#AtoZChallenge: Secretkeeper

Secretkeeper first started out with the thought: What do you do with the secrets you keep?

I’d originally wanted to do an urban literary type story about a girl—one of those quiet types who are great listeners—that’s feeling bogged down by all the secrets she has to keep because people keep telling her things and being trusted to keep them secret. It was supposed to be set in Penang, because why not write about the place I actually live in, huh?

But… I couldn’t get the story to move. Nothing worked, nothing was interesting enough.

Then I decided okay, let’s add in some magic since I seem to write better when its fantasy.

So the story got revised—she’s still burdened with secrets—but this time, it’s because she has developed some magical powers that lets her see visions of the future/or snippets of things that are happening. And what if she sees something, but misinterprets it? And there’s this whole fiasco of her trying to prevent this calamity from happening, but it’s only happening because she’s trying to prevent it…

And it also didn’t work out.

Well, so, I was also working on editing (or trying not to rewrite) Absolution and I got to the bit where I gave the Impianans mind powers and wondered what on earth for. BUT wouldn’t it be interesting that because of these mind powers the priests from Impian are feared? And the common people have to learn tricks/skills to prevent their minds being read?

I was still thinking about that one person made to bear everyone’s secrets, and that felt rather like priests who take people’s confessions, and thought … but what if only ONE person listens to confessions and those confessions and memories can be passed down through the generations?

So yeah, that was how Secretkeeper more or less came about.