“Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. Then do it.”
Robert A. Heinlein
My original idea for this series was a middle-grade story about two boys going on adventures together. But the story that eventually became The Pair Dadeni went through a long and tortuous road to become what it did. As I researched the history for this post, I was surprised at how it evolved. Below are the key changes I made.
Things I changed in The Pair Dadeni
- It used to be a part of book 1, The Palantir. But 6 years after I started writing, and 25 versions later, I got feedback that it read like 2 stories. So, I split it and took the last 1/3 of the first book to create The Pair Dadeni.
- That feedback happened to occur the same year I took my fateful graduation trip with my daughter to Lamanai and Machu Pichu. It was the trip where I realized that truth is stranger than fiction. It caused me to switch out a lot of fictional elements so I could include even more amazing historical characters and places, including:
o The fictional name of my original pirate was Captain Crook. When I decided to go with historical characters, I looked up famous pirates and discovered a fascinating character I’d never heard of – Captain Henry Every. More on him in a later post.
o I changed the group of magical women from Wiccans to Druids. I wanted them to be an ancient order, which ruled out the Wiccans, who are only a hundred years old.
o I changed the island they went to from Martinique to Haiti because it was much easier to travel to, and I wanted to visit where the action took place.
o I originally had a cabal of fictional men who were the main antagonists in my story. When I decided to make them more historical, I added key figures of the Salem Witch Trials (William Phips, William Stoughton, George Corwin, Samuel Parris, and Cotton Mather). But that was too cumbersome for the series and didn’t fit well with the background, so I selected the two men who I thought were the worst of that group and made them my antagonists.
- When I first split book 1, my original title was The Baetylus which eventually transitioned to the Cauldron of Dagda. But when I did more research on mythological objects, I realized that The Pair Dadeni (more on its history in a later post) was more appropriate, and it could also tie into the Fountain of Youth myth.
- I had no aliens in any of my books until I started writing book 2. Now they’re a prominent part of the series.
- I had almost no females in my original stories. In fact, I didn’t add:
o Diana, until version 29 of book 1
o Jane until version 32
o Deborah, until version 36
- There were almost no ghosts in my early versions.
- I added in a lot more magic.
- My protagonist, Alex, went through several changes. I changed his last name from Watson (as in John Watson from Sherlock Holmes/Alexander Graham Bell) to Scire. And I changed him from being a rich Caucasian boy to part Ute Indian because I wanted:
o A more interesting background
o More character diversity
o My protagonist to reflect the region I grew up in
o To honor my mom, who was interested in the Indian tribes native to southern Colorado
Things I kept the same
This is a short list.
- Since the start of my story was originally in Salem, because of the Witch Trials, I searched for events that I could link in 1692. I wound up with the earthquake/tsunami that destroyed Port Royal, Jamaica. Not only was that the former center of pirate activity in the Caribbean, but it’s also a UNESCO World Heritage Site – something that I have tried to add into my books.
- My protagonist’s first name.
- I kept a hurricane in the story.
I hope you like the story as much as I do.
The picture below is of ‘The Giddy House’ in Port Royal, Jamaica. No, it’s not an optical illusion that the building looks like it’s slanted upwards. The building is tilted (you can see it better from a side view, but I don’t have a picture of me in that direction) because of an earthquake in 1907 that caused the ground underneath to shift. It’s the same type of shifting that occurred in the deadly 1692 earthquake that was part of the genesis of my story for book 2 – The Pair Dadeni.
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