Marie Vibbert is joining us today to talk about her novel, Andrei and the Hellcats. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Only the Galactic Hellcats can help Andrei, a charming, sex-positive robot, rescue his sister.
This book promises: Action! Adventure! Fashion sense! Solo-flyers! Wit!
Don’t dare put down this book or all might be lost… as in, you might lose your page. And we don’t want that. Yeah, not the end of the galaxy, but do you really want to flip back and forth?
What’s Marie’s favorite bit?
I’ve never been good at writing romance or romantic arcs. Well, wait, maybe I’m overstating that. I often write my characters with unrequited crushes or troubled marriages they’re trying to keep afloat, or long-established marriages they fit comfortably in like an old pair of shoes. Those romantic arcs I can do. What I have no experience nor expertise in is writing the successful start of a new relationship, which is what most people mean when they say “romantic arc.” I’ve tried! Desperate for money, I once auditioned at a romance publisher to ghost write. I just… couldn’t do it.
So it surprises me to admit that my favorite bit in Andrei and the Hellcats is the scene where Margot and Amoreena fall for each other.
I didn’t want to write it. I felt like I was trying to type with boxing gloves on just outlining it, but when I was asked by Vernacular Books, the original publisher of Galactic Hellcats, to write a sequel, I immediately asked everyone I could what they would want to see in one, and nine out of ten friends of me responded, “Let them date!”
At first, I assumed I’d meet this request via Prince Thane hooking up with Honor from the Black Dragon, since they met in book one and hit it off, and I kind of had Hon in mind all along as Thane’s eventual boyfriend, but I couldn’t wedge Hon back into the narrative; he’s on Black Dragon, everyone else is somewhere else.
I plotted out Galactic Hellcats to be about each character having something they want and something they need, and learning to pick the need over the want. This time, I figured I’d easily build on that by having each character have a relationship they need to work on. My working title was “Hellcats in Love,” and I would have an arc dealing with familial love, an arc on frienship-love, and of course at least one romantic love arc. There was a character I wanted to introduce, that had been in the story in long-ago earlier drafts: Amoreena. She is confident and tough and probably the perfect person for Margot to fall for. I just had to have Amoreena fall, too. There, check off that romance box!
My first draft was… clunky. I basically had them immediately glom onto each other, no tension, no hesitation. Love at first sight leads to awkward flirting and hand-holding.
“Marie,” said my bestie and critique partner, herself a romance reader and therefore my knowledge-area expert of choice, “You can’t rush past the romance because you think you can’t write it.”
She was, as usual, right. I wanted to get it over with in one scene. I had to slow down, start out with them just meeting, no immediate spark, no love at first sight, we must be acquaintances before we can be friends before we can be more. If I was honest with myself, that was how romance had worked in my own past. You meet someone while you’re struggling to stay alive, you can’t act on it, but then you meet again. So, I just throw them in each other’s way, right?
Nope. Four scenes together, and Margot and Amoreena persisted in not believably falling for each other. I waxed poetic from both perspectives about how attracted they were, but that wasn’t it. Physical attraction didn’t lead anywhere. Margot was too shy to act on it, and Amoreena too professional to do more than lay down hints.
There was a big heist at the end of the book, and of course I made Margot and Amoreena pair up for their role in it and… this was where their chemistry came to life. They were both designed as characters who knew how to break into a security office and unlock necessary doors. Amoreena is impressed first by Margot finding a way to not harm the guards; she doesn’t want to admit that she feels guilty about how jaded she’s become to human suffering. Then she notices the easy way Margot trades off taking point with her without having to have it explained and she feels she can finally relax around someone.
They reach a door with a key-pad. Margot doesn’t know how to open it. Amoreena crouches down and breathes, long and slow, on the pad. Water droplets preferentially fall on the keys with no finger oils on them. Now it’s just a matter of a few combinations to guess.
“Wow,” I said to me, “That was hot.”
Listening to myself, I typed, “The lock clicked and she opened the door. ‘That was incredibly hot,’ Margot whispered.”
I never thought I could write people believably falling for each other, but as I read back through this scene with its ratcheting stakes and tension, I saw it happening, naturally with the rest of the action. On top of a purely physical attraction, they saw the best in each other.
I did manage to have every one of the original four Hellcats – Margot, Ki, Zuleikah and Thane – have an arc that had something to do with love. Margot and Amoreena, Ki and her gang, Zuleikah and her brother, Thane and his country, but ultimately, I had to change the title, because Hellcats in Love felt misleading when I looked at how much more was happening in the book. Still, I’m proud of myself for achieving something I never thought I could write, and I hope you enjoy it, too.
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BIO:
Hugo- and Nebula nominated author Marie Vibbert’s short fiction has appeared over 90 times in top magazines like Nature, Analog, and Clarkesworld, and been translated into Czech, Chinese and Vietnamese. Her debut novel, Galactic Hellcats, was long listed by the British Science Fiction Award and her work has been called “everything science fiction should be” by the Oxford Culture Review. She also writes poetry, comics, and computer games. By day she is a computer programmer in Cleveland, Ohio.