Jason and Azazel
Extras
© copyright 2012 by V. J. Chambers
http://vjchambers.com
Punk Rawk Books
Smashwords Edition
Please do not copy or post this book in its entirety or in parts anywhere. You may, however, share the entire book with a friend by forwarding the entire file to them. (And I won't get mad.)
Original Trilogy Extras
Behind the Pen: The Making of Breathless
author commentary
character sketch: Jason
interview with Jason
Torturous: The Frustrating Creation of Tortured
The Unexpected Romance of Hallam and Marlena
On Violence and Sexuality in Teen Literature Wherein the Author Makes Lots of Excuses for Her Books
Apocalypse Trilogy Extras
Afterword
The Stillness in the Air Extras
Original Series Plan
Character Planning—Azazel and Kieran
Talking with Azazel…
Stillness Revision Notes
Stillness Draft Outline
Between the Heaves of Storm Extras
Draft Notes
Questions for Kieran
That Last Onset Extras
Original Sparse Outline
Sexy in Love Gods??
Original Spiritus Mundi Outline
Final Spiritus Mundi Outline
Original Trilogy Extras
Behind the Pen: The Making of Breathless
The idea for Breathless started germinating in my head way back in 2005. I'm an avowed (and some might say obsessive) fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. My favorite season is season six, when Marti Noxon was calling the shots, so I watched the short-lived television series Point Pleasant, which was Marti's baby. You may not remember Point Pleasant, but it was TV show about a girl who washes up on the shores of a New Jersey beach town and doesn't know that she's actually the daughter of the devil. There was an episode of Point Pleasant in which Christina (that was her name—ironic, right?) has fallen in love with a guy named Jesse, who has been chosen by God to stop Christina.
Whoa, I thought. What a cool idea.
Immediately, as is my habit, I set about thinking about ways to steal it. Nothing I came up with was far enough away from the source material to use in good conscience, so I eventually abandoned it.
Flash forward several years to fall 2008. I was watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. (Stephen King says his ideas all come from what if questions. Mine all come from television shows, apparently. Guess that's why he's a millionaire and I'm an indie writer/publisher.) In the middle of the show, I had a thought. What if they stopped Skynet? I thought to myself. What would John Connor be like then, if he knew he didn't have to save the world anymore? With what he's been through, could he ever be a normal kid?
I knew immediately that this was an idea I had to run with. I was just too intrigued by it. So I began going about my normal method of stealing ideas, which is something I stole from Holly Lisle. (Check out hollylisle.com for her absolutely fabulous article about this.) I already had my idea. I knew I wanted a boy to appear in some girl's life who had a mysterious past, who had been through all kinds of horror in his life, and who had to now struggle with trying to fit into normal society. Of course, to make it an actually good story, I knew I was going to have to make it so that his life wouldn't actually be normal and he'd have to fight one last battle. Basically, I just had to get rid of everything about it that sounded like Terminator. So there could be no robots, no time travelling, and no Ahnold.
For several hours, the story was nearly doomed to being about a guy whose parents were monster killers (vampire slayers . . . see earlier comment about stealing from television shows), but had been killed on the job. He was taken in by a kindly foster family, with a young daughter, who then would be pulled into a dangerous world of werewolves and zombies and . . .
Well, anyway, right about then, I remembered Point Pleasant. And I thought . . . wait a second, remember that cool idea I had? Well, what if this story was about the anti-christ and the messiah falling in love? And from there it just snowballed. What if you couldn't tell who was the anti-christ and who was the messiah? What if there was a secret society?
I was on a roll. I pretty much outlined the story right then. And, since this is your all-access pass into my brain, here is the original outline:
Part One
-Finding of Jason
-Jason integrated into life at the Jones' house
-Friction between Jason and Toby
-Azazel finds out Toby and Lilith are having sex.
-Break up of Azazel and Toby
-Parental interfering into Azazel-Jason-Toby
-Jason and Azazel kiss
-Hallam finds Jason while Azazel in the house
-Jason fights off Hallam, even though Hallam tries to tell Jason he is on his side
-Jason tells Azazel who he is.
-Azazel is kidnapped by Toby
-Jason goes after her
-Azazel told by coven what they want her to do
-Jason saves Azazel
-Azazel and Jason go to the foster care people
-The foster care people are on the satanists' side
-Azazel and Jason break out
Part Two
-Azazel and Jason go to the city
-Jason has a contact there who gets them fake Ids and credit cards
-They stay in a hotel
-The contact reports them to the Sons
-The Sons are on their trail
-They have to ditch the credit cards
-Azazel has an aunt who always thought her parents were whack jobs.
-They go there.
-The Sons kill Azazel's aunt
-They take money from Azazel's aunt anyway, which is good, but they're still on the run
-They steal Azazel's aunt's car, switch license plates with someone and drive across the country
-They have sex
-They get picked up for speeding
-Recognized as reported missing by Azazel's parents, the cop brings them in
-They tell the cop that Azazel's parents are whack-jobs and that they have to get away from them
-The cop is sympathetic, gets them into a foster home
-The Sons find them
-They are on the run again, this time with no money, no car, and no Ids.
