First Sentences: God of the Dark Chapter 1

To lead up to the release of God of the Dark, I am posting the first sentences of each chapter, with a little bit of insight.

Chapter 1:  Adrastea descended into the dark.

It took me years before I could come up with a first line to Chapter One that I liked. When I first started writing Of The Dark waay back when, I focused mostly on the adventure of the storyline. Later, as I matured as an author, I started playing with themes. The most blatant one is the question about what it means to be Dark. While I like my metaphors to be more subtle than this, I couldn't resist peppering the opening scene with a few of them. (I also like the opening of the first scene because it satisfies the Bechdel-Wallace test.)

Here we have Our Heroine literally descending into a dark cellar to investigate something. She can't take an incendiary light source, due to the nature of the problem she's investigating. Instead, she must rely on other senses.

Darkness has a way of obscuring or hiding things.  Darkness can also be seen as an absence or a vacuum, one that sometimes begs to be filled. In this first scene, she literally descends into a dark cellar and then must find a way to thwart the darkness and allow herself to solve the problem she came to solve. By the end of chapter one, she is confronted with Darkness itself and is thrust into a situation with a difficult choice.

Often we are faced with choices that seem difficult not because they are morally ambiguous--they may be quite blatant in right or wrong--but because of what we must endure to stand by our choices.

Passing the Bechdel-Wallace test

When writing heterosexual Romance stories, especially shorter works like a novella, it can be difficult for a story to pass the Bechdel-Wallace test. After all, the plot arc is all about Our Hero and Our Heroine getting together for an HEA. Because of that, most of the conversations that happen in the story tend to revolve around characters and their goals. This means most, if not all conversations in a Romance novella will include or be about Our Hero.

I confess I haven't given it much thought until now, but in "FOR RICHER, FOR POORER" my characters have conversations about:

• genealogy and family history
• food
• flowers
• property development
• storage and transportation of antiques
• history

That alone lifts it a level from the usual conversational topics of a Romance novel.

I'm happy to say that my novella "FOR RICHER, FOR POORER" also passes the Bechdel-Wallace test with this conversation:

Francie turned to Beatrice and changed her tactics. She became soft-spoken, though she never lost the steel behind her voice. "My dear Miss Nottham," she began. "I know how much you love family history, especially something so important as this. I'm sure someone as knowledgeable as you has a preservation room…"

Beatrice gave her a startled look? Preservation room? Of course not. Then she quickly looked away, but too late. Francie must have seen her very thoughts on Beatrice's face, for the Englishwoman's smile eased into smooth triumph.

"…but I do question the conditions on the spaceplane. I doubt they will not be too kind to the poor tapestry. Something so old cannot be subjected to three Gees on takeoff and landing."

Beatrice's heart ached. Was Francie right? A spaceplane journey, which only took three hours instead of the usual nine or ten of an airplane flight, did suffer from an increase in gravitational pull as the plane accelerated up to the troposphere. Then, while at the top of the parabola there was the fun yet sometimes nauseating sense of weightlessness. Then there was the descent where the bottom of the parabola increased to three Gees before settling back to the normal one Gee at ground-level. Would the tapestry survive? Goodness knows the flight made her queasy.


Get FOR RICHER, FOR POORER by Heidi Kneale from The Wild Rose Press or wherever quality ebooks are sold.

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Her Grace wonders, how important is topic diversity to you in a Romance novel?

Regency Romance and the Bechdel Test

These Austenacious ladies
passing the Bechdel Test

Do you know how difficult it is for a Regency Romance to pass the Bechdel Test? (Well, at least mine are.)

Regency Romances are all about pursuit of a spouse, usually during the London Season, and all the gossip and on-dits and, of course, the fabulous clothes. Naturally, everyone is talking about everyone else. It is rather difficult for two Regency women to sit down and have a conversation without it turning, sooner or later, to one of the other characters, usually Our Hero.

My characters do talk about other things in between. There's been discussion of mismatched horses, whether or not one should put one's hair up in rags at 3am or collapse to bed in exhaustion and suffer the curling tongs tomorrow, to how awful the negus is and whether something is sufficiently enchanted... to attract a bloke. (Aw man, so close!)

I guess it all comes down to how strict one interprets the conditions of the Bechdel test.

Strict interpretation: discuss ANYTHING except one of the male characters. He can't slip in at all.

Loose interpretation: discuss ANYTHING which has nothing to do with a male character, but the conversation either drifted in to the subject from discussing Our Hero, or segued into a discussion about him. The important part is that we saw our two women discussing something that wasn't Our Hero.

Bechdel failure: our two women never discuss ANYTHING except Our Hero (or another male character).

So where do you draw the line? Do you favour a loose interpretation? After all, women discuss the things in their lives, but also the people in their lives, which includes the men they interact with. Or do you prefer a strict interpretation, because women's lives do not revolve around the lives of the men they know?

I'd like to think my Regencies pass the Bechdel Test, even if only barely, because my women characters do show interest in things other than the male characters. I don't know if I'm the best one to judge.

Do me a favour; next time I release a full-length Regency Romance, someone let me know if it passes the Bechdel Test.

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Her Grace favours a looser interpretation, but then, it shouldn't be difficult to pass the Bechdel if the characters are well-rounded and the plot well-constructed.