Suddenly A Succubus Ch. 13 - Reflection

It's finally time for the last chapter of my first book! It's a little surreal, having the events of this chapter be the goal for so long, planting so many seeds, and then finally getting here. The chapter ended up being shorter than I initially thought, but I couldn't be happier with the result.

We start with all the girls doing their makeup in a fun little prologue section. We're seeing a rare glimpse into Amara's life before she discovered her lineage, and I had an absolute blast putting this part together. I love writing all the girls together, I feel it's one of the best times to really show how they play off each other, but also how they differ.

Plus we get more time with Chloé, which is always a special treat. She's so cute!

This section ties in with some of the events of the first chapter, which was a great way to start tying a little bow on this first book. I love showing bringing back Nick's texts, Tessa stealing Amara's homework, stuff like that.

For the purposes of this story, the most important bit is seeing more of the relationship between Amara and Vee. They're about to butt heads, so I thought it was important to show how far things have come, for better or worse.

This scene actually took a fair amount of time, mostly because of the section where Amara stares at the mirror. I had some very specific feelings I was trying to portray, but emotions are hard when the character having them doesn't know they exist. This section, as well as the section on the roof from chapter 12, pull from a lot of personal experience, so it was important for me to do it justice.

Then we skip from the past to the present! I normally visualize a lot of what I write, but that can happen in many different ways. For this cut specifically, I honestly envisioned the transition as something you might see in a movie. She's looking in the mirror, surrounded by friends, and then poof, now she's a demon and alone in the frame. Obviously, film language doesn't always translate to the written word, but I'm still happy with the juxtaposition.

Picking costumes for the girls stumped me a bit, honestly. Tessa was the easiest, she's happy with anything skimpy, but I really wanted Chloé to have something that felt unique to her. I used to have a lot of conflicting feelings about Halloween, myself, and it's nice to write characters that are so jazzed for it.

Just before we cut to the party, we get a really sweet moment of Amara realizing how happy she is with her new body. There's a version of Amara that feels much more conflicted about her demonic aspects, and has to go through a lot to accept them, but that would be a very different story. Like I mentioned in 12, this was kinda the final piece of Amara's puzzle.

But now it's time to party! I often like to jump into scenes character first, then reveal the setting description later, but I got to flip that here. Thinking up the perfect college party house was a blast, and I also managed to sneak in the name of the college! Did early chapters avoid naming the school because I hadn't thought of a name yet? I'll never tell.

I waffled back and forth about how much of the party I wanted to show. I could have easily stretched things out, showing Amara have more interactions with different friends and random guests, but in the end I'm pleased with the approach I took. It's not the longest montage, but it gets the point across, and it let me focus on the more important discoveries of the night. Amara is still learning about her abilities, and it's always fun to delve into the parts of her demonic nature that aren't as obvious as her tail.

Her revelry is cut short, however, when she realizes Vee is at the party. I have a very specific image of her standing on the loft, leaning on the railing as she watches Amara, and it's a cool image. I hope I did her justice!

I ending up scrapping a lot of dialogue between the two of them once Amara is trapped in the circle. There's so much they could have talked about, and honestly some of what I cut would have been great for setting up future plot points, but it never felt quite right. Vee has a lot going on, and her anger stems from a few very specific places. Amara, on the other hand, still has faith that they can talk this out, and their miscommunication is on full display here.

It ultimately felt right to cut the section down, and I'm happy with that call. Vee wanted certain information from Amara, and when she didn't get it, she stopped trying.

When I was plotting the outline of Book 1, the last major plot point to get introduced was Brandon and the summoning circle he makes. At first, I just needed to get Amara's transformation some more breathing room and create the circumstances for her meeting Tessa. After some thought, I realized it also perfectly paralleled with this chapter, which Amara actually points out.

But, all good things must come to an end, and Amara finally realizes there's no talking, or seducing, her way out of this. She already knows she can break through Vee's holy magic, and she's got to pull a lot of energy to do so.

Which brings us nicely to the final confrontation. We switch to Vee's point of view, which was essential to making this scene work. We've spent so much time with Amara this book, but things are taking some strange turns, and I needed to create distance between Amara and the reader. Switching to Vee does a great job of that, but it also is fascinating to see how her own ideas have twisted how she sees Amara, only referring to her as 'the demon'.

I was really nervous about this scene, as I've never written a fight before. There are so many ways for fights to happen, so many details to choose whether or not to include, but I'm proud with what I put together here.

The two girls have some very different power sets, but most importantly, Vee knows how to fight and Amara doesn't. I could have drawn the fight out longer to show this a little better, but it didn't feel as important. I've spent a lot of time this book side-stepping the issue of how powerful demons actually are. Vee and Tessa both have thoughts on this, but we don't know how factual those opinions are. What I really wanted to stress was that, even with all of Vee's preparation, fighting experience, and holy powers, she still loses this fight.

Creating narrative stakes can be really hard. How do you convince an audience that a threat is scary? How do I create a sympathetic character that is also someone that the reader might be scared of? A lot of questions rattled around in my head as I set the stage for this chapter. Ideally, the audience doesn't know who's going to win, but also doesn't know who they WANT to win.

I wanted Amara's actions to be understandable, but also surprising, which was a really tough balance to hit. We know what her powers are, we know her emotions have been a little explosive recently, so her fighting back is, ideally, not surprising. But to what extent? She gets within moments of killing Vee, and I wouldn't be surprised if people have some conflicting feelings about that. My main character is, at the end of the day, a demon, and they're not known for being nice.

If I can be open for a moment, I hope you feel something for these characters. I hope they're believable, that you feel good when they're happy, and conflicted when they fuck up. Maybe you blame Vee for all this, maybe you blame Amara, maybe Tessa. A lot has happened this book, and hopefully there's no easy answer or scapegoat.

At the end of the day, I think the greatest gift an author can receive is that their readers care. I've certainly fallen in love with everything I've put together, and I can't wait to continue on to Book 2.

Nyx <3