Fractured Families, an Introduction (Patreon)

Fractured Families is the fifth book in the Tristan series and is the one book that I wasn’t planning on having in it.

In the draft 0 idea of Once Broken, the first part of the book was going to be Alex rescuing Tristan from prison. It was going to be a handful of chapters, some fighting, then they would move on to getting to Samalia and fixing Tristan.

Before me and my co-scripter got to building the outline for this book, I started shopping around for the cover of book 1. One of the artist I approached, and the one I was really hoping would do it agreed to look the book over for a quarter of the total fee and see what he could do.

He then got back to me saying there was no way he could do a cover for the book as the story went against what he believed in. Because of a “no refund” clause I never got that deposit back, and after explaining why the book was “wrong” he offered to help me “fix” it, for a fee.

As you can imagine, it would be years before I even looked at this artist’s site again.

But one comment he made, along telling me how to write my story, was about how Tristan just “got his way” that as a bad person, he had to be punished and not “win”.

Well, that was utterly wrong for the book, but it reminded me of a detail about story telling. The protagonist needs to earn their victory.

And in all the story building and ‘thinking about’ Tristan never had a ‘dark night of the soul’. He never had to confront what he’d done, and who he was. Yes, some of what he was going through with Shattered Salvation was forcing him to look at how he felt about Alex, but it never sent him in a truly ‘dark’ place.

So…

I got to thinking about the rescue, Tristan’s imprisonment. I don’t remember if it was going to be the Sayatoga from the start of the idea, but it quickly became that, and there was the fact Justin, Tristan’s brother was imprisoned there, and that, Justin being Justin, there was no way he wouldn’t take over, if given the chance. And wouldn’t it be just perfect, if he was behind Tristan’s capture? And if he decided to break his brother once and for all?

And I had my ‘dark time of the soul’.

I also had a problem, since as we worked out the outline, this as well as what would happen on Samalia felt like two different stories in tone. Okay, easy answer. Make them separate books.

And in doing that, I now had more space to deal with Alex’s side of things; explore how he dealt with operating without Tristan there to guide him.

And so, Fractured Families happened.

As a side note, I ran into that artist years alter at a convention, and I recounted the incident. While he had no memory of it, he was appalled at how he’d behaved. We’ve talked here and there at other conventions and it’s become an amusing anecdote between us.

As Always, Enjoy.

I welcome Comments, opinions and suggestions.