“First I want to say a HUGE thank you to Colleen Houck for inviting me here today! I kind of feel like a freshman in high school and a senior I’ve admired from afar has invited me to sit at her lunch table.  You’re truly an amazing writer and person. Mwah!

When Colleen first invited me to do a blog post, not gonna lie, I pretty much went straight into panic mode. I kept thinking: Oh great! A blog post. Blog posts and I are like sworn enemies. Not to be too hyperbolic, but blog posts (and their topics) are my Lex Luther. What in the world was I going to talk about? Then it hit me. I’d talk about villains!

One of the questions I get asked the most is: how did I create a villain that everyone loves to hate?

When I first started RENEGADE, I didn’t know anything about Evie or her story. I only knew I had this voice in my head of an amazing main character, who lived in an underwater society, who just kept telling me that her life was just about perfect. I ended up spitting out the first (mostly unchanged from it’s original form) chapter in about twenty minutes in the middle of the night. I had no idea where those lines would take the story.

At first Mother was just this abstract thought. I was just going to make her this evil person who stole girls from the Surface for her own evil plot to help populate Elysium as breeding stock. She was going to be a momentary character barely worth a quick mention. However, even as I finished writing that first chapter, I knew Mother was much more than just a Snidely Whiplash character twirling her metaphorical mustache. It wasn’t until I had written and rewritten RENEGADE that I really knew just how important Mother’s story was to Evie’s.

 One of my all time favorite stories is Sleeping Beauty. And my favorite villain was Maleficent. Of course, Sleeping Beauty is Aurora’s story, but there wouldn’t be a story without Maleficent. But, even as a child, I always felt there was more to her than just being slighted from attending a party for a baby. I KNEW there had to be a reason for her to be the way she was. (Of course, with the Maleficent movie, we know there really WAS more to that story, but I wrote RENEGADE way before that came out.) So Sleeping Beauty just felt…flat to me. Like something important was missing.

When I finished RENEGADE, it felt the same way. As if the story was one of those 3-D puzzles and I was missing all of the important pieces that made the entire thing pop to life. It was at that moment, I realized that like Maleficent, Mother wasn’t evil for evil’s sake. Something in her past had changed her and shaped her into the horrible person she was. Every decision she made (good and bad) was directly related to whatever it was that happened. And that Mother was so much more than the villain of Evie’s story. She was the hero of her own.

That’s when I decided I had to do much more than just a character sketch of Mother. I had to stop telling Evie’s story and start telling Mother’s, so I could see what that moment (or moments) was.

So I did.

Right in the middle of revisions for my editor I stopped what I was doing and wrote Mother’s story. I ended up writing what essentially amounts to a complete manuscript completely devoted to Mother. When I’d finished it, all of RENEGADE’s missing puzzle pieces were lying on the table in front of me, waiting for me to pluck them up and fit them into place. It completely changed not just the direction of Evie’s story, but also the entirety of the Elysium Chronicles.

So why is Mother a villain people love to hate? I think it’s because people can relate to her even if it’s in just some small way. Mother wasn’t just evil for evil’s sake.  She had reasons for the decisions she made. And while most of us would have made different decisions, we can also see how she justified the decisions she did make and that in and of itself is just as powerful as her actions.”