My characters say ugly things. And I don’t clean it up after. Not because I’m trying to shock anybody, but because I trust you, the reader, to know the difference between a character’s voice and mine without me holding your hand through it. That’s the whole ask. Not “believe I don’t mean this personally.” I shouldn’t have to say that. Just: trust yourself to know it.

Let me show you what I mean.

Now to the one that actually costs something: Later in the same book, Northway runs into the ghost of his childhood sweetheart, his fiancée, the one he lost, the one this whole story already made you grieve right alongside him. She is NOT some stranger. She is not wrong to be in pain. In the middle of that pain, jealous over the woman who’s taken her place, she calls Burningsand a slur. A bad one. Bad enough I’m not printing it here, and I’ll get to why.

That’s a different animal entirely, because I’d already spent real pages making you care about her. The easy move, right there, is to pull the punch. Give her a softer line. Let her grief excuse it. I didn’t do that. She says the ugly thing plain, and nobody rushes in to forgive her or punish her for it. Both things just get to be true at once: her pain is real, AND what she said is inexcusable. Holding both without picking one, that’s the actual work. Anyone can write the dad at the pool. Writing her is what costs you something as a Writer.

That’s the test I’d give you, if you want one: could the ugly line survive without me jumping in to tell you how to feel about it? The pool dad doesn’t need that test. Nobody’s confused. Northway’s former fiancee does need it, and she passes, because I’m trusting you to already know a person can be someone you love AND say something unforgivable, in the same breath, without either one canceling the other out.

And honestly, that’s what real bigotry actually looks like most of the time anyway. It’s not cartoonish strangers. It’s people you already love, caught in the moment they feel most entitled to their worst self. Writing it softer than that isn’t kindness to you, the reader. It’s just me ducking the harder book.

I’m not going to tell you the word she used. That’s not me being coy. It’s the same rule, just running the other way. In the book, that word is hers. It’s her worst moment, and I let her have it without apologizing for her. Out here, talking to you directly? It’s not hers anymore. It’s just an ugly word in MY mouth, with no character left to carry it. So you don’t get it that easy. If you want to know what she said, go meet her the way I did: inside the story, where it’s actually hers to say, and actually costs what it should.

That’s the whole difference between writing a bigot and being one. It was never about the words on the page. It’s about whose mouth they’re allowed to live in, and whether you, the Writer, are brave enough to step back and let them.

No matter what you do, keep writing.

~ Shiri

Here’s a dumb little formatting trick that I will defend to my grave: when Dyiij or Mokallai speak in their Aelythian god-voice, I don’t tag it. No “she said telepathically,” no “his voice boomed in their minds.” I just… make it bold.

— Look, I can’t protect you from Mokallai forever.

That’s it. That’s the whole stage direction. Bold text, dash out front, and you’re supposed to just know this isn’t coming out of a throat.

Why Not Just Say “Telepathically”?

Because “she said telepathically” is exhausting to read fifty times over the course of a manuscript, and it puts the mechanism front and center every single time when what I actually want front and center is the content of what’s being said. Nobody wants a stage direction before every line of a god talking. You want the eeriness of the voice itself.

Bold does the tagging for free. Your eye catches the visual shift before you’ve even consciously parsed a word of it, and that little jolt — oh, this is Different, capital-D — happens instantly, every time, with zero narrative real estate spent on it.

It’s Also Just… Characterization?

The thing I didn’t fully appreciate until I was deep into revisions: formatting can do characterization work that prose usually has to carry on its own. Bold Aelythian speech reads as authoritative and a little detached before you’ve processed a single word of the actual line. That’s tone, delivered typographically, for free, before the sentence even starts doing its job.

Compare that to how much prose you’d need to burn establishing “this voice sounds different, otherworldly, commanding” every single time it shows up. I’d rather spend that word count elsewhere. Let the formatting carry the tone; let the actual words carry the meaning.

The Catch, Because There’s Always One.

This only works because I use it sparingly. If everyone in the book had a formatting quirk, you’d lose the “wait, something’s different” jolt entirely — it’d just be Wednesday. Bold is reserved for exactly two characters’ god-voice, and The Catch, Because There’s

that scarcity is doing half the work. The second I overuse a trick like this, it stops being a signal and starts being wallpaper.

Small thing. Steal it, but steal it sparingly.

Until next time.

~Shiri

Okay, confession time: I do not explain Laylen’s dialect anywhere in the text. Not once. No footnote, no appendix entry, nothing. You just get “ain’,” “yai,” and a woman hissing “MISMANS HIS YATHEDQA” at a room full of Kyusoakin guards, and you’re on your own, bestie.

This was a choice. A slightly unhinged one, maybe, but a choice.

Why Not Just… Explain It?

Because the second I explain it, it stops being a dialect and starts being a vocabulary quiz. Nobody grows up with a translator running subtitles under their own accent. Laylen doesn’t experience her own speech as foreign or in need of decoding — it’s just how she talks. If I hand you a glossary, I’ve already told you that she’s the weird one and you’re the normal one, and that’s not the relationship I want you to have with her.

