One thing I really enjoy doing in my writing is exploring the same situation through different points of view. Writing scenes from a second point of view almost feels like cheating, because the hard part (for me) is done – the action, the plot, that’s all decided already. That leaves the fun part – looking at the situation through a different character’s perspective and seeing what I see.
So when I was asked to do that for one of the scenes from my book Blindspots I was excited to do so 🙂
In this scene, our heroes – a pack of anthropomorphic dogs – have reached their owl friend Winter’s nest to ask for her help locating Jasper, a dog who just happened to have a very specific type of security system installed. The Fortress 180.
The scene in the book is from Ricky’s point of view, but in the following bit we take a look at it through the eyes of Winter.
~*~
Alternate point of view scene from Blindspots:
I know I have it around here somewhere, I think, flipping through a stack of newspapers. Though, as the dust tickles my beak I wonder why I am bothering. I can just tell the dogs what I have to share without the paper and they’d–oh! There it is!
I tug the paper out of the pile, careful not to let the rest of it topple over, and snap it open in front of me. The headline reads:
FORTRESS 180 RECALLED AFTER ACCIDENT INJURES TWO
Yup. This is the one.
Tucking it under my wing I pick my way back to the main control room. The dogs are all waiting, some more patiently than others. Ricky and Fenton are standing in the middle of the room, looking nervous. Ricky at least has the good sense to keep his tail tucked in close to his body this time. Last time he’d been here he’d started wagging it and scattered dobobs and whirlygigs all over the place. Meep also caused an avalanche last time she was here, but thankfully she is up on Moo’s back. That’s just safer for all of us.
A bird’s nest is their sanctuary and I’m a bit of a collector. I shouldn’t have to worry about my collections being scattered all over the floor just because I happen o spend time with dogs.
“Here is is,” I say, pointing a wing tip at the headline.
“When was that?” Meep asks.
“Month or so ago? You don’t read the news?”
They all shake their heads, looking utterly clueless. It’s a good thing they’re cute, I think. But what I say is, “Well, the system is magical, and there is a serious shortage of those crystals they use for magic these days. So much so that the company started using smaller, inferior ones. Bad things started happening.”
“Bad things?” Ricky said, dumbly.
I resist the urge to sign at the poor dog. It’s not his fault. “The way the system is supposed to work is that if someone unauthorized enters the protected room, or if the owner presses the panic button, everyone nearby gets teleported to a secure location. They all land in a cell somewhere where there are security guards to intervene in whatever is going on and arrest the intruders. But it started malfunctioning. Teleporting everyone to random locations. And once it exploded.”
All the dogs gasp in shock and horror. “Is that how those dogs were injured?” Fenton asks, his eyes almost comically wide.
“The explosions? No. They were injured when they were teleported to a spot ten feet above the ground and gravity kicked in.” I stretched my wings, snowy white and beautiful, wide apart as far as they’d go. “Shame they did not have wings.”
“Jasper also doesn’t have wings,” Ricky says. It’s the first good point he’s made all evening. Possibly not so good for Jasper though.
~*~
That was a lot of fun! And also? I don’t know an elegant way to segue over to this, but even though this book is aimed at grown-ups, I commissioned Allie MacAllister to illustrate a few scenes from it for me. This scene was one of them:
There are three more illustrations and lots more scenes in the book. All the scenes are from Ricky’s POV… but maybe I’ll write a sequel from Winter’s LOL We’ll have to wait and see.
