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Sydney McGlynn, Baphomet, and Writing Into the Dark

I don't often say much about writing process around here. And I say still less about some of the choices that I make while I'm still in the process of writing them out.

There's a couple of reasons for this. One is that it risks spoilers to talk about what I'm writing, and why it's turning out the way it is. Another is that, typically, I'm writing chapters in a different area from the one I'm publishing in, so you won't even know what I'm talking about.

But at the moment my publishing and writing schedules have briefly intersected. (I just typed up the next-to-last chapter that I intend to write in this sequence before breaking off to write something involving Will, the YouTube crew, and Andrea Varnsworth.) Also, I've been getting some comments via email that suggest it's worth saying something about why the storylines with Sydney have and will evolve as they have.

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So, when I invented Sydney, I wanted two things: a surprising kind of a girlfriend for Will, and a surprising kind of partner for him. I think that's what we've got in her. Will could be more successful with girls than he imagines himself, but even Sydney would ordinarily be out of his league. And not only is Sydney as a type (shapely, popular, cheerleader sort) unusual for her interest in magic, but she's got dark ambitions probably beyond even what Aubrey Blackwell is capable of.

(That's not to say she's the Wicked Witch of the West in disguise. It's just that no step she takes looks like it's going to be the last one for her.)

The fun up to now (AFAIC) has been in inventing and justifying this character, and the long line of chapters that took her and Will deeper into the Libra climaxed in the moment when they decided that they were going to replace a bunch of people with duplicates and use them to make kind of cult—a Brotherhood of Baphomet.

But I have felt very shy about writing past that point. Or, at least, shy about writing past the point where they make their first replacement.

Because I have no freaking idea what a Brotherhood of Baphomet is and how it works.

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Now, I've been here before. A long time ago—

A very ... very ... long time ago, now that I look at the publication history.

—I got Will in trouble by throwing a couple of teenage cops at him. Their names were Frank and Joe Durras, and I only wrote two chapters with them, and I only wrote those chapters because I was tickled by the idea of Will getting into a magical scrum with the Hardy Boys.

But then I got emails asking "Who are these guys?" and "When are we going to see them again?" and I had to say "I don't know." I didn't have a backstory for them—I didn't even know if they were human, or magical, or what—when I tossed them into the story, and I didn't want to write any more for them until I had them figured out.

So I left them far behind and far away to do some other stuff while I thought about it.

(At the time, it felt like a year or two passed before I picked them up again; a more alert reader than me informed me that actually is more like only a couple of weeks.)

When I came back I still had only a few ideas, which I used to get them onto a few more pages. But bit by bit, more ideas accumulated; I met some more people who belonged to their Order; I learned more about them by bouncing them off these other members of the Order, and by listening those other members; and gradually a fully worked out mythos for the Stellae Errantes emerged. That whole process took at least a year of writing.

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I tell you all that because I'm more or less in the same position—the same starting position—now with Sydney and the Brotherhood. So what I'm saying is that writing about her and Will and this Brotherhood is going to be a very slow and tentative process, with lots of starting and stopping lots of hopping around as I figure stuff out and find places that are conducive to figuring it out. Anything that shows up in the next week is going to be far from the final and complete word on what this thing is and how it works; and as I want to fold revelations into each evolution of the hijinks, that means that the hijinks here are unlikely to quickly develop.

I can say one thing about the Brotherhood, though you shouldn't take it as a spoiler for anything coming up. Actual Brotherhoods are a thing connected to Fane. That's not something I have lately invented; alert and unusually retentive readers may remember Baphomet being mentioned in relation to Fane during one of the Fane-centric storylines. When I decided that Sydney's father would be into the occult, I decided that he would be a Fane employee, and Baphomet seemed like a good and surprising choice—something much more sinister and plainly occult; something more like something out of Dennis Wheatley—than what we usually see when we see Fane. But it's going to be a very long time, in terms of weeks and chapters, before anything like that becomes relevant to a BoM storyline.