Same goes for the invented terms: Aelyth, Yathedqa, gibdon, all of it. You’re not supposed to know what a gibdon is the first time it shows up. You’re supposed to flinch a little and keep reading, and by the third or fourth mention you’ve built the definition yourself out of context, which sticks a lot harder than anything I could’ve told you in a footnote.

(I do write appendices. I just don’t want to read footnotes, and I’m assuming you don’t either.)

The Actual Risk Here.

Let’s not pretend this is free. Unglossed invention is a real gamble — some readers are going to bounce right off the first “ain’come here for that” and never look back, and that’s a completely fair reaction to have. I’m asking you to trust rhythm and repetition to do a job that a lot of books hand off to explicit exposition.

So how do you calibrate how much a reader will actually tolerate before you lose them?

Mostly: repetition with enough context clues that the meaning lands even when the word doesn’t. You don’t need to know exactly what a Yathedqa is the first time Laylen calls herself one. You need to know it’s a title, that it means something to her, and that it’s tied up with Mokallai. The rest accumulates.

When It’s the Whole Point.

The Knetann dialect specifically — that’s Slaggan swamp-speak, carried over from an entirely different manuscript (RIP, Bog Fodder, we hardly knew ye) — exists half to characterize where a person’s from and half just to be a delightful little speed bump. I want you to slow down on those lines. I want the clunkiness to register as clunky, on purpose, because that’s what marks someone as an outsider to Vandanei high society before anyone’s said a word about it.

That’s the whole trick, honestly: the confusion is supposed to feel like character information, not like the author forgot to explain something. If it’s landing as the second one, that’s on me and I’ll take the note.

Until next time.

~Shiri

There is an easily overused, tropey version of “Sympathies for Monsters” that’s a gimmick. I’m talking about where a writer shows you the creature getting called a slur by someone worse than him, or misjudged over a simple misunderstanding, and BAM! The reader instantly becomes more sympathetic to the character. Not because the creature earned that sympathy, but because the accuser did something uglier first. It’s a lazy gimmick, but one that works.

My books utilize that gimmick, too. But the way I go about it is different, and not the cheesy, slur-and-simp use. There is a harder version that I love to use in my manuscripts, and it’s worth building whole books around. What I mean is, it is more worth asking your readers to stick around after he tells the truth. Not after he’s been incidentally misjudged.

This is what I’m talking about: There is an early scene where a reporter calls Northway a “slimy, loathsome toad” to his face, right after he’d spent the moment protecting Jaime and staving off the worst that he can do. That baseless accusation is the cheap version, and I use it all the time. Readers immediately give in to sympathy for Northway, being misjudged by a stranger, and I’ve hardly lifted the pen.

Later, you find out what Northway really does for a living. Without being led-on, he tells his lover about being part of a harvesting operation, treating humans like they’re cattle, and he believes in what he’s doing. Nobody misjudged him, and he’s not being persecuted for something innocent. He’s a monster. He’s not hiding it.

Giving characters these dichotomies does more than add flavor. It does more than allow me, as the storyteller, to run freely with a narrative, dipping into light and dark themes and motives as I see fit. I find it truly brings a character to life, and adds stakes to the story, whether or not a reader is able to walk alongside Northway on his journey, knowing his plans and feelings towards Humanity.

Dawnfury is not the only book where I do this. I enjoy testing my Reader’s investments in my characters across stories and in a variety of ways. “Sympathy for the Monster” is just one of them. I recommend building up to those moments with more foundational back story and character actions over the one-and-done sucker-punch we see executed so often in fiction. I use it to give the reader a choice, to see whether or not they’ll continue the journey and enjoy it in the face of the truth. That’s what I’m actually asking of my readers when I hand them my monsters: Neither forgiveness nor condemnation, but the willingness to keep going after they’ve witnessed the ugly. The slurs are easy bait. Anyone can write a simple scene, call someone a slur, and immediately cash in on cheap sympathy. That’s not depth.

What’s deep is writing the actions and thoughts that lead up to a genuine confession. One where the reader has to decide, when there are no misunderstandings, to continue to stand by that character.

Bear in mind that building up to readers’ sympathies needs to be handled well. You can’t give full stage to one brand of conflict or event, and not give time to those of another sort. Don’t spend all your time setting up for the positive, good moments and blow through the bad. Likewise, don’t bog your reader down with only cutting, bad events. While it’s not always appropriate to apply an even hand with their frequency, you do need to give your readers two things:
1. Enough time for them to process what’s happened, and
2. Enough of these events, good and bad, for them to have a solid rapport with the character(s).
Readers need breaks when going in deep. That’s regardless of whether or not it’s a positive or negative incident. Readers need breaks because of the emotional intensity you evoke, especially during the ‘payoff’ moment when everything clicks. They’ll also need these breaks between buildups. Because it’s easy to overwhelm and exhaust them when you’re pulling on their judgment and emotional strings all day.

But, ye. Reader Sympathies for a Monster character is a joy to get into. I don’t want anyone feeling mistakenly sorry for Northway. I want you to know precisely who he is, because by the end of the book, I want you to come to grips with the truth behind a story like his, whether you can stand beside him or not.

See you on the other side.

~ Shiri