by Tal Turing
Author's Notes (with spoilers)
Why the apocalyptic setting?
I wanted to invent my own version of a society on Earth, one different than today's countries, governments and peoples but I didn't want to tell a story far in the future. A weather apocalypse was a very relevant mechanism toward that end. Thus my story focuses on the tiny fraction of the world occupied by the protagonists and their cities while still leaving a huge amount of possibilities for what else might be lurking in the remainder of the damaged planet.
Why all the female characters?
LOL, what about it? If I had a written a story with only male characters, no one would say a thing.
Well, I thought many of the men were antagonists as well.
One of my beta readers asked why there were so many 'creepy' men? Perhaps more disconcerting is that even some of the normal men had a creepy side to them or engaged in some reprehensible acts.
Honestly, my little story pales in comparison to the real world where women and children are used and abused in so many ways. The very real issues of slavery, human trafficking, sexual assault and inappropriate uses of power are minor aspects of this work. If I may be so bold, we are all a part of it as well as being repulsed by it.
Why corporations?
There were two aspects of society that I didn't want to deal with at all: the military and governments. There are plenty of stories that will give you both and frankly I wanted to focus on the people, on the ideas and not on weapons or dictators. But I still needed something to personify man's desire to achieve, to be powerful and to be admired. Enter the corporations, think of the ones we love, Apple, Google, Starbucks and the ones we don't so much, insurance companies, airlines and the cable company. Corporations open up the possibility of intrigue and espionage just as with governments.
Where did all the names come from?
It is somehow hard to write 'science fiction' with characters named Bill and Bob. But neither did I want to scrape through history to find interesting names. So I adopted a mechanism where I took a normal name and switch some vowels into 'y's. So Edward becomes Edwyrd, Mark, becomes Myrk, Tim becomes Tym and Cinnamon becomes Cynnamon.
Then there are some dedications. Daneel Tech is named after Asimov's robot. The huge mega-corporation and sponsor of my main character is named Transom similar to the center of civilization of Asimov's Foundation novels. And then there are many names and words that just come from Spanish: Maltiempo, Las Joyas and guajira.
What about witches?
Many of my beta readers seemed frustrated waiting for some witches to appear. This series is about my own spin on the witch genre, so there will be no wands or spell books or the like.
What about Cynnamon?
Chaos Witches certainly is more about characters than it is about plots and there are many characters, both protagonists and antagonists who ended up on paper much the way they were conceived in my mind.
If the series is about any one person it is about Cynnamon, and for me, she was that character who grew in spite of me rather than because of me. Originally, I wanted her to be a beautiful secret-agent, a femme fatale who worked her way through dangerous and difficult corporate assignments.
But she defied all of my preconceived and silly stereotypes and forged her own trail. It was her idea to emphasize her near-slave status, to add stress and worry to her life, to experience the real consequences of losing her mother at an early age, an idea I had just to give her a 'difficult' upbringing and a reason to be at the orphanage.
I was shocked when she decided to sing her way through a major scene in the prequel and again in this work. And it was definitely her idea to bring the themes of sexual assault and violence to herself and she made me feel silly for worrying that it would taint her in any way. I'm the one who is damaged for ever thinking that way. And there are places she thinks to go that frankly I do not want to take her. But that is another story.
Cyn is inspired partly by the fictional Cinnamon Carter of Mission Impossible and she has some of her namesake's traits. Certainly she is part secret-agent and she is often though not always incredibly calm under pressure. One scene with Tym Matheson is patterned after a piece of an episode. Cinnamon and Rollin have just escaped being discovered and while he is a nervous wreck she seems unaffected. So he asks her how can she be so calm, she smiles, shrugs and tells him that 'you get used to it'.
Will there be more books?
I envisioned four stories, but only one more which contains the characters introduced so far. The next work, K-Doll, is intended to focus on a single character who was encountered only briefly in the first two books. The next work, maybe the last work is partly about the banished colony of Palenque as well as where Cynnamon goes next.
