Hi there! I've recently read the Little Thieves trilogy, and I really love Vanja. She's just. amazing. Her growth (and the initial stubborn refusal to grow tbh) in LT made me fall in love with her more and more with every page I read. And the Catwoman/Batman dynamic, wow! Extremely compelling. Thank you for this!
I also have a question, if you don't mind. Little Thieves feels almost like a standalone story, and then Painted Devils+Holy Terrors read more like a duology. So I was wondering, was your writing process different when you were working on PD+HT? Was it more difficult to make the character arcs make sense when you had to divide them between two books with no bones of the original fairy tale plot, or easier because you had more space and freedom for them? Idk, for me as a reader LT and HT had very different vibes, I'm very curious what it was like for you as the writer, if you're okay with sharing.
So LT was originally planned to be a standalone, and then I realized how much fun I had writing these two nincompoops chasing each other around, and pitched more books to my publisher! TBH, there were actually things I left a bit open, or let play out in particular ways, in LT, that would have changed if I didn't know I had two more books to tackle them.
(Spoilers for Painted Devils and Holy Terrors ahead.)
With PD and HT, a couple things were different. LT draws a lot from The Goose Girl with Vanja in a very specific role, and while PD and HT do have her pulling from other fