Narrative Jumps

Part of the fun of writing On Black Wings was the freedom to blow away my concept of linear time and twist the narrative into a strange, off-putting and unsettling whole. The timeframe of the book is a mirror dropped onto a stone floor, and our heroine travels through each piece not knowing or understanding how or why she is making the jumps. She is taping together pieces as she goes, and she doesn't know where she is going next.

She doesn't even have control of when it happens - at first.

Figuring out the how and the why is part of the fun, but she still suffers from the disjointed and stuttering jumps through time throughout the entire book, some not under her control. She is a victim of them initially, and she fights these side, back, and forward steps throughout the book.

I loved this part of the book and narrative structure. It was really hard to stitch things together at times, and at other times I just had to let go and let our heroine take me through the next step she took. She is literally walking barefoot on the broken glass of the world's end, picking her way across it while discovering what is happening to her.

She deals with two lives, her older self and her younger self, and these two personalities collide during her jumps through time. Her husband, her family, people she meets and others she knows - they interact with both sides of her. I begin to wonder if she really is the older her or the younger projecting herself into those older shoes by the end of the book.

It is fascinating, and in a way, she really is her younger self dealing with the idea of her loving someone and settling down to raise a family. When that part of her is lost, she agonizes with her loss, and it drives her on to become someone new and unique. She still is that person in her future, or the person in her future is still the one in her past, and the two sides of her fight when she has to make decisions.

And decisions she makes.

She's given a choice to save the world or join with the forces of evil; and I found her thinking and actions shocking to say the least, but totally relatable and understandable. She is a character who isn't perfect, can't make the best decisions, but the things she does are the best of what she is capable of, and quite possibly heroic by the book's end. She is the ideal imperfect survivor, an angel of death, and someone who lost everything she knows and loves.

But did she, really?