Benedict Jacka

(This is part 6 of a 12-part series of author commentaries on the Alex Verus books.  The master post with links to all the parts is here.)

I finished Hidden in the summer of 2013.  The rewrites would take the rest of the year, but as it turned out, Fated, Cursed, Taken, and now Chosen had been selling well enough that my editors were willing to contract for two more books.  The series still wasn’t what you could call a big success, but I did have a little breathing room.  

As a result, Alex Verus #6 was designed from the beginning to lead into Alex Verus #7, since that was how many books I could count on.  My idea for the two books was simple:  Alex would do something to anger Levistus in book #6, who would pass a death sentence on him in book #7 and force Alex to go on the run.  I hadn’t figured out what the “something” was.  

Since I had no requirements for the book other than “Alex pisses off Levistus”, I started Veiled free to do pretty much whatever I wanted, and I used that freedom to try another experiment.  One of the things I’d discovered by this point was that I quickly got bored with writing the same book over and over again, and my solution to that had been to experiment with introducing elements from different genres.  All of the Alex Verus sequels were urban fantasy novels, but they all had quite different flavours.  Cursed was an action thriller.  Taken was mystery and supernatural horror.  Chosen and Hidden focused much more on the characters, and on the consequences of their actions.  

For Veiled the sub-genre I decided to play around with was “police procedural”.  I’d recently watched the first couple of seasons of The Wire and somewhere along the way it occurred to me that the theme of “police who are supposed to be fighting crime but whose biggest problems are all caused by the dysfunctional nature of the system they’re working for” would fit the Alex Verus setting pretty well.  I hadn’t really developed the Keepers very much, so I thought that might make for an interesting story.  

But the problem with experiments is that they don’t always work.  And in the case of Veiled, the big problem was that the events with the Keepers and White Rose weren’t directly connected to the main storyline.  Alex needed to do something to annoy Levistus, but the details of the “something” didn’t really matter, and from a structural point of view, they didn’t need to take up an entire book.  And while the enemies Alex faces in Veiled are certainly evil, he doesn’t have any particular emotional connection to them.   

And so when Veiled came out, it didn’t get very good reviews.  No one thought it was bad, but readers rated it on average worse than both Chosen and Hidden, and I’m pretty sure this was due to the lack of plot progression.  Unfortunately, by the time I realised this, it was far too late, so all I could really do was learn from the experience and move on.  As such, Veiled occupies a weird place where despite being right in the middle of the Alex Verus series, it’s essentially a side story.  Veiled is probably the most skip-able book in the entire series, along with Cursed – pretty much nothing happens in either that you couldn’t catch up on with a one-paragraph recap.  (This would become much less true as the series continued.)

But let’s move on to something which I know many of my readers care about much more, often to the point that it’s THE reason for them to keep reading a book.  Namely, romance!

Ever since Luna’s formal apprenticeship in Cursed had torpedoed the possibility of Alex and Luna ever getting together, I’d been thinking about giving Alex a new love interest.  Alex is the sort who’s slow to open up, so whoever he developed an interest in, it was going to take a while.  The question was, who would it be?

The first possible candidate was Anne, which I think readers picked up on quite early.  What I think most readers didn’t pick up on was that the second potential candidate that I had in mind was Caldera.  And just as Hidden had focused on Anne, Veiled focused on Caldera, and on Alex’s relationship with her.  

Given how badly things ended up turning out between Alex and Caldera, it’s easy to think that any relationship between them would have been doomed from the start, but the idea did have a few things going for it.  Both Alex and Caldera are loyal, and generally honest.  On top of that, they’re both fundamentally ethical people.  Both Alex and Caldera place doing the right thing over their own self-interest and personal safety, which is why they come to respect each other over the course of Veiled.  So I could see why Alex might be interested in Caldera.  

