Suddenly A Succubus Ch. 30 - Reflection

With this chapter, I finally get a chance to show Vee's POV! I've missed seeing things from her side, but there was a lot of other stuff going on. However, I think the brief pause from her inner monologue ended up working fairly well, as it gave us a lot of time to sit in Amara's head. Amara, for better or for worse, has been a pretty different person this book. I wanted to sit in that feeling for a while before jumping over to Vee, as their dynamic is going to be pretty important to this book. By waiting just a bit, we now have a plethora of questions that we (hopefully) want to see Vee's thoughts on!

Why was she avoiding Amara? How does she feel about this strange personality shift? About their current predicament? We also get a bit of insight into other problems she's wrestling with. Most notably, in my opinion, is that she wishes she had another to talk to about all this supernatural nonsense that's appeared in her life.

Much of this book ended up pretty different compared to my initial outlines. I think I've mentioned this before, but Vee was originally intended to be even nastier in Book Two. Whenever I sat down to write from her POV, though, that didn't feel genuine. Sure, there are pieces of her that turn to anger when she's confused, but not to the extent I'd originally planned. This meant that, after saving Amara's life during the Ritual, it was time to mix things up a bit.

The biggest stroke of luck this Book afforded me was a chance to flip the dynamic between the two. Amara is now being rude and standoffish, while Vee is now being calm, hesitant, and even somewhat nice. I've got some very excited plans for these two coming up, but sadly I can't share those with you.

I've already seen people theory crafting about what the underlying feelings might be for these two, and that's been incredibly exciting for me. Early on, like towards the end of Book One and middle of Book Two, I was worried that people would be too harsh on Vee. I think this happened a little bit in Book One, but seeing as she was the main antagonist, that does make sense. I think Book Two did a great job of showing some of the conflict in her head, and I'm happy I structured that as one of the main questions. There's a reason why, in my opinion, the climax of Book Two is not defeating Mr. Wellington, it's Vee choosing to save Amara.

After a tiny little cliffhanger, I jump back to Tessa and Nick. This is, more or less, the first time Nick joins in while Tessa wanders around doing magic, and I was really happy to see this scene come together. The biggest benefit of pairing Tessa and Nick is that it gives us a chance to see Nick's perspective on everything. He's incredibly supportive person, but he's been pretty focused on helping Amara deal with her nonsense.

The best example of that, in this scene at least, is him seeing the aftermath of the Ritual fight. I thought it was really interesting to see him both be incredibly supportive of Amara, while also not exactly recognizing the feats of violence she's capable of. We're still early in the book, and I tend to be planting a lot of seeds, but hopefully this is something that people will be interested in revisiting later.

Back in Purgatory, I finally get a chance to up the stakes a little bit. What was that thing? Well, even if we never find out, I had an absolute blast writing its description. I've had the visual for these monsters planned out for months, and I was really happy with how it came together.

Although the presence of these monsters serves a few purposes, I mostly wanted to stress that other Planes are not nice places. There's a lot we understand about our world, and I'm hoping I can make the other planes feel mysterious and dangerous. With Purgatory, I'm happy with how that's going. We'll be learning a bit more about what's happening as the book progresses, but I'm also no going to explain everything. Some things are better left unexplained, and it just doesn't make sense for the protagonists to solve literally every mystery that ever finds them.

In the aftermath in the fight, we get to see a bit more contention between Vee and Amara. I'll admit, it's much easier to write Amara being a little mean when I'm in Vee's head, so the trick here was to make sure that I didn't accidentally go too far.

Lastly, I got to end the chapter with a healthy dose of Vee's existential crisis. Just a bit of light reading, you know? Since this is the fourth chapter of this book, and we're probably about a third through everything now, I think this chapter was the perfect way to set the stage for what's to come. I also couldn't resist sneaking in a little cliffhanger, but it's such a guilty pleasure.

Until next time! Nyx <3