Welcome back to the author commentary for Hammer and Anvil. SPOILER WARNING is in effect!
My Wife Saved the Day
Credit where credit is due. My lovely wife, who saves my butt day in and day out when it comes to putting these stories together, really stepped it up for Hammer and Anvil.
Most of the time there are little things she finds when reading through my drafts. There will be the usual hodgepodge of grammar and punctuation issues. Sometimes there are a couple out of place elements or questions that come up, but nothing major.
Then Hammer and Anvil hit.
Mentor’s injury
It’s no secret, Mentor has a problem with his right knee. It locks up on him. It slows him down. Eventually, it leads to his death at the hands of Nathaniel Evans.
I never explained where the injury came from. I never felt the need to dive into it. In my mind it was a process of age from a long life of getting the crap kicked out of him by random monsters.
So when Mentor confronts the Minotaur in Hammer and Anvil, Mentor is taken out pretty definitively. The Minotaur wipes the bloody floor with him.
At one point, the beast takes Mentor out at the knee. It wasn’t specified in the first drafts which one. It was merely a progression of the fight and never went further.
Until the wife reads it.
All of a sudden she shouts out, “So this is how Mentor injured his right knee!”
She was very excited.
And I looked at her without a single clue what she was talking about.
She had to explain the scene to me, to spell out the impact of this blow. This is the moment Mentor’s life changed, that his death was all but inevitable because of the Minotaur.
It never even occurred to me. (Idiot!)
I tried to play it off that of course I meant it that way. That OF COURSE I, being the genius author I am, had that moment planned from the very start.
I didn’t. Not at all.
My wife saved the day. She deserves all the credit for making the connection.
The lesson here?
Always let other people read your work? I guess. More likely, the takeaway here is that my wife is always right and will always be right for all time.
I’m okay with that.
The impact of that moment
Everything changed with that revelation. Every instance in the book, and the two that have followed, was given a new layer of context thanks to my lovely wife’s discovery.
Mentor’s whole life was shot in a new trajectory. If not for this injury, he could have continued being the Greystone indefinitely. By adding this as the turning point for him, there was a ticking clock on his tenure.
It was the perfect way to add a layer of tension to his arc going forward, especially in The Gifts of Kali which I will be talking more about in a couple months.
