While on vacation last month, I left my laptop at home and my only writing utensils were a pen and a spriral notebook. I should thank myself for that decision. I was hand-writing some notes on the project I'm doing for Lazette Gifford's 2-Year Novel (2YN) class on Forward Motion, and I discovered something important: I almost told the story from the wrong character's perspective.

To summarize my 2YN: Ashilda and Idona are lovers (yes those are both female names), they live in a pseudo-Scandinavian society, and they must contend with a nasty disease ravaging their village. At first I wanted to tell the story from Ashilda's perspective, because she was the first character I imagined. Then I wanted Idona to share some of the story-telling, after all she is a major character.

And then there is this other character: Nels.

Originally he was a monkey wrench I threw in the story to make the other characters' lives miserable and complicated. Nels steals a love potion from Ashilda, then seduces her with it. He leads Ashilda astray from Idona, gets her in life-threatening trouble, and plain frustrates and confuses everybody. He could well be the mortal equivalent of Loki, the trickster god.

In my first vision of him, Nels is a thief and a scoundral. Then I read up on Scandinavian mythology, and found that thieves were severely punished in Nordic cultures (hanging was a popular form of execution). If Nels were really that bad of a person, I couldn't justify how he would be tolerated for very long in the small community he lives in.

I also found a curious word that caught my attention: skald. A skald is poet, a bard, someone who entertains others with stories of the battles between the gods and giants. I knew then why Nels is tolerated. He may be a full-time scoundral and a part-time thief, but he is also a skald. He is a person gifted with the power to entertain and fascinate. When I figured that out, Nels became alive in my mind.

And I went out of town for a week, without my notes or computer. I hardly thought of my stories, and the distance away from my work did wonders. On the way back home, I came to a very important conclusion: I need to tell the story through Nels' eyes.

I've chosen to play with Nels' POV, because in many ways I thought the story was getting too melodramatic.  Quite frankly, I was scared of botching the story- and I still am.  It is a story of seperation, death, and healing- things that easily get over-dramatized.  I don't want that.  I want to tell a story that is dark and humorous.  Telling the story (at least partly) through Nels' eyes gives me the opportunity to do that.  He is a trickster and a pain in everyone's backside, but as he grows he becomes more sensitive to the events going on around him and to the people's lives he affects.

Nels now gets the dubious honor of being a POV character in a lesbian romantic fantasy novel.