What scares me most

As the concept of sharing my story with a wider audience becomes more real, I find myself getting nervous. I know there will be people who don’t like my book, and people that will, just the same as with any book out there. I’m not the kind of writer who is so confident they can say “My book is better than this, this and this book!”, or “If you like good books, read mine, you won’t be disappointed!”. Sometimes I feel good about my work. I know I’ve worked hard to craft a solid story. Other times I’m terrified that no matter how much I worked on it, it still isn’t good enough, and maybe never will be. A lot of this might just be “performance anxiety”.

But the thing that scares me the very most, is that people won’t like Memory (my main character) herself.

And I could understand if they don’t. Memory isn’t your normal fantasy heroine. She’s not always brave or righteous. She is violent, damaged, and her motives are generally toward self-preservation above all else.

I worked hard to create characters that act logically based on their personalities and situations. They don’t all just get together or stay together because they “just feel like an adventure” or because they feel some glorious moral responsibility to a stranger and their troubles. Each character has their own wants, their own goals, and sometimes those might not be at the best interest of the other characters. Memory doesn’t know anything about herself or her past, but they have still shaped her personality. Her upbringing, although she can’t remember it, was troubled to say the least. Her driving force is to find her way home, to find her family, and, if possible, regain her memories. And she’ll do whatever she can to reach that goal.

Memory is very special to me, but that is because I know everything about where she came from, and also where she’s going. Memory grows and changes throughout the trilogy, from someone angry and tortured to… well, you’ll see. Everything she was is stripped away, everything of her past life, and she’s starting fresh. The past still haunts her, but even in the first book she’s making choices about who she want’s to become, regardless of who she was in the past. It’s a very long and hard journey for her that will take her to the darkest possible places, but I can’t wait for everyone to meet her when she’s emerged from the other side.

One of my favourite literary characters is Lyra from Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy. And do you know what? I hated her in the first book, “The Golden Compass”. She was a brat, a bully, she was selfish and she grated against me so much I almost didn’t read the rest of the trilogy. I’m so glad I did. Lyra learns and grows into one of the most inspiring, selfless heroines I’ve ever known. I love her not just for who she was at the end, but how much she grew to get there.

So I’m terrified that people won’t like Memory. But I hope there is something in her that people will see, some hint of potential, something likeable in her character that will keep them reading, to see where her journey goes.