Harley Asher - Discussion & Author's Notes

Elizabeth · Harley Asher - Discussion & Author's Notes

For any discussion of the story.

Author's Notes: Well, I don't want to write too much about the story yet, as it just started, but there's a few things I can put.

One of the main threads of the story originally started as part of a Choose Your Own Adventure story I was considering making, but which will probably never be made. The other two characters (from whom you could choose at the beginning) might show up somewhere in this story, but I doubt it. Really, this story was by far the most interesting... The others are the kind of thing I'd probably only write in a CYOA story or something like that, where the format would make them interesting enough to write, even if the plots were fairly basic.

I knew Harley's first name pretty early on, but I didn't get to picking the last name until the first chapter was done, and I needed to find a title for it. I came up with the Harley ____, Witch for Hire thing - likely I just remembered hearing "Harry Dresden, Wizard for Hire", and stole it... I haven't actually read the books, but I've heard a bit about them. If I'd realized that's what I'd done, I'd probably have tried to find a different name, but I don't really know what, since it took me forever to even come up with even that. Anyway, I had that, but it would only work with a last name, so I started searching through listings of surnames. I came across a couple that I liked, but the one that really almost made it was Archer. I liked the -er sound at the end for whatever reason... But then I ran across Asher, and decided I liked it better. It sounded a bit more witch-like, to me, just because it sort of evoked thoughts of fire... I don't know.

Another thing brought about by Harry Dresden was the way magic works in the story. I wanted to make sure it wasn't too similar, so I went in a direction I didn't think the author of that series did, and added the technological element, though the real inspiration for that came from that news story a little while back about the universe possibly just being a giant hologram. I remember thinking that, if that were true, maybe it would be possible to, in a way, hack that hologram (don't ask me how one would do that... it was just an interesting idea at the time), and if one could do that, they would essentially be wizards. Or, in this case, a witch.

I discontinued this version of the story in November of 2009 because I was planning on re-writing it as a non-AB/DL story for NaNoWriMo, which I did (for the record, I hit 50,000 words, the target, on November 24th). There were enough changes to the general story that a straight conversion back to AB/DL territory would be somewhat problematic, not to mention the fact that, after spending nearly a month forcing myself to write at least 2,000 words a day of it, I was kind of sick of the whole thing.

MrAngel

This story's already getting pretty interesting; I'll make myself a note to keep checking for a new chapter.

Elizabeth

Actually, this version of the story may be dead... I'm reworking it to try to use it for NaNoWriMo, hopefully, though that version will, most likely, not include diapers at all. If my planning for that falls through, though, I'll continue this version. I'll just have to see if I can get myself more motivated next month than I have been the rest of this year.