-Hallam contacts Jason
-Jason doesn't trust Hallam, but Hallam is convincing and they go into hiding with him
-At a church where Hallam is posing as a monk or something
-Hallam disappears
-Jason gets a message from Hallam's cell phone, saying that they're going to kill Hallam if he doesn't surrender
-After a long deliberation, Jason and Azazel decide to surrender.
-They do, but the guns don't go off and all the guys in the Sons go mad
-Final scene two of them living together and beginning their first day of college
Not a lot changed, actually. The biggest different is that I originally planned to have Azazel and Toby break up much sooner, and that at the beginning, I had absolutely no idea that Michaela Weem was Jason's mother or where Jason came from or any of that crap. It really all came together pretty perfectly.
Anyway, after I wrote the outline and did tons of research into stuff for the Sons of the Rising Son, I then . . .
Did nothing.
I didn't start writing the book. It sat on my hard drive for two months. I was calling the book The Return at that point, and I envisioned it as a book for adults with young adult characters, which is why there's so much sex in the darned thing.
&n
bsp; Anyway, it was November, and the movie Twilight came out. I've written at length about my feelings on the series online, so I won't rehash that here. Suffice it to say, after watching the movie, and being ridiculously disappointed, I went home thinking to myself, "I could write something like that. Hell, I could write something better than that." And I came home and wrote the first scene to The Return. It just so happened to be the week of Thanksgiving, and I had three days off that week. I started writing The Return on 11/22. I finished writing it 12/1. That's right. The book you are holding in your hands was written in nine days.
I couldn't stop writing it. I had five straight days off. Wednesday through Sunday. Each of those days (excluding Thanksgiving, which had this annoying eat-and-visit-with-family obligation attached to it) I got up around eight in the morning and wrote all day until about midnight. The days that I worked, I got home, started writing, and wrote until I went to bed.
Let me tell you. My arms were very, very sore.
author commentary
Chapter One
I got the idea for the emails and instant messages beginning each chapter from the book Ender's Game, one of my favorites. Especially since I was locked into writing in first person (I was trying to emulate Twilight a lot, I think), they gave me another outlet to tell the story.
Azazel is totally into having sex because when I was her age, I was too. My problem was that nobody wanted to date me for some reason. (I was hot, too. I thought I was ugly, but I was really not.) My first boyfriend, however, did not have Toby's hang-ups.
Azazel was nearly named Azalea, like the flower, because it kind of looked demonish, but I decided to bite the bullet and go for the demon name. I'm glad I did too, because it ended up tying into the Rabbit mythology so perfectly.
In the first draft, there was another foster boy named Matt, but he got cut, because there were too many guys as it was. I combined Matt and Nick, who really does nothing else outside of be introduced. I still wonder if I oughtn't cut all of the guys entirely, but I've kept them because I think they're important to setting up Azazel's parents' characters (totally twisted people . . . ).
Chapter Two
In the first draft, the conversation about The Da Vinci Code was in the first chapter, but I moved it when I decided to serialize the book online because I wanted a cliffhangery kind of ending to the first chapter.
ESPN probably doesn't show cheerleading competitions in the fall. I never really looked that up. Oops.
When Sheriff Damon mentions Marianne Wodden, I really had no idea who she was. I picked the name because it sounds like Mary and because Wodden is like Woden (as explained in later chapters). Michaela Weem's name was originally Reem, like the Diane Rehm Show.
Chapter Three
At this point, if you're paying attention to the emails, Hallam says that he's going to New York, because he's already working at cross purposes to the Sons. However, from the emails, it appears that Jason is safe, and it continues to appear so until Chapter Six, when we realize Hallam didn't go anywhere.
When I was in high school, I never once attended a keg party, so I have no idea if my keg party is even accurate. I've never been to a party where people used their cars for lights and music, but it seemed like a good idea when I was writing it. In retrospect, I wonder if it just killed everyone's battery.
If Azazel is a lot like me in high school, Lilith is a lot like I was in college. I had a slutty phase. It was about as empty as you can infer Lilith's is.
In order to describe this fight, I actually watched like ten youtube videos of fights. I haven't really witnessed very many fights in my lifetime, although just recently, two boys in one of my classes got in a fistfight over a water bottle. It took the janitor a half an hour to clean up the blood. (In other words, boys and girls, if you're considering teaching as a career, think long and hard before you do it.)
Chapter Four
This conversation between Jason and his parents is where I start wandering into the philosophic realm. I enjoyed playing these two opposing ideas off each other—namely whether or not there is an absolute right and wrong or not. Frankly, I was kind of concerned, because I figured this would be the point in the book where I'd lose everybody. But one of my beta readers, (who were actually my students. They read the book for 75 extra credit points until a parent called the principal and complained about the content of the book.) whose name was Jakob, told me that the book was slow until this point, where it started picking up. I was astonished.
