This Post Was NOT Inspired By Valentine's Day.

So today I am writing about love. This has nothing to do with the fact that it is Valentine’s Day on Friday. It actually has more to do with Game of Thrones than it does with the 14^th of February.

In August, I read the first book of the A Song of Ice and Fire series (A Game of Thrones), and in September, I read half of the second book (A Clash of Kings.) On January 28^th, it was my sixteenth birthday, and I got season one of the TV show Game of Thrones as a birthday present. On Saturday last week, I started watching said TV show, and yesterday, I watched season 2. All of season 2, might I add.

If you have never experienced a ten-hour TV marathon, let me inform you of this: it is painful. Your back will hurt, your head will hurt, and your eyes will hurt, but it will all be worth it. (Implying said TV show is good. But if you watch it for 10 hours, it will be good, because nobody would be stupid enough to watch something they hate for ten hours.)

So yesterday, I was about midway through my Game of Thrones marathon, and, what I think of as Writer’s Brain started to kick in. Writer’s Brain is where I can’t just watch a TV show or movie or read a book without thinking about it on a deeper level, thinking about plot and characterization, rather than just “Oh my gosh this thing is so awesome!”

The things that Writer’s Brain was fixated on yesterday were the relationships between characters, specifically the “romantic” relationships. I mean, Game of Thrones has a lot of characters, and most of them are either married, betrothed, or sleeping with someone. The relationship that really triggered this line of thought was that of Robb Stark and Talisa. If I had had to make a choice between Ned Stark’s sons, I’d have chosen Jon Snow any day, perhaps because the books (or what I’d read of them) showed more from his perspective than they did from Robb’s.

But the romance between Robb and Talisa changed the way I saw him. Watching them fall for each other…I could really see the love between them, and this made me think about my own stories. When was the last time I had written a love story that wasn’t completely toxic. I think it must have been that of Persephone and Drew in CONSEQUENCE. Given the fact that it’s been about a year and a half since CONSEQUENCE was completed, I began to wonder what the hell I’d been writing since then.

Basically, the “love” stories I wrote, weren’t all that loving. There were Melinoe and Blake, who basically tried to destroy each other, there were some people in TRANSCEND who I can’t talk about because it’s not published yet, there were some other characters in other books I attempted to write. And then there was Katerina Kamanev, my current main character. She is probably the most toxic of them all. I’ve only written about 21,000 words of that book, so it’s nowhere near done, which means I can’t really start writing anything new.

But when I do write something new, I don’t want to write another toxic love story. I want to write something that’s actually about love, not jealousy and schemes and treachery (it’s rather ironic that Game of Thrones made me realize this, given the fact that “jealousy, schemes and treachery” are what that series is about).

I want to write love like Persephone and Drew’s again, love where the characters don’t have these hidden dark sides or deep commitment issues, or whatever other problems I create for my characters. I also want to have a main character that isn’t semi-evil, because I’m getting tired of writing characters like that.

I feel like it’s been a very long time since I wrote characters that were actually redeemable, rather than just plain evil like the ones I write now. What is it inside my mind that is preventing me from writing something good, rather than something that makes me wonder if I’m going insane?

Once my current book is finished (so, in a very long time), I want to write something different to my current stuff. No apocalypses, no wars, no dictators, no robots (okay, you can write a decent love story with robots. That is, if CONSEQUENCE is decent, which I’m still not sure of.) I want to write something that doesn’t make me think I’m a female version of Ben from Outnumbered (the fact that he mentioned Game of Thrones in last week’s episode is even more proof that I am like him.)

So that’s my mission: write something…*searches for word to describe what I mean*. The only word that really comes to mind is “pure”, and that has connotations of….basically everything I don’t write about. I don’t mean pure in the sense of milkmaids and virgin brides. What I mean is a love story that actually makes you believe in love. I remember when I read Allegiant, and the thing that I couldn’t stop thinking about (other than that ending that made me sob for a week) was the love between Tris and Tobias, and how strong and beautiful it was. There was this indescribable quality about it, and that’s what I want to write. I want to write at least one book that is beautiful, that makes people believe in good, rather than believe in the bad in the world.

The other day I was thinking about the end of TRANSCEND, and I considered changing it. You see, the ending is currently in the vague realm of “and they all lived happily ever after, but here’s a fun flashback to show what an evil bastard this character used to be”. What I wanted to do was change the ending, because I’d had second thoughts on some of the pairings. There are some characters that belong together, yet really don’t belong together, and no matter who they end up with I will have regrets. But I’m glad I’ve kept the ending the same. If I made those characters get together, I would have completely changed the message of the entire series.

When it comes to the end of TRANSCEND, all I can really do to explain my feelings is quote The Book Thief: ‘I have hated the words, and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.’

*****I Googled Talisa from Game of Thrones to check I'd spelled her name right, and WHAT THE HELL? I'm not sure if I'm brave enough to watch season 3, HOW CAN SUCH THINGS HAPPEN? I think I need to go and cry for a bit now.