Reviewing Progress on Boudica and The Beast

I had Word read me the first 17 drafted chapters (183 pages) of my incomplete Boudica and The Beast story. It took a long time to read, so that originally intended short story is demonstrating itself a novel in the making, especially as it might be only half drafted.

The rereading was necessary as I had taken a break from writing to draft teaser short stories to world build especially around the besieged city of Pilgerruh. This allowed me to develop other characters like the city’s rebel leader & the assassin who will wound The Butcher, describe conditions within the city, and demonstrate the impact on rebel soldiers.

After being away from the main characters for a while, I found that I liked the way I developed the characters.

Boudica is the heroine of the story; we meet her as a rebel soldier nearly dead on the battlefield from a head wound.

Pregnant Olga is her mentor & voice of reason as Boudica adapts to her new life; I like Olga as she is a competent female character.

Meanwhile, The Butcher so far has been a terrible bloody and abusive beast, who also healed Boudica’s wounds and still grieves the death of his wife & son in a terrorist car bomb at the start of the civil war.

One of those drafted teaser stories became the novel’s first chapter with The Butcher finding an unconscious Boudica receiving first aid on a recent battlefield. The female medic acts as a stand in for the voice of the reader. As the story world is introduced, the medic emotes & says how terrible & cruel everything is. However, she also recognized her enemy’s pain and the empathy that The Butcher has for the young soldier (Boudica) he had injured in the earlier battle. As The Butcher took the rebel medic prisoner & gave her as a gift to his lead army doctor, she reappears later in the novel a couple times when The Butcher is injured in battle & requires medical treatment.

Note to self: I was pondering Boudica’s given name before The Butcher renamed her. Perhaps Antigone, from Sophocles’ plays, as the war has made The Butcher the living dead, and he spends a good part of the story so far half blind from a head wound. This would be revealed in the book she selects to read (Sophocles’ Oedipal trilogy) when Olga is training her and in a flashback chapter with her parents dramatizing the ideas that lead to the civil war.