{"id":30246,"date":"2015-10-12T06:30:04","date_gmt":"2015-10-11T17:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=30246"},"modified":"2015-10-11T15:04:41","modified_gmt":"2015-10-11T02:04:41","slug":"the-wall-of-night-series-reflections-on-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2015\/10\/12\/the-wall-of-night-series-reflections-on-characters\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Wall Of Night” Series & Reflections On Characters"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Having a new book scheduled to come out “soon”(-ish!) gets you thinking about the books that have come before them, especially in a series—and Daughter Of Blood<\/em><\/strong> is very much part of the continuing The Wall Of Night<\/a> story.<\/p>\n

Partly, this is what made me embark on the recently commenced “About the Characters”<\/a> posts—altho’ “meet<\/em> the characters” might be another way of thinking about!—which\u00a0 has been focusing on minor characters, mainly in The Heir of Night<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (The Wall Of Night, Book One.)<\/p>\n

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All that has got me thinking about the whole process of developing characters, not only in a book, but also in the book that you know is the first step in the long and winding journey of “series.”<\/p>\n

And (in my humble opinion, anyway!) The Heir of Night (Heir) <\/em>and The Wall of Night (WALL) series is all<\/em> about the characters: who they are, what code of values they subscribe to\u2014and how they behave in relation to those values when the chips are down. So I guess that\u2019s why Heir<\/em> is quite an adventurous story (OK, it\u2019s also because I like treks into dangerous territory, sword fights and hunts and battles with demons, to be strictly honest!) as well as being character driven. Because it\u2019s only when the going gets tough that the person you believe<\/em> you are gets tested.<\/p>\n

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The two central characters\u00a0 in WALL are Malian, the eponymous Heir of Night, and Kalan, who is both her sidekick and a major character in his own right. In Heir<\/em> they are both young (not unlike the five Stark children in George RR Martin\u2019s A Game of Thrones<\/em>), but dark events are thrust upon them. How they deal with that is very much part of the story, so that Malian at the beginning of The Gathering of the Lost<\/em><\/a> (Gathering<\/em> — The Wall Of Night, Book Two<\/strong>), despite her youth, already has a harder edge than the girl in the opening scenes of the book.<\/p>\n

One of the more\u00a0 difficult characters in the early story, at least in terms of values and being tested, is Malian\u2019s father, the Earl of Night. Some time after the book first came out in 2010, a reader said: \u201cOh you can just feel the <\/em>weight resting on him.\u201d <\/em>This did please me, because it is very much how I hoped that the Earl would come across: not as a straightforward personality, but as a man caught between opposing forces and conflicting values, not least his personal inclination and circumstances that are driving him in a different direction\u2014which means that he is tested, sometimes even severely tested, as a character. Needless to say, he is not necessarily a likable man\u2014but I hope that readers find him an interesting one<\/p>\n

Big ideas, big story, characters under pressure\u2014or a tale of adventure, battles and flights from danger? I love stories that weave the two elements together, so it\u2019s probably not surprising that I’ve striven to achieve the same result in The<\/strong> Wall of Night <\/strong>series.<\/p>\n

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Coming soon now…<\/p><\/div>\n

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… January 2016<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having a new book scheduled to come out “soon”(-ish!) gets you thinking about the books that have come before them, especially in a series—and Daughter Of Blood is very much part of the continuing The Wall Of Night story. Partly, this is what made me embark on the recently commenced “About the Characters” posts—altho’ “meet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-my-books","category-about-the-characters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30246"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30256,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30246\/revisions\/30256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}