7 or 9

My novel The Wayward School for Girls began as the idea that most people are children. There was no story in mind. There was only the realization that most adults are childish. I imagined the reality as literal.

My thematic specialty is the foot soldier of villainy archetype, female versions specifically. The characters are always young in my work. They are always ordinary. They are typically adults because I want these useless antagonists to be at their best, so that their inglorious fate is deserved.

The foot soldiers of villainy are action-adventure characters. They set the standard of ordinary by which heroes are measured. The story would be an action-adventure accordingly.

The best mainstream use of children as the nameless baddies is the 1999 video game Silent Hill. A school is infested with the dehumanized students who bullied the daughter of the protagonist. The hero slaughters them in droves, and not to avenge his daughter. The children swarm him relentlessly. They are the mindless servants of the evil trying to be born.

The setting of my fiction would be a school, like it was for the child soldiers of villainy in Silent Hill.

I started writing what became the novel The Wayward School for Girls before I even knew what I was going to make of it. I finished fifty days later. I illustrated the cover a week after that.

I decided from the beginning that the children of the story would all be the same age. The heroes and nameless baddies would all be little girls. I had yet to decide what age, exactly and what costumes the characters would be wearing.

In the book Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the protagonist states that she is “seven and a half years exactly.” I decided the girls in my story would be seven years old… but changed my mind before finishing. The dialog of the characters would be more interesting if they were slightly older… so I turned them all into nine-year-olds. The actress Fairuza Balk was nine years old when she played Dorothy Gale in the wonderfully scary movie Return to Oz. Her performance gave an example of what I preferred.

I have written many books, several of them novels. I consider The Wayward School for Girls to be among my best, if not my best. It is a long and adventurous nightmare as survival horror… and I enjoyed the ride. I hope those who read it have as much fun doing so as I did writing it.

https://www.deviantart.com/yellowplasma/art/The-Wayward-School-for-Girls-full-cover-1043500403