Becoming Petronella

The outline came easy, filled in with coloured pencil as I went along: a bare voluptuous woman framed by the tousled plumage of black feathery wings against a backdrop of twilight sky. Her torso was suited in a finespun filament of protective armour, like a new-age knight of the royal order. Her hair was neatly and practically bobbed, face dominated by a seductively dangerous smile of bright pink lips ringing dazzlingly white teeth. I exaggerated the mouth, but not to monstrous proportions. And those were the main ingredients: the armour, the wings, the gaping rictus. The sky I rendered in hues of wildfire orange and violet scarlet.

The above paragraph was originally cut from the end of Chapter 3 (Escaping Hazel). Sadler (main character) is sat in his rehab room drawing a picture. The only reason he was drawing a picture because there was nothing else happening in the story (in other words, I couldn't think of anything better to happen). I was simply filling in the lines, writing for the word count, and so that's why it had to go.

But now, oh now, there's an unexpected female character called PETRONELLA who has come into the story at the end of Chapter 4, and her description just accidentally matched the picture above (weird), so if I REINSERT the cut paragraph, it looks like Sadler will have been drawing her in a kind of psychic vision to come. And that's handy, seen us though she has been dead over two centuries.

At the time I thought 'why is he drawing this'? But now it works.

These are my characters. This is my world.