(Whether Caldera would be interested in Alex was another question.  With hindsight, I think the answer was yes, but she’d probably have seen the two of them as having too many differences to make it work.  Alex basically just doesn’t care much about obeying the law, and I don’t think Caldera would ever have been able to get past that – it would have felt to her like a policewoman dating a criminal.  But given how things turned out, this ended up being a moot point.)

After doing “try-outs” for the two relationships in Hidden and Veiled, I picked the Alex-Anne relationship over the Alex-Caldera one, for several reasons:  

1. In terms of their character arcs, Alex and Anne had a lot more in common.  Both had been taught by Dark mages that they were now trying to distance themselves from, and both had uneasy relationships with their own darker halves.  Emotionally, Alex and Anne understand each other on a much deeper level than Alex and Caldera ever could.
2. There was a distance between Alex and Caldera that never quite got bridged.  There are two scenes in the Alex Verus series where Alex visits Caldera’s home – one in Chosen, and one in Veiled.  Both times, they get into a fight.  Caldera is loyal to the Council and to “the system”, and Alex senses that, and that places an upper limit on how close the two of them can ever be.  Alex always knows that if it comes down to a choice between him and her job, Caldera is going to pick her job, which is why he’s not surprised by what happens in Burned.  For Alex, on the other hand, the people in his life come first.  A relationship for Alex means 100% commitment, and he’s too proud (and has too much self-respect) to make someone else his number one priority when he’s only a third or fourth priority to them.  
3. I knew even in Veiled that Anne was eventually going to become one of the major antagonists for the series.  Having Alex be in love with her at the time sounded like a really entertaining emotional trainwreck.
4. Giving Alex a female cop as a love interest would lead to endless annoying comparisons with the Dresden Files.
5. Alex cares as much about looks as the next guy, and Anne is better-looking.  

As a result, Veiled is the last book in the Alex Verus series where Anne doesn’t play much of a role.  For the remaining six books, she would show up more and more.  

Finally, the events of Veiled have an important (but subtle) effect on Luna.  Luna by book #6 has spent a while learning to duel and to fight, and she’s taken part in smaller combats, but Veiled is the first time she sees what a large-scale battle is really like.  The book doesn’t put much of a spotlight on it, but it leaves a deep impression on her that shapes the decisions she makes a couple of books later in Bound.

(This is part 5 of a 12-part series of author commentaries on the Alex Verus books.  The master post with links to all the parts is here.)

Hidden was the big planning book of the Alex Verus series.  

My starting idea for Hidden was simple:  do something with Anne’s past.  I wanted to develop the story of Richard’s return, too, but Hidden was mostly about Anne, just as Chosen had been mostly about Alex.  I’d been dropping hints as to Anne’s past in Taken and Chosen, and I thought that this was the right time to reveal exactly what that past was.

Sounds simple, right?  

Yeah, it wasn’t.  Hidden turned out to be an enormous struggle to write.  Counting the first draft, the edits, and the rewrites, finishing Hidden took something like a full year, longer than any book in the series besides Fated.  There were several reasons for this, and the biggest one was that Hidden was the book in which I had to figure out the direction in which the entire Alex Verus series would go.  

Chosen had established that Richard was going to be the big antagonist of the series.  But how was that going to play out?  I didn’t know what Richard wanted or what his plans were, and as a result, in the first draft of Hidden, Richard’s presence was very muted – it’s hard to write a character when you don’t know why they’re there.  Anne’s character was also much vaguer and less clearly defined.  Her dark side was there, but it didn’t show up until later and it was less “dark” and more “ambivalent”.  In both cases, I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go with the characters, and so I avoided committing them to anything.  

My editors thought this was a terrible idea.  As they saw it, readers were going to have high expectations for Richard, especially after how I’d ended Chosen, and that having him act like this would be a massive anticlimax.  Anne got even harsher feedback – my editors thought she was unlikeable, uninteresting, and a stick-in-the-mud.

So I went back to the drawing board, which brought me right back to the question I’d been avoiding.  Where was the series going?

