
What I’d like to write about is Lune.
Lune is the hero (one of the two heroes) of all the books published so far by Evernight in the very-very hot SciFi series The Cydonian Tales. For the time being there are two novels in the series, Black Carnival and White Sands, and a short story, Head Shy.
Lune came to me as a beautiful mystery when I started writing Black Carnival. As soon as I began the story, he was there, quiet, inscrutable, and yet compelling. He wanted to be written, and yet he wanted to be written in his own way, which is, mostly by omission. He was always a man of small, meaningful gestures and long silences.
He whispered a lot, which upset my editor, because of all the fancy speech tags. But when I tried to edit the tags Lune protested. He was not going to “say” things. He was a horse-whisperer, and he would keep whispering, thank you very much. I talked to my editor. I did some serious soul searching. I even cried a bit, but Lune did not budge. I talked to my publisher. Finally Lune was allowed to keep most of his fancy tags. That’s how adamant he is about his very own brand of understated bravura.
He worked with me over two novels, always a very cool, introverted man, difficult to read even for his lovers. My poor editor asked for more openness, a happy ending, a love declaration, but it was hard to get it out of him. To the last line of White Sands he closed up like an oyster every time I tried to make him say more than he wanted. He said very firmly a real man does not wag his tongue all the time uttering flamboyant love declarations. That’s what car dealers do, he said. He’d be there for his lovers, always, but he would not talk sentimental nonsense.
And then one day, out of the blue, bam.
Head Shy happened.
All of a sudden he let me open a little window in his inner self, and it was a revelation. It is as if this quiet, deeply private man had always kept all those words of love and desire hidden in the darkness of his heart, out of shyness, reserve, who knows? The words were not lost, not forgotten, but written down in poem after poem, secret, passionate, heart-breakingly tender love poems dedicated to his young male lover, Laz’law.
Exceptionally, he went as far as to let me publish some of his poems within the story.
Even for me, his faithful chronicler, it was surprising and pretty emotional to discover the depth and delicacy of his feelings and emotions after knowing him as a imperturbable, almost annoyingly self-possessed alpha male for so long.
I am very grateful that he finally trusted me enough to let me write this side of his personality.
Sometimes characters can surprise you like this.
When you think you know all about them they just turn a different page...
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