Death Revisited

I am paying a visit to my good old friend: Death.

Death to the Old
No, I'm not a near-suicidal artist or deep gothic writer, I'm talking about the character Death... warmed over. You see, I don't want to rehash the same old, same old with Ælemental. I want it to be fresh, innovative and exciting to a new generation. But I'm also tackling fairy tales. Yeah, you know, the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen. And that's just in the first book. So you see my dilemma: how to dress up the old in a new coat.

The New Fairy Tales
By now you may have caught on to the Sisters Grimm series or one of the fairy tale TV shows (Grimm or Once Upon A Time). And yes, the shows are just as creative as their titles suggest. Kinda blah. The Sisters Grimm novels are actually quite entertaining, but are rather light in approach. I'm trying to rewrite fairy tales in the way Tolkien would have done: with grandeur and prolific gravitas. But I also want it to be weird. Alien weird. Guillermo del Toro or Clive Barker weird. I want the characters to have history, but also an otherworldly feel and strangeness to it, that is offsetting at first, but totally logical when you dig deeper.

Meet Death
Death really is just a minor character, but there are fairy tales that deal with the Grim Reaper in all of his glory. I wanted to incorporate a fair amount of real danger to Ælemental and have Simon, Sally, Alix, Karl and Maya truly deal with deadly threats - both real and fantastic. Gone is the robe and scythe, in with the black suit, fedora and morphing face. Add some SFX like screams erupting from the folds of his jacket and a permanent black fog upon which he glides and you're starting to get where I'm going.

The Practical Aspects
So I stopped redrafting Chapter 16 back in November 2011, leaving Simon, Alix and Sesame stranded inside Death's offices, while searching for the magical artifact that will give them bargaining leverage towards rescuing Sally from her kidnappers. But Death would not be useful if he didn't have a few trinkets I wanted to use. Like the glass of water in which his image reflects when you hold it above a dying person. But I cannot possibly let you on to what happens with that glass of water other than that I changed it into a glass key. The glass key is useful for foreshadowing upon who befalls some awful fate later in the book. Death himself turns out to be very interesting and not all is as it seems at first. Aw, read the book if you want to know how or what. :)

Back to writing...