Behold the Queen

This massive piece of art of Queen Erishella was created by Becca. It is too huge for my scanner so you will have to settle for this picture taken by my camera. I apologize for the unclear picture but much like Queen Erishella herself, it is dangerous to gaze on her beauty directly.

I don’t do as many Erishella stories as I would like. Most of it is my fault. When you have an all powerful female character with a kingdom at her command, it is hard to find the conflict necessary for a story. Most of my stories focuses on another character with Erishella being the conflict in their lives. These characters run smack into the immovable sexual object that is the wicked Queen.

The stories I love focus on Erishella dealing with conflicts. The easy way to do this is to have stories where Erishella is somehow depowered or in a weaker position than usual and she overcomes it with her inherent awesomeness.  That is also the kind of story I despise when it happens to strong female characters. It is as if writers can’t relate to a strong woman so they have to make her a weak woman to make her interesting.

This is why my position on Erishella stories is to make her a fabulous powerful woman AND give her equally awesome opponents/lovers. My last story, War and Fornication was my ideal embodiment of that concept and I am very proud of it. I want to do more stories like that.

Lately I have found that difficult to do. It can be hard to create awesome characters worthy of a wicked clever queen. It can be difficult to create characters in opposition to evil and not make them more sympathetic.  This is why I don’t often write Erishella stories.

Which brings me to something I read once about the writers on the television show, Cheers. The writers were struggling with a scene and they decided to just skip it for now, write something else, and come back later. This is perfectly good advice for writing and I highly recommend it.  The head writer however had a different opinion. He said, “What are we, cowards?”. They went back to the scene and finished it.

I love this story because it is fabulously wrong headed and macho, yet it embraces the idea that no problem with writing can’t be overcome.

I think Erishella would approve.