Most authors won’t admit what I am about to until long after they’ve made their coin from a book or series.
Yet, as long-standing Legionnaires will know, that’s not how I play ball around these grubby parts. And it’s certainly not what makes the Legion so alluring (if I say so myself).
No.
I’m willing to thrust a lantern on my flaws, my struggles, and say the things other scribes are simply too scared to say.
Today, my lantern spills on Darius — the main protagonist of The Divided Region — and our…
Somewhat estranged relationship.
You see, out of all the characters I’ve written across the 12 years I decided to take this whole “making stuff up” seriously, he is the only hero I’ve struggled to form a connection with.
A bond of sorts.
The only way I can describe the situation is that he likes to keep his cards close to his chest in a way none of the cast does. No matter how hard I pry, no matter how hard I squeeze, he’ll only give me so much depending on the day, mood, and scene.
To non-writers, this sounds like I’ve veered a bit too far off the track.
Like I ought to be thrown in a straitjacket whilst a nurse chokes me on a dozen pills.
(My kind of party.)
But it is what it is.
He’s a stubborn mule like me at times, as Lady Laura likes to remind me, but we’re working through these troubled waters. I suspect that as the war ramps up, as he incurs more tragedies, and darkness spills into the land of the light and the living, he will bleed more both literally and figuratively.
Children tend to clamber to their daddy when the boogie man appears, after all.
In his case, that boogie man is the dark lord, Vraqor.
And while Darius is certainly no child or slouch (he’d surely take my backside to task in the barracks), characters are no different to us in times of bleakness.
They panic.
They fight.
They sob.
They flee.
They do things they didn’t think they were capable of (good and bad).
And let’s just say Darius finds himself in A LOT of bleak situations from Exiled right through to The Great Betrayal, with The Great Betrayal dishing out the most crud on our protagonist.
Ironically, it was in this instalment I felt like I got to know the “real” Darius Rarkez a bit more.
Still, only a little, but I’ll take it.
I suspect readers of Exiled, Forbidden Forest, Last Alliance, and One True King will agree when they read Book #5, which — shamelessly — you can get here:
https://djjwatsonstore.com/products/The-Great-Betrayal
DJJW