And somewhere along the way, I came up with an answer.  I’d tie the two together.  Richard’s ultimate plan would involve Anne, and Anne’s future would be shaped by Richard.  The details of that plan would take another two or three years to work out, but the core shape of the story was set in 2013 and never really changed.  Interestingly, the initial spark of the idea came from something I’d read.  Richard’s intentions towards Anne, and the way the story plays out, is (very loosely) based off the events of a fairly popular piece of media.  As far as I know, no-one has guessed what it was, although a couple of people on obscure corners of the Internet have noticed the similarity in theme between it and Alex Verus.  I won’t give it away because I think it’s more interesting as a mystery, but I’ll be curious to see if people can figure it out after the publication of Risen.  

Figuring out Richard’s plan made things fall into place.  I rewrote his scene, and this time it went much more smoothly.  Anne was more difficult.  I improved her character in the rewrite of Hidden, but no matter how long I wrote her, I was never able to get as comfortable with her personality as I was with Luna’s.  Reader reactions have tended to reflect that, too – Anne consistently gets rated as one of the less popular characters in the series, below Alex, Luna, Arachne, Cinder, Landis, Starbreeze, and Hermes.  Something about her personality just never completely clicked, and I’ve never been able to quite fix it.  Maybe it was that her initial character concept was just so weird that was hard for people to really empathise with her.  Maybe I made some mistake when originally designing her that made it hard for her to become a fully three-dimensional person in her own right.  Or maybe it’s something much simpler – it’s just really difficult to write a genuinely good character (as opposed to a decent or okay character) of the opposite sex.  I find most male characters written by female authors to be fairly unsatisfying, so expecting to consistently write good female characters myself is probably asking a lot.  Still, I’ll keep trying.  

Hidden also dealt with the fallout from what had happened in the previous book.  The events of Chosen had split Anne and Sonder from Alex’s group, but while Alex was able to repair his relationship with Anne, Sonder was another story.  I was slightly surprised at how much negative feedback Sonder got as a result – my readers definitely took Alex’s side, and even the ones who still liked Sonder were hoping that he and Alex would become allies again, rather than seeing them as being on fundamentally different paths.  (Anne also got a lot of criticism, but I think finding out her backstory in Hidden made people a bit more willing to sympathise with her.)  The focus on these interactions made Hidden a more character-oriented book than Chosen.  

As part of this, Hidden introduced Alex’s father.  I think a lot of readers wondered at the time how he was supposed to fit into the larger storyline.  Assuming that you’ve already read most if not all of the books, you’ll know the answer to that:  he doesn’t.  Alex’s father has nothing to do with the overarching plot of the Alex Verus series, and he’s in Hidden purely to show how Alex turned out the way he did.  Judging from some of the reactions I got, I think this is probably a bit unusual in this kind of novel, but I thought the insight it gave into Alex’s character and family history was worth the page space.  Alex’s father has never appeared again – his relationship with Alex is pretty much stuck, so there’s no point.

Being a more character-focused book had its drawbacks.  Hidden was published in 2014 to only moderately favourable reactions – its overall ratings were still higher than books #1-3, but they were lower than Chosen’s, and the tone of the reviews was definitely a bit less enthusiastic.  It wasn’t hard to see why.  Chosen had been a “payoff” book with a lot of high drama and excitement, while Hidden was slower and more focused on setting up future developments.  On the positive side, Hidden aged well.  Its ratings would continue to climb over the years, while Chosen’s would go slightly down.  I think readers came to appreciate the character development over time.

And finally, Hidden brought in Hermes, one of the series favourites.  As a few people guessed at the time, Hermes was a fox version of a fantasy creature from Dungeons and Dragons called a blink dog.  When I wrote the book in 2013, it was a new name, but in 2018, another company called Blizzard created a card called “Blink Fox” for their online game, Hearthstone.  So now if you Google “blink fox” you’ll get a hundred variations of the image below, which isn’t what Hermes looks like at all (he’s supposed to look like a European red fox).  Oh well!