I’m deep in the weeds with The Heritage of Michael Martiniere, and starting to realize that there may be at least one other book dealing with this character. When I first thought about Heritage, it was because I wanted to continue the story of a character who shows up toward the end of The Martiniere Legacy Book Three: Realization. I’d pretty much concluded a trilogy arc in Realization, and Heritage was intended to focus on some issues that attracted me: namely, Michael coming to terms with being the clone of a toxic, manipulative, man (Philip Martiniere) with significant health issues that Michael was intended to help remedy. I also didn’t intend to write the story in a linear fashion but focus on specific issues and relationships that shape Michael’s progression.
Parts of the story are chugging along quite nicely. Mike has flaws. He’s significantly damaged, not just physically but mentally, by what happened to him before he was rescued by Ruby and Gabe, the protagonists of The Martiniere Legacy. Writing short pieces about how that damage gets addressed is coming along quite nicely, and not writing it linearly means I can pop from one self-contained section to another (Scrivener is proving to be quite useful for this purpose). There are some rather dark scenes that I can work on until I’ve maxed out, then jump over to something not quite as grim.
Well, for the most part I can do that.
But there’s one relationship that keeps evading me, and I realized yesterday what it is and why it is.
Lily. Biologically, she’s Mike’s great-granddaughter. She’s the daughter of Brandon, who as Gabe and Ruby’s son serves as a sort of mixture of big brother and father figure to Mike. Lily’s conception was not supposed to happen as her mother Kris was still under the influence of indentured hormonal and birth control tags. Such conceptions are known to happen in this world, but for the most part they tend to miscarry due to…not very nice distortions of the development process. What isn’t known until Lily is a pre-teen is the cognitive impact of those tags on psychosocial development. Everyone worried for a while that Mike would turn out to be like his progenitor Philip, who was…toxic, manipulative, etc, etc.
But it turns out that Lily is the one the family should have been worried about.
And that’s what I’m struggling with. The interactions of Lily and Mike. Mike is seven years older than Lily. He ends up having to confront her because Lily tries to revive the institution of indenture, and leads a cult venerating Philip.
I’ve had a hard time writing Lily and Mike. Yesterday I realized why. It’s a different book from Michael’s coming to terms with himself as Philip’s clone and his struggles with being a clone. In a lot of ways, realizing this is a huge relief. I’m not ready to write those confrontational scenes. Hell, to write Lily.
So I’m going to write a few notes to myself, and keep on working with the central issues of Heritage. While I’m not necessarily looking forward to what dealing with the structure of this book will be once I know it’s completed, moving the conflict with Lily out of the book except for side references in other self-contained units, makes my focus on Michael’s clone issues more central…which it is supposed to be.
That’s a relief.
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The Martiniere Legacy: Book One, Inheritance; Book Two, Ascendant; and Book Three, Realization will be released in Fall 2020, along with side stories and sketches. More specific information can be found in my newsletter which comes out toward the end of each month. Sign up for my newsletter at https://tinyletter.com/JoyceReynolds-Ward for release dates.
