When I’m using a first-person POV, I want to get as deep into the character’s head as possible and let them tell their own story. I approach it the same way I write dialogue, having the character’s background and personality inform their distinct voices and verbal tendencies. For example, with Corvus’s formal education and military background, he’s more proper and favors short, straightforward sentences. Scorpia, on the other hand, is much more casual, can be occasionally rambling, and often peppers her narration with colloquialisms and profanity. Also, since Corvus’s POV was a later addition to the manuscript (based on my editor’s suggestion), I ended up having to swap some scenes from Scorpia’s POV to his, which turned into a fun narrative exercise as I thought about how the two characters would view and describe the same set of events differently.

Scorpia’s voice came to me more naturally, and her narration was also a part of the story’s concept from the beginning. Corvus was more difficult to get the hang of writing, especially because I added him later in the drafting process. His early chapters on Titan were the last scenes I wrote in the first draft, but once I finally completed them, it gave me a much better grasp of what was going on inside his head.

How did you develop the dynamic between the Kaiser family? They all have their own important role on Fortuna, but they still have to navigate being a family. What was your process like while writing their relationship?

I’m a messy drafter and write quite a lot of material that doesn’t make it into the end product. Here, I think, that really helped with fleshing out the various relationships in the family. I wrote pages of backstory that ended up distilled into flashbacks lasting only a few lines, one-on-one scenes between characters that didn’t fit into the final narrative, long conversations that had to be cut short to keep the pacing even. Rather than being wasted words, it all contributed to building those family relationships. It was important to me to make sure each pair of siblings had their own unique dynamic, and that the relationships felt real and complex, since these characters have known each other for their entire lives.

Do you have a favorite scene in Fortuna? If so, why?