Sabrina’s Trials and Tortures Aren’t Entirely My Fault

Down here at Disney World, everything’s magical. For my Tinker Bell lookalike Sabrina up in Scotland, however, things are anything but in Faerietales Book 2: “To Err Is Faerie.”

I won’t spoil anything for anyone who hasn’t read “Not So Human” yet. All I’ll say is Sabrina is less-than-content at the end of that story, initiating a whole lot of drama as the series continues.

Which is why I have to acknowledge that authors are jerks. We purposely make our characters’ lives difficult however we can, whether romantically, physically, psychologically… You get the picture.

We make them lose their jobs or lose the love of their lives or lose their cool. Heck, the caption I wrote for “To Err Is Faerie” is “Martyrdom is all well and good ‘til someone loses a mind.”

Moreover, authors have full control over their finished works; don’t let them tell you otherwise. If they try to defend themselves after the fact, explaining how they cried over all the nasty things they did to their characters, tell them you have three words for that:

What. Ev. Er.

With all of that said, I feel the need to try to defend myself over all the nasty things I do to Sabrina in this upcoming book. (Yeah, yeah. I know. What. Ev. Er.)

But hear me out for a sec... You see, just because an author has full control over her finished work doesn’t mean she can say the same during the first stages. For example, during the initial draft of “Not So Human,” I found myself wide-eyed, wondering what was going to happen next.

It took me a good second or two to remember that I was the writer, not the reader.

Sounds crazy? Maybe. But remember: It began about a human and ended up a flight of fancy about a faerie princess. So clearly, I’m not always in control of how my storylines flow at first.

I have another novel I swore up and down wouldn’t turn into a love story… until my main character fell in love against my wishes. And I fully intended to kill off my heroine in a separate book… yet she not only thwarted my insidious plot but also inspired two sequels.

In other words, I don’t plot out most of my stories. And when I do, it doesn’t seem to matter. They happen how they happen. And after they happen, well, it’s really kind-of annoying going back and changing the whole thing.

So consider this my apology for torturing Sabrina the way I do in “To Err Is Faerie.” Don’t worry: She gets her Disney-esque happy ending.

Eventually.