Lucius

The Leppard King, circa 1992 - the template for my hero

“Lucius!” I cried. “It’s about Lucius!”

It’s Reijo’s story, but it’s about Lucius. It’s always about Lucius. Always has been, always will be. Fixed Fire is his world, created for him, and while others occasionally take a lead role in the ongoing saga, he is the sun at the center of their galaxy and everyone—everything—revolves around him.

He needn’t even be present to own a scene. Be it a short story,  a novella, or a volumes in the series proper, my great Golden Savage figures prominently in the plot. I got confused with Reijo’s romance because Lucius isn’t a POV character, but I’ve lately been reminded that it doesn’t matter if he’s not the one telling the story. It’s still about him.

He’s a typical Leo male. “Pure-faced and roaring,” as Nicole once described him, putting her impression into a poem that said it all in that one powerful phrase. Love him, loathe him, fear or revere him, he is the driving force in his world.

I must admit, seeing the Leppard King again was a sharp reminder of where it all began. It took the universe eight years to engineer a royal return to Victoria, and in the course of one evening, it all came back. The birth of our hero in 2002, the writing of four fat novels in the following five years, the crazy coincidence of Leppard’s proximity to my creative consciousness. The King eventually fell off my radar but the story continued—albeit with less enthusiasm on my part, and even less understanding of why it was so. Seeing him in April compelled me to pull out the albums that had fuelled my passion for his fictional child, to revisit Treason and remind myself of who the General was when I first met him.

And then, the inner voice stating with crystal clarity that this part of the story, that Reijo’s romance, is also about Lucius. The hopelessly tangled knot suddenly unraveled and has run straight and smooth ever since. I’m rewriting scenes, adding new ones and reorganizing others, and haven’t want to write anything else for weeks.

Not even blog posts.

This is what happens when I am truly obsessed with a project. It becomes my sole focus, to the exclusion of all else—except maybe F***Book and my office gig. My thoughts are all with the story, reworking bits of dialogue, envisioning new scenes, typing so fast from the heart that my head can’t stop my momentum. It’s blazing and brilliant and precisely the point of my existence, to feel this alive in the creation of something wonderful.

So I haven’t been writing, but I have been writing—and it’s looking good.

How can it not, when it’s all about him?