Radical Changes

First, late me take an opportunity real quick to say I've published a short anthology of shorts (whoa) on Amazon Kindle under the name Daniel Dydek. If They Keep Silent is a collection of voices as varied as any crowd with one thing in common: the need to tell their story. You can get the book here. If you don't have a Kindle, you can search "Kindle for PC [or Mac]" and get a free download that will allow you to read Kindle books on -- you guessed it -- your PC or Mac. My version even came with some free books. Check the anthology out, you can preview before you buy it, and if you're an Amazon Prime member, you can check it out in the Kindle Library. Thanks!

So last night, while we were sitting and eating at a very, very good local Italian place, my fiancee and I began talking about the next book I'm working on. Well, "working on" might be a little misleading: I'm primarily working on finding an agent for the novel I've finished. But I'm tumbling around ideas in my head, I have a sample chapter done just to explore the world and meet some of the characters -- but nothing terribly concrete. It's malleable. Which, after last night, is a good thing.
Here's the thing: I had the characters pretty well set up. I had the POV character, a jaded mercenary who needs a job, but is given one he doesn't particularly like. I had a very enigmatic, quiet, supremely wise, ageless man(?) that no one -- even the mercenary best friend -- ever really knows what's going on with him. Then I had the idealistic, shallow young soldier from the army that the mercenary is hired by. Three characters, nice and simple.

Until I started running with the reality that my first novel is a YA novel. Towards the mature end (high school and more toward college), but still YA. Book two, with a grizzled 35-year-old protagonist, is not YA. Not projected to be YA, that is. So as we're talking, my fiancee advises me to make the protag a little younger. Which I don't really like, because his age is kind of important in the things he's going through.

Then it hit me: I have a character who could be 18: the young idealistic soldier. First of all, it would be very, very interesting to explore the themes of this novel through his eyes. He's a guy who has wedded himself to the ideals of the army he serves, and its commander. He's not the kind of guy who seeks to change his mind; if he encounters arguments, he regurgitates whatever information he can, whether or not it applies directly to the argument presented to him. (If you're a Republican, you can think of him as a Democrat in that regard; if you're Democrat, he's like a Republican.) He's not concerned with logic; only in keeping the status quo. The grizzled mercenary, however, is very much about finding arguments and strengthening his opinion through honest searching of the truth. And there's several reasons why the merc is like that; but the important thing is he's a polar opposite to the young idealist.

I'm still fishing through the plans I had laid already for the book, but thus far I'm finding that this radical POV shift is solving more problems than it creates. And I'm itching to start this book.

See you Friday.