In all the urban fantasy I’ve ever read, there’s always a smorgasbord of hotties for the heroine to choose between and angst about choosing between. And, naturally, I wanted to make sure Kate was in the same predicament.
Having said that, I’m really not sure Patrick’s in the running.
I wanted to talk about Patrick in one of these posts, because in a funny sort of way he’s one of the most important characters in the series. I’m fairly unapologetic about the fact that the Kate Kane series is sort of my response (or if you prefer, my slightly peculiar love letter) to the urban fantasy and paranormal genres. The series was kind of a crystallisation of a lot of ideas I’ve been kicking around for a while, and one of those ideas could be best summed up as “what happens to a YA heroine after the trilogy finishes?”
One of the most simultaneously gratifying and worrying things to have come out of the copy-edits for Iron and Velvet was a comment from one of our editors which read “I don’t understand this, but I assume it will make sense to people who have read the other books in the series.” Just to clarify, there are no other books in the series. At least not that have been published yet. I’m pretty sure I clarified the segment in question (there’s no sense in confusing people needlessly), but since a big part of what I wanted to do with I&V was to create the sense that there was a whole lot of backstory that the reader is only partly being let in on I couldn’t help feeling a little chuffed.
Kate’s history with Patrick is important, in a strange way, because of how little it really defines her. I mean yes, Kate is all kinds of messed up, but I hope that the text doesn’t support the reading that her biggest source of emotional baggage is the guy she dated when she was seventeen. The central joke, insofar as it is a joke, of Patrick’s character is that Kate got over him years ago but he still thinks and acts like he did when he was her vampire boyfriend. With all the creepy, stalky, possessive behaviour which that entails. Kate is quite angry and bitter about her relationship with Patrick, but mostly in a “I am annoyed by that shitty thing that happened in the past” way, not in a “this has profoundly affected my present happiness” way.
Patrick himself is a difficult character. He basically started life as a thinly failed parody of the hero of a certain popular Young Adult novel series, and I suspect that his behaviour will, for many people, sit on a difficult boundary between “amusing satire” and “slightly cheap spoof.” The basic point I wanted to make with Patrick (and I am very much aware that this point is hardly ground-breaking) was that certain types of vampire boyfriend behaviour are at best annoying and at worst borderline abusive. Perhaps more importantly, though, I also wanted to use the character to highlight how much a person’s perception of themselves and of the world around them can change in a few years. Or okay, fifteen years. Part of the reason Patrick is so irritating to Kate is that he continually reflects her seventeen-year-old-self back at her, and that’s a person she’s left far behind (for a great many reasons, most of which have nothing to do with her sexual orientation).
A tiny part of me almost sees Patrick as a tragic figure. Although the original intent was always for him to be a psychotic mashup of every vampire boyfriend I’d encountered (and I’ve encountered a few), the more I thought about it, the more I realised how utterly miserable it must be to actually be that person. I mean, I admit that I didn’t have the best time in school, but to my mind anybody who – at the age of a hundred and something – feels that their ideal partner is an emotionally sheltered seventeen-year old probably has more than their fair share of problems. I realise it isn’t really part of the archetype (in that vampire boyfriends have usually had basically no romantic relationships except the heroine), but I sort of imagine him going through this terrible cycle of obsessing passionately over one teenage girl after another, endlessly through the centuries. Which, don’t get me wrong, is probably worse for the girls than it is for him.
The whole idea of a vampire who embodied the most unhealthy, most obsessive aspects of love strangely altered Patrick’s character as the book (and particularly the sequel) progressed. I’d already decided that certain traits were passed down in vampire bloodlines, so if Patrick was cursed with a doomed and obsessive attraction to inappropriately young people with obscure supernatural heritage, the rest of his bloodline probably were as well. Which meant that as Patrick’s backstory developed (and there’s more detail of this in the second book in the series – and I appreciate that it’s probably really annoying to have a teaser for the second volume in a post which is already designed as a teaser for the first volume) it became clear that at some point in his youth, he would have had to fulfil that role for somebody else. And so Patrick’s backstory wound up casting him, ironically, as the heroine of a YA urban fantasy. A naïve young man with a hidden supernatural talent, who was pursued relentlessly by a beautiful but tormented vampire.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, the guy is still basically a dickhead. But dickheads can have tragic pasts as well.