{"id":1452,"date":"2011-12-05T09:21:51","date_gmt":"2011-12-05T14:21:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=1452"},"modified":"2012-01-21T17:13:53","modified_gmt":"2012-01-21T22:13:53","slug":"on-writing-tortured","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/prized\/on-writing-tortured\/","title":{"rendered":"On Writing “Tortured”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>My short story \u201cTortured\u201d<\/a> (Birthmarked<\/em> 1.5<\/em>) came about as a dark experiment, the sort that goes wrong and stays with you.<\/p>\n

At first, I was faced with a unique writing challenge.\u00a0 The tie-in story was intended originally for readers who already knew Birthmarked<\/em> (Book 1) but who had not yet read Prized<\/em> (Book 2).\u00a0 It was a precarious window.\u00a0 I pondered: how could a story add something to both books and yet stand alone enough to work as a short story? When would it take place?\u00a0 Who would it be about?\u00a0 How could it not be a spoiler?\u00a0 It couldn\u2019t simply be a misplaced chapter.\u00a0 It had to matter<\/em>.<\/p>\n

At the time, I had been routinely receiving emails from readers of Birthmarked<\/em> who asked about a certain character, one who was doomed to suffer.\u00a0 A visceral, pivotal scene began to formulate at the edge of my mind, and I had this insidious feeling I\u2019d be forced to face it.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t want to.\u00a0 I\u2019d been creeped out enough by the twisted dungeon stories of opium-loving, cousin-marrying Poe, and I had little desire to explore the parallel side of my own mind.\u00a0 Yet the more I resisted, the more I felt this powerful urge to see where my own dark side could take me.\u00a0 Besides, I cared about my character.<\/p>\n

So I started with this murky prison scene, and as it sucked me in, I followed along, letting events materialize before me.\u00a0 It was told from a new perspective, not Gaia\u2019s, but the setting felt deeply familiar.\u00a0 I wrote with no concern for explaining anything to anybody because I assumed the characters and my reader knew all of the first novel as back-story, complete with its events and relationships.\u00a0 A spare character from a story I\u2019d written for my blog spontaneously came down the stairs when I needed him.\u00a0 Working in reverse, I culled details from a character\u2019s memory in Book 2 so the story would have satisfying continuity, backward and forward in time.<\/p>\n

Despite its grimness, it was incredibly fun to write.\u00a0 As I revised, I found holes, and then my editor found many more.\u00a0 I had explaining to do, after all.\u00a0 The story went through half a dozen drafts.\u00a0 Then it went through copyediting and proofreading, just like the process for a full-length novel.\u00a0 The art team worked on a cover, and when I said I wasn\u2019t keen on my title, my publisher proposed a new one: \u201cTortured.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cEw!\u201d I thought, squirming, and then realized that it fit.<\/p>\n

How on earth did I, sunny as I am, become the writer of a story called \u201cTortured\u201d?<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re curious about the timing of this story, I can tell you it was originally intended to be e-published for free in October, a month before Prized<\/em> was released.\u00a0 That\u2019s the part of the experiment that went wrong.\u00a0 Ironically, though neither my publisher nor I will earn anything for the story, we still needed a contract for it, and since this was new ground legally, vetting the one-page agreement took longer than expected.\u00a0 In the end, however, I think this timing is fine.\u00a0 It will work to read the story before or after Prized<\/em> because it adds a layer, either way.\u00a0 Now the story matches these dark, gray days of December.\u00a0 I would read it curled up beside the fire.<\/p>\n

What stays with me about this dark experiment is how it changed the way I see my \u201cTortured\u201d characters, not to mention myself.\u00a0 Now that I\u2019m revising Promised<\/em>, Book 3 in the series, this new perception is useful.\u00a0 I know my characters better for having stepped outside the novels and spent one key night with them.\u00a0 Like campers who sneak out for an ill-fated tryst after lights-out, the characters from \u201cTortured\u201d and I share a special bond.<\/p>\n

\u201cTortured: A bridge story between Birthmarked<\/em> and Prized<\/em>\u201d is available on Kindle<\/a> and Nook<\/a> for free, starting Tuesday, December 6th<\/sup>.\u00a0 It will also be featured on Tor.com<\/a> on Thursday, December 8th<\/sup>, for those without e-readers.\u00a0 Be warned: the story is a spoiler for Birthmarked<\/em>, so read it at your own risk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My short story \u201cTortured\u201d (Birthmarked 1.5) came about as a dark experiment, the sort that goes wrong and stays with you. At first, I was faced with a unique writing challenge.\u00a0 The tie-in story was intended originally for readers who already knew Birthmarked (Book 1) but who had not yet read Prized (Book 2).\u00a0 It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[17,129],"class_list":["post-1452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prized","tag-prized-2","tag-tortured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1452"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1458,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1452\/revisions\/1458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}