Author Insight: Episode 9
Friendly Fire
This episode was really hard to write for a couple of reasons. The first was purely psychological. At the time I was writing this episode, I had what I consider to be an explosion of fans. The number of people reading my stories literally increased exponentially as people from such areas of the world as the Philippines, Africa and South America were exposed to “The Beast Hunter” for the first time. It was and is a dizzying experience, and I’m so excited and grateful for the opportunity to have my stories read all across the globe. Still, it’s incredibly intimidating, and I think I can be justified in feeling some butterflies as I worked on this piece.
The other reason why writing this episode was difficult was that I felt I was running the danger of plagiarizing myself. I’d originally intended to flesh out Jaylocke’s character in Episode Four: “Welcome to Dhalma Province”. You can still see the leftovers from that idea in that episode, particularly during the conversation where Jaylocke asks Keltin whether he knows how to use the Ripper. I saw this episode as a way to finally introduce the reader to Jaylocke, but I worried the episodes would sound too similar. In both, Keltin guards the gypsies while they gather food and a beast attacks them. To change things up, I added the idea of “friendly fire”, a term that relates to a soldier being accidentally shot by one of his comrades during combat. If you look through the episode, you’ll see that Keltin’s marksmanship is prevented four separate times by the interference of others. Also, the sleevaks themselves could easily be considered another form of friendly fire from the Heteracks. In the end I’m very happy with this episode, and I look forward to following up the cliff-hanger ending with Episode Ten as soon as possible.