We live in a world where joy and empathy and pleasure are all around us, there for the noticing.
―
What if you could actually give a sociopath/psychopath empathy?
That”s what I began to ask myself after watching an episode of Charmed. More specifically, the sixth episode of the third season of the original series entitled “Primrose Empath” (click here). The episode, and the series as a whole, got me interested in the whole aspect of the mind. At the time, I didn’t know about psychology but it still intrigued me. Fast forward to 2019, when I started working on the outlines for the forty-five short stories, I decided to revisit that episode and do a deeper dive while reading up on the core aspects of empathy. And that was only the beginning of my research.
I would like to point out that research is the most fun for me in my writing process. I just love reading and learning so much that I tend to forget – just for a second – that I have a short story to write and needed to start writing down notes. Fortunately for me, I made the right decision on researching the power of empathy – not the psychology behind it. I mean…I did that later but I really wanted to understand the full extent of that power (click here to read). It was completely worth it and I listed all the applications, advantages to the willing, and disadvantages to the unwilling. This gave the skeleton for the best victim/villain of the story.
Referring back to the aforementioned episode, Vinceres was the villain of the week and I wanted to create a grounded version of him. The thing about science fiction is that, for me, I need to make the villain a humanly repulsive as possible. There has to be a way for me to make the villain related and identifiable to the reader…and it doesn’t have to be in a good way. What’s important is for the reader to see the villain and say “I know someone like that” or “I’ve seen someone like that”. So, I had to keep the core ideology of Vinceres. He’s a psychopath that thinks he’s invincible. So, after watching that episode, I knew how to create and punish the villain.
I was going to create a human villain who thinks he’s untouchable. I took that vile mindset and created a scenario that the outcome was pretty damn obvious: he was going down. But the way he was going down was going to be the fun part.
I decided to use the idea of witchcraft to approach this as it made the story a whole lot more fun. It’s really becoming part of my ongoing themes to have the protagonist of the story be women when the villains are egotistical men. Just something satisfying about it all; I can’t explain it. I guess it’s the byproduct of me being raised as a feminist. Can’t complain, though, it’s great for storytelling and female empowerment.
Now, the telepathy plot device was added at the last moment and didn’t really mean anything at first until I read it over it. At first, I didn’t like it so I decided to work into the beginning the villain’s part of the story so it flowed better. Good thing, too, because it made the torment that much more enjoyable for me to write about. Let’s see that the reader feels the same. And, with that, I hope you enjoy the story.
You can buy the book on Amazon. The link is here.
You can also learn about it on Goodreads. The link for it is here.
