The Black Dagger Brotherhood_ An Insider's Guide - J. R. Ward [76]
Ah . . . no.
After I took the scenes I had already written concerning him and Marissa falling in love, and sketched out the other things I saw in my head, it was clear something was missing. The book just wasn’t as big as I sensed it was.
I stewed about it. Worried. Stewed some more . . . and then I got the image of the Omega cutting off his finger and putting it into Butch’s abdomen.
Actually, I got both the image and the sound of the carrot crack when the Omega did the knife action on himself.
Ew.
Once I tuned in to that, all these scenes came hammering down on my head. As I followed the story, it was fascinating to see how the original scenes of the book morphed. For instance, I’d known that Butch was going to get abducted by the lessers, and had seen him and Marissa reuniting in the clinic, but suddenly he was under quarantine and the consequences were much, much more dire. So there weren’t huge shifts in content, per se, but more in implication and scope within the world.
The big theme for the book is transformation, and with respect to Butch, I love the parallel tracks of his story. Both good and evil transform him—first when the Omega has at him, and then when the change is brought on him and his vampire nature comes out. It’s as if the Lessening Society and the Brotherhood are both fighting for control of his destiny and his soul, and it’s not immediately clear who wins. For a while after Butch leaves quarantine, neither he nor the Brothers are sure whether or not he’s been turned into a lesser or what exactly he’s doing when he inhales a slayer.
The thing I like most about where Butch ends up in terms of the world is that he’s a significant player in the war, arguably turning the tables on the Omega because he puts the evil directly at risk. The Brothers have been picking off lessers for centuries, but Butch is actually degrading the Omega’s finite being each time he takes care of business. I think this is a great ending for the cop. It gives him a place where, although he’s not purely of the Brotherhood bloodlines, he’s an equal participant in the fight to protect the species.
And Butch isn’t the only one who changes. Marissa, too, is transformed from a cloistered female of the glymera into someone who has her own life.
I think, of all the females, Marissa’s probably the one who resonates with me most personally, because I, too, am from a conservative, establishment background and have had to break a few molds and expectations to be who I really am. Her scene in the beginning of Lover Revealed (the one that starts on page seven), with her having a panic attack in the bathroom during that party at her brother’s, shows clearly the toll of her having lived her life in the glymera. She’s sublimated so much of herself and borne burdens for which she didn’t volunteer for so long, that she’s nearing her breaking point.
I get asked a lot whether there are parts of me in the books and whether I take people I know and put them in. Both are a no. I’m very private, and I strictly separate my personal life from my writing life, and additionally, I would hate to think any of my friends or family would feel used. That being said, there are definitely things that happen in the books that I’ve had personal experience with. For example, as someone who’s had panic attacks, Marissa’s interlude in that bathroom really resonated with me. I didn’t put the scene in because I was revealing something of myself, but I did empathize with my heroine in the way you would when you talk to someone else who’s been through what you have.
For Marissa, the real turning point for her as an individual comes when she burns all of her dresses in the backyard. I thought this was a great way to symbolically mark her break with tradition:
It took her a good twenty minutes to drag each one of her gowns out into the backyard. And she was careful to