Title
The Blood of Whisperers has had many different working titles in its lifetime. Many years ago when I did the original draft it was called The Errant Pawn. This, as you can imagine, led to numerous jokes amongst my beta readers, though mostly it became known as The Errant Prawn, rather than less savoury options. During its rewritten life it has also been called Sight Without Seeing, A Touch of Malice and The Exile’s Revenge. Neither of the first two say much about it, or even make sense until you actually read the book, while The Exile’s Revenge didn’t make it because it had a rather generic feel to it that didn’t suit this particular story. The Errant Pawn obviously didn’t work either, but it did make for a nice series theme – Errant Pawn, Errant God, Errant Storm. Errant is the name of a game they play within the book, which, although cool, has far from a vital role in the story.
The Blood of Whisperers draws on connotations of bloodlines and families, as well as the idea that gods hear the whispering of our souls.
Working with Multiple Protagonists
This book has always had more than one protagonist, but in its early drafts it was only ever Endymion and Darius. When I started the second rewrite I changed a lot of things and found that there was a whole section of the story that was just entirely missing from the page, so came Hana to join the mix and what a wonderfully refreshing voice she had. The first female protagonist I had ever written and she practically wrote herself! When I was writing her I went from 3000 words a day to 8000 – I just couldn’t stop!
I find the greatest challenge in working with three protagonists is being sure to spread their chapters evenly so they get even ‘screen time’, and making sure each of their stories continues to involve the other two. If this had been a bigger epic I might have let them go their separate ways more, but I wanted to be able to wrap it up in three fast paced books, which didn’t give them much time for getting out of hand.
Perspective
I like to write in the first person perspective. I like the closeness this gives the story, and it is just the way stories often come to me. I have characters who live in my head an I write down what they say, that’s pretty well what it comes down to. I don’t think about what is popular or what is ‘right’, I just write the story however it comes, and for me, more often than not, that is in the first person. These characters are telling you their story and their experience, not having their story told by someone else.
