lately, gruesomely and with much blood—right there on the spot.

Regardless, the longer she delayed, the more pissed off he was going to be.

Which didn’t bode well for either possibility, and meant she should probably just get it over with.

He was waiting, eyes narrowed, nostrils flared, tensed to step forth from the glass. “I’ll bide not one more excuse,” he warned. “Say this now: Lialth bree che bree, Cian MacKeltar, drachme se-sidh.”

She wet her lips. Shook her head. Braced herself for all hell to break loose.

Oh, yeah, goodbye control, hello chaos.

She spoke the words to free him.


---

“Listen to this! You’ve got to hear this!” Gwen MacKeltar exclaimed, bursting into Castle Keltar’s cozy, informal dining room, where Dageus and Drustan were already seated, patiently awaiting their wives to join them. Or, rather, as patiently as any Highlanders were capable of awaiting their women.

Both were scowling.

Drustan was drumming his fingers against a wine glass.

Dageus had just finished plaiting a war braid into his hair at his temple.

“There you are, love.” Drustan rose, his gaze sweeping his wife’s lush figure, which had, in his estimation, been made all the sweeter by childbirth.

“Sorry we’re late,” Gwen replied, pushing up on her tiptoes for a kiss, “but Chloe found the coolest book in the underground library. It’s all about Keltar mates and how they find each other and what happens. “

“But what Gwen really likes,” Chloe said, waving a leather tome of thick, yellowed sheets, “is that it seems to explain away her state when she first came to Scotland.”

“Her ‘state’?” Drustan teased. “Of which ‘state’ are we speaking? Her irascible temper? Her contrariness? Nay, I have it, her wenchly possessiveness of me when—”

Gwen poked him in the ribs with an elbow, which, at five-foot-two and three-quarters on a good day was a reach for her. “You know, my state of, um… well…determination to find a man.”

“You mean a lover,” Drustan growled, tensing instantly “You journeyed to Scotland to take a lover. And ‘tis a damned good thing you met no measure of success. I would have had to rip out the bastard’s heart for touching my wife. And while he was dying, fed him his own bal—”

“Drustan,” Dageus spoke over him roughly, “women present.” So saying, he moved to slip a possessive arm around his lovely wife. He understood Drustan’s sentiments all too well. But a Highlander didn’t burden his woman with broody jealousies. He simply killed the man fool enough to look at her too long.

Drustan ended his sentence in the same growl it had begun.

Gwen gave him a doting smile. “Easy, my fierce Highlander. I wasn’t your wife yet. And don’t take it personally. Apparently, I couldn’t help it. If your ancestors are right, I had little choice. I was the victim of an “irresistible, uncommon heat.”

Chloe laughed. “Me too. Which explains my wandering in and exploring Dageus’s bedroom like I did. I may be nosy, but I’m not usually that bad. I felt…well, like I was mesmerized or something while I was exploring his penthouse. Apparently it works on the woman like the legendary siren’s call on sailors.”

“And this book tells of this?” Dageus asked.

Chloe nodded. Delicately, with a tissue pinched between her fingers, she opened the book. “This is a rough translation, I’m still not great with Old Gaelic, but here it is: A woman destined for a Keltar mate will suffer an irresistible, uncommon heat as the time for her claiming approaches, it may endure for many moons, preparing her for her laird and husband. If not claimed, the woman may turn…” Chloe cocked her head, “I do believe it means something like ‘feral’.” She glanced up from the book, with a soft snort of laughter. “The gist of it is that she becomes single-mindedly fixated on sex. And if the timing is off, or she doesn’t get claimed, it can get pretty bad. She becomes aggressive and testy, unable to get sex off her mind.”

“Och,” Dageus gave Drustan a dry look, “any surprised faces here?”

Drustan laughed, slipping his hands around his wife’s waist and pulling her back against him. “Nay, none here.”

Gwen and Chloe exchanged a private smile. What their husbands didn’t know was that a few pages later, the volume explained that such a heightened sex-drive or “irresistible, uncommon heat” never completely abated. It merely learned to simmer rather than constantly boil.

It was intended to ensure—not merely the survival of the Druid line—but compatibility with their aggressive, insatiable Keltar males.

Keltar women were lucky women, indeed.

---

She was a warrior, this one, Cian thought, watching, as she muttered the words to release him.

Grudgingly. Very grudgingly. He could scarce differentiate the consonants from the vowels, she was gritting her teeth so hard. He bit back a smile.

Och, aye, she was a woman with heart and spine. He’d seen her mettle, when she’d valiantly faced down her assassin. Her wits too, when she’d availed herself of the most effective weapon in the room by threatening to break the mirror.

Then she’d carted about his mirror for several hours and, he’d wager, it weighed as much as she, if not more. She’d commanded a metal beast (albeit with about as much grace and control as a deer skidding about on an iced-over loch, lurching and slipping so much he’d nigh lost his kippers—figuratively speaking that was, he’d not eaten kippers in centuries—Christ, how he missed them! He’d decided she must lack the strength in her forearms to hold it to an even gait, thus all the stopping and starting. When next he was free he would try his hand at the beast’s tethers. He’d teach the contrary creature command.) She’d stood her ground against him—him—the most dangerous Keltar his century had ever known—giving back to him as good as he gave.

And he’d been deliberately trying to intimidate her. Cow her a bit, Render her malleable. He’d endeavored to use Voice on her from within the mirror on multiple occasions, but it seemed to have no effect on her whatsoever.

Which confounded him. In his experience, only those with advanced Druid training could resist the compulsion of Voice. Verily, when he was free from the mirror, only one man alive, James, could withstand his command of it, and only because it had been Cian himself who’d taught the bastard the art. In the practice of Druidry, mentor and pupil developed immunity to one another during the process of training.

The thief who’d stolen him had been simple to command, even from several levels below, deep in the labyrinthine catacombs, where his mirror had hung facing the wall. It had scarce required any effort at all to lure him down, and persuade him to steal all the Dark Hallows.

But this wee woman—she’d been mere feet from him and not a single command he’d laced with Voice had she obeyed. Verily, she didn’t even seem to notice. He’d begun to think he’d not even be able to make her do something so simple as scratch her nose.

Mayhap, he’d decided, he needed to be outside the mirror. Mayhap for some reason, she was unaffected by his powers with the glass betwixt them.

With that thought in mind, the moment he stepped forth from the mirror, he drew on the full power of his Voice and got right to the point. “Take me to your bed, woman.”