The last read-through for Fates and Curses is officially complete. After massive rewrites, I’m very happy with where I’ve landed, especially when it comes to pacing. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to be more involved in promoting my work, so I thought I’d talk a bit about the process I went through writing Fates and Curses.
Aside from the fact that The Warning got a complete rewrite due to the original manuscript being stolen during Hurricane Katrina, Fates and Curses had an insane overhaul and A LOT of rewrites, so I thought it would be fun to share some of that journey here on the blog.
The Warning began in 2001 as a comic project between me and a group of friends. The project was called Black Star, and the basic story was pretty similar to what The Warning would grow into: set in a post-apocalyptic future, a group of teenagers go on a radical adventure to get revenge on a corporate overlord.
Although the names were different, the characters of Alice, Basil, Caleb, Hiro, and Victor Solomon were all present in the original comic (in fact, I don’t think I even changed Victor Solomon’s name). Plot wise, they never changed much from their original incantations. Of course kids grow up, but even after we lost interest in making the comic, I remained really interested in these characters and continued trying to work on the comic on my own. I entered my own version of Black Star, renamed Étoile Noir in Tokyopop’s Rising Stars of Manga (A manga drawing contest that ran from 2002-2008). It was around then that I began drafting the story as a novel, slowly expanding on the universe and fleshing out the characters.
Part of the splash page from the manga. Toned by hand.
At some point after losing the original Étoile Noir manuscript, The Warning was born, and the characterization got an overhaul as the story expanded into not only a novel, but an entire universe. . .The Warning wasn’t actually about a radical teenage suicide mission. For me, it was a tragedy centered around a handful of bros who are brought together under terrible circumstances, each with their own baggage and motives. Like the original comic, the main events of the book span less than seven days, while a third of the novel is actually a prequel, all of these happenings becoming part of the exploding pressure cooker which is them finally coming together for their radical teenage suicide mission.
The Warning is definitely a tragedy, and that was the set-up for Fates and Curses: In The Warning, the characters GET fucked up, and in Fates in Curses, the characters ARE fucked up, dealing with the painful repercussions of what they’ve all lived through.
The original draft of Fates and Curses was actually completed about four years ago, but the project sat on a metaphorical shelf while I worked on other manuscripts. After The Warning was published, I pulled out the file, blew the dust off, and dove back in, quickly realizing that the characters had evolved not only since that first draft, but forcefully through the publication of The Warning.
Anthony Rivers 