Wisdom's Kiss (85 page)

Roger, sweet thing, wants to do well. He rescues Dizzy and carries her offstage—but only after she's fainted; he was scared to step in before then. He even tells Dizzy that she will thrive in his family and that his mother will love her. Is he lying or delusional? A bit of both, I think, though more the latter—you'd need a bit of insanity to survive that upbringing.

Speaking of which, there's the whole matter of his younger brother,
Hrothgar
, who is married to another man. The gay couple even adopts and raises children together. Let us pause for a moment to reflect on how Wilhelmina, had she ever learned this news, would react...

That was fun.

I do think that of the three siblings, Hrothgar is the luckiest. For one thing, he's not dead like their
oldest brother, Rüdiger
. In fact, he's youngest, and in fairy tales youngest sons always emerge victorious; look at
Puss in Boots
>
. He's married to someone who—I assume—can occasionally engage in conversation, unlike Princess Wisdom's mute and lifeless Doppelschläferin, and the two men love each other enough to adopt children. Most of all, he's far, far, far from Phraugheloch Palace and all its accompanying misery.

That said, I do think Roger also ends up happy, which is nice for the role of sympathetic rejected suitor. He has his figurines; he drives his mother mad with frustration (well done!); after she dies, he instantly and definitively blows off all of her ambitious scheming. Would that we were all so privileged.

More on Roger's lovely
mother
Roger on stage
>
More Commentary on Characters
>

Author's Commentary on Wisdom, Princess of Montagne
>

Oh, Dizzy, how I love ya.

Princess Wisdom of Montagne began life, poor thing, as the Other Woman—the girl who would steal Tips from Trudy. That was pretty much all I knew about her. Given that I intended to tell Trudy's story via a third-person memoir, it seemed appropriate to give this other character the immediacy of a diary, which I thought would help to differentiate the two young women. Otherwise a reader, you know, might confuse them.

Then I started writing said diary, and within the
first few sentences
I realized I had a tiger by the tail. No one—no one—could possibly confuse Trudy and the princess. Trudy is quiet, dutiful, modest, loyal, a bit dull. She's nice. And nice is ... well, nice is nice. Dizzy, on the other hand, is stubborn, self-centered, capricious, taxing ... But she's also enthusiastic, determined, and fearless. Deep down inside, she's a good person, and I loved coaxing out her integrity, helping her discover her "innate compassion." (I still get a kick out of Nonna Ben's admonition that Dizzy "present more graciously [her] innate compassion." That's going to be a tough one; compassionwise, Dizzy is scraping rock bottom.) And yet Dizzy does improve, as evidenced late in the story when she realizes how she's hurt Trudy. Musing on the link between cruelty and envy, she vows "improvement on that front." There is indeed a strong link between those two vices, and kudos to Dizzy for figuring it out.

Perhaps it was subconscious—no, it had to be subconscious, because I certainly wasn't smart enough to reason this out—but the two contrasting writing genres ended up reflecting perfectly the two contrasting personalities. Trudy's memoir, like Trudy, is quiet, dutiful, and modest. Dizzy's diary, on the other hand, explodes with her innate breathless energy. It helps that she doesn't use commas, an inspiration I stumbled upon quite by accident while trying to make her voice more distinctive.
>
Writing without commas—it turns out—is a world-class royal pain. I'd craft a comma-free sentence that made sense to me at the time, and then while reviewing would add a comma reflexively, just to clarify things. Several times I searched Dizzy's entries specifically for commas, and darned if there always weren't a couple snuck in by the midnight tweaking pixies. To be fair, every comma those tweaking pixies inserted indicated that the sentence was ill-phrased in some way. So I would rework it, and be very grateful afterward for that nudge toward elucidation, however irked I'd been initially.

The princess's name was also a challenge. I needed a virtue that didn't sound too clunky or weird (Diligence? Humility?? Citizenship???) and that could be shortened to an apt, memorable
nickname
. "Wisdom" I wasn't so fond of, but "Dizzy" was a total keeper—not to mention the juxtaposition of these antonyms, and the thought of her family observing this tiny ball of fire and saying, "Well, her given name might be Wisdom, but in truth she's kind of the opposite..."

I especially enjoyed exploring the tension between Dizzy and Trudy, how they relentlessly misinterpret each other ... which happens ALL THE TIME in real life, especially between teen girls. Trudy believes Dizzy is disgusted with her, when in truth Dizzy is consumed with green-faced jealousy but masking it with icy disregard. And Dizzy assumes that Trudy is just faking her modesty to cover her vanity. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Allow me to repeat: girls do this all the time. Do not ever assume you know what's going on in someone else's head, particularly if that person has traits you either long for or despise. I guarantee there's a lot more insecurity and a lot less confidence inside that enemy's skull than you could ever possibly imagine.

Dizzy is now one of my favorite characters in
Wisdom's Kiss,
next to Felis and Escoffier. Just as I once imagined
young Princess Ben
as a grandmother, I now wonder how Dizzy would fare as a crazy old aunt. She certainly is a crazy old
playwright
.

More Commentary on Characters
>

Author commentary on Wilhelmina, Dowager Duchess of Farina, and her father Edwig
>

As I've mentioned
elsewhere
, Wilhelmina represents my first authorial experience with villainy. I'm not a fan of the whole good-versus-evil foundation of storytelling: "Oh, the other dude is the bad guy! Wow, everything is explained!" Um, no, it's not. First of all, even if you're writing fantasy, you still have to ground it in human emotion. How many humans do you know who are truly evil? When you get inside their heads, most people are operating with the best of intentions ... however much "best of intentions" ends up meaning "best of intentions for me." Mighty few of us actually seek malevolent world domination.

As an author, I've found great joy in exploring the truth that people, however fallible and self-involved they might be, also mean well. The "bad guys" in
Dairy Queen
and
Princess Ben
turn out to have their own fears and dreams and misconceptions, and learning this greatly matures the heroine narrator. Hopefully, it also matures the heroine readers. In
Wisdom's Kiss,
even Duke Roger of Farina, while complicit in his mother's plotting, views himself as good: he's only taking over Montagne to please his future wife.

Which brings us to Wilhelmina. She, too, has fears and dreams and misconceptions, but they are so twisted and malicious that even I could not describe them as anything but evil. The woman is a monster whose presence advances the plot wonderfully.
>
I originally started writing diary entries just to get inside Wilhelmina's head, and—poof—I was addicted. With Felis el Gato, I sought to wrap the prose in preening so that readers laughed at his vanity; with Wilhelmina, I wanted readers gasping aloud: "Did she just say what I think she said? Holy cow, she did!"