Incidentally, I also owe the last line of the last chapter to Jakob, who told me that it should end with, "The power. It will strike men mad." He was right.
This scene with Toby and Azazel caught me lots of flack from my students, who seemed to flip directly to that page and then tell me things like, "Your book is dirty, Ms. Chambers." No one ever commented on the actual sex scene, which starts with the oh-so-smooth line, "No. But you could take them off."
Chapter Five
If you remember the conversation about Samhain and you know that Samhain is Halloween, you should start to become suspicious of Azazel's parents here, when they're talking about something big that they're planning on Halloween.
This scene about the incidents in 1991 was one of the big reasons why I decided to self-publish the book. For lots of reasons, Jason NEEDS to be born in 1991. And I couldn't let the book languish for years waiting to find a publisher if I wanted to keep that date. I'm sure that lots of earthquakes and stuff have happened in other years, but I'd spent so much time digging up this information that I couldn't let it go.
I still wonder if it's a bit of a stretch to think that people would be so cruel to Azazel because she was a virgin. Certainly nothing like this happened to me at my school. I guess I'm explaining it away, because it was an important plot point, and I needed Jason to save Azazel. Probably, people in town know that Azazel is special. It's possible that their kids dislike her for that reason. So they're maybe crueler to her because she's the vessel, even though they don't really know all the details yet (being under 18 and not allowed into the coven yet.)
Furthermore, it's probably right about at this point in the book that I fell in love with Jason myself. "People are jerks" indeed. ?
Did you notice the "Jason is robot" theory? Totally a shout out to his John Connor origins.
Chapter Six
After this instant message block and the scene in Goodwill just before it, I began to worry that I'd given too much away and everyone who read this book was going to know what was about to happen.
Hopefully, the scene with Hallam distracts everyone from what's going on in Bramford. Instead, hopefully, they start thinking about what's going on with Jason.
Chapter Seven
I did all kinds of research on the ankle bracelet that Jason has to wear. Wasted a good hour of writing time reading things people said about it on internet forums. After all that, it doesn't feature that heavily in the story.
I allowed Azazel to realize that she liked Jason at this point because I didn't know how much longer she could be obtuse. This is one of the reasons I'm no good at writing romance novels. In a romance novel, where the romance is the main plot, the two people don't get together for 300 pages. I could hardly keep Jason and Azazel apart for 160.
Chapter Eight
While I was writing this chapter, I wasn't totally sure about whether or not Ms. Campbell would end up being on the Satanist's side or not. Ms. Campbell is somewhat based on myself—although I am a way less cool teacher than she is. Anyway, I wanted to plant the seed in Azazel's head to go to her after the ritual. I knew going to Ms. Campbell was going to be disastrous, but I wasn't sure if it was going to be Ms. Campbell's fault yet.
I distracted Azazel from her feelings for Jason with Toby promising to have sex with her, because I was trying to buy some time, and keep Jason and Azazel apart for a little longer.
Chapter Nine
Toby's dressed as Michael Myers because it's ominous. Also, a guy w
ho seriously broke my heart dressed up as Michael Myers one year for Halloween. I think I wanted to vicariously have Jason beat that guy up for me.
I was a little concerned about the fact that Azazel kisses Jason when she's still dating Toby. I hoped that people wouldn't hold it against her. Just to make sure, I followed that scene up with the big reveal that Toby and Lilith were sleeping together. If you didn't already hate Toby, you do now.
I'm not a big fan of books that play two guys against each other for the admiration of one girl. Sure, it sounds fantastic to have two guys fighting over you, but I think it rarely happens in real life, and if it does, someone always gets hurt. Anyway, I just wanted Toby out of the picture in terms of Azazel's affection for him. So, right about now, I pretty much started making him the biggest bastard of all time.
Chapter Ten
As we begin Chapter Ten, Azazel has just found out that her best friend and her boyfriend have been sleeping together behind her back and she's been kidnapped by her boyfriend. This alone would be enough to really mess up a character, but do I stop there?
No. One of the things that I've learned is that good stories are all about conflict and pain. I didn't just take away part of Azazel's support system in this chapter. I destroyed her entire life and left her with absolutely nothing.
Another thing I was concerned about was making sure my female heroine wasn't just a damsel in distress. So I have her freeing Jason here, not just yelling for help or whimpering. I don't necessarily ever want to write about a Buffy-type character. I think in some ways, appropriating a male attribute (like physical strength), giving it to a female, and then calling it empowering is . . . well . . . still affirming the male attribute and therefore not empowering female attributes. For this reason, Azazel does not discover she suddenly has magical fighting powers and she is not super strong. However, in the sequels, she does learn to protect herself by going to a shooting range. I tried to strike a balance here—somewhere between Bella and Buffy.
Jason and Azazel Extras Page 1