This is the “Behind The Scenes” post for the story “The Enemy Within. Please read the original story first if you want to avoid spoilers…
First off, an apology for the lateness of this post. It was supposed to be ready Wednesday, but Wednesday got consumed by “other things” (read, real life). Then Thursday got consumed by chronic stomach pains, an emergency doctor, and generally nothing other than pain management for the next two days. So right now it’s Saturday morning. Here goes…
This one started OK. Despite what you might think the name of the protagonist was always intended to be Carter something – like Carter Pewterschmidt in Family Guy, although I didn’t think about that until some time after I’d written it.
The actual story is pretty much based on reality. It’s happened before, of course.
But what those newspaper reports didn’t cover was how exactly you’d work it out. So that was the challenge I set myself in writing this story. Would you think you were sleepwalking? Or that the place was haunted? I started with the one theory, and then worked my way to the second.
That allowed me, to my surprise, to bring in a character I’ve been working on since I was about 14 years old: Destiny Jones. She’s a medium, and you’ve met her here for the first time, although the story I wrote about her in school – “Treasure Trove” is lost (it would probably fit in quite well with the stories here, so I might write a new version when we get there). There’s a lot more to Jones that I have planned other than this brief glimpse, but she should be making a reappearance later in the series. I’m actually surprised she hasn’t, although Munro Elkwood’s been in it three times – “Xeme” being the most recent (last week), “The Onyx Ring” and “Elkwood” (the latter of which, his debut, I intend to rewrite a little bit as I prefer Elkwood as his surname. I also don’t like the name Jacob and might change that too.)
Do you want to see any other characters make a return? Let me know in the comments…
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