Flavors of Contempt

More than halfway done with Rhean?

Hey! What’s weighing heavy on your mind?

I’m pretty sure I’ll have a first rough draft of Rhean written within a week or two. There’s only a few more chapters I need to chisel away at—and then I can jump into rereading and reworking everything once again.

I’m guessing the book will end up in the 70k word range, and that’s more likely to go up than it is for me to miss the mark.

Having said that, I’ve recently been thinking a lot about how best to capture a certain complex emotion.

One that I don’t think has an obvious description.

One I’ll be exploring a bit today.

Hidden Pain

Emotions are like flavors for a well-cooked meal. They can mix and match and combine into new sensations. Strong feelings like strong spices also quickly overpower more subtle hints. The untrained sommelier may miss the sleight-of-hand of a saboteur.

Where I find this to be the most relevant to Rhean is in how rage, anger, and violence is often digested. At the moment of an obvious transgression, blame and fault are quick to be shoveled and shared.

When a particular outburst of emotion and action disrupts the status quo, the one who first “gets in the way of the everyday” is often seen as the villain—the one who needs to be punished. As an aside, the framing of a story can do some heavy lifting as well, e.g. collateral damage being glossed over in every superhero movie.

Most people don’t think of themselves as villains though, and for us mere mortals, we aren’t gifted with the grace of protagonist plot armor. I see this being the most compelling in how enduring continual pain is rarely noticeably perceived before it’s too late.

Adding insult to injury, complaints around that dull onslaught are far too often simply scoffed at as an excuse—if not outright ignored. Personal problems that the individual should have dealt with sooner. Fault placed on the two pairs for trying to win against a straight flush.

This quickly becomes a discussion on victim-blaming and can include more vocabulary than I care to evoke. So, in simple terms, when someone is pushed over the edge and a fight “suddenly” breaks out with injuries inbound, I find there is often disproportionate sympathy for the bully over the one being bullied.

Rather than letting that settle into indignation that could lead to a divine sense of righteousness, I wanted to focus more on how that feeling—that emotion—can be qualitatively defined. I also wanted to explore how it can affect other actions and reactions.

There’s a certain futility to it all—an easy path to nihilism.

Knowing that any response will be met with more protest than doing the wrong thing.

Learning that it’s better to hide when there is no chance of acceptance or validation.

And eventually finding out that there is no escaping who we really are.

I call it contempt in the title, but I think the use of hidden pain is better—some mix of annoyance, frustration, shyness, and obviously pain and anger.

Unleashed Secret

For Rhean, it’s overly simple to just map this complex flavor to our everyday experiences. But that can be hard when almost everyone is familiar with the emotion in varying degrees of subtleties. Micro or macro aggressiveness that impacts how we react to a perceived slight or an alleged wrong.

I say that because my goal is not to write an entire book about revenge for silent shadows. Instead, I’m more looking to understand how to add this flavor as a spice to the story.

I’ve mentioned before how a big theme of Maneus is regret. How we deal with our past and how trauma is passed down a family line. In Maneus, even the antagonist has obvious regrets—ones that spark disproportionate acts of revenge and thus the savior of humanity requires the heart of a hero.

While not nearly as central, I wanted Rhean to capture some of its sister-story’s themes. Not a direct translation, but something referential and related.

I settled on an idea around betrayal.

And I think hidden pain heightens that theme.

Free Books

On a lighter note, the Amazon campaign is mostly done and I wanted to provide a quick update on how it went.

Even with the absolute minimum of promotion on my side, there was clearly some kind of boost. My theory is that a non-zero amount of people just download every free Kindle book.

For some added detail, the breakdown between the books shows a lot more interest for Besnowed than the others.

However, I have not received a single subscriber here on Substack and only two ebook sales as a result of the promotion. So, that’s some downloads with almost zero conversations. Not the best results for a marketing campaign.

In dollar terms, a whopping $0.70.

While the promotion is over for Besnowed and Revification, Maneus is still free on Kindle until tomorrow. Be sure to get a copy if you haven’t already, if for nothing else than to give me a more impressive graph to look at.

I’ll end this letter with another question for the reader.

Besides my mother, did any of you tell other people to download my books?

I don’t blame you if you didn’t, but I would like to know if you did!

Until next time.

Cheers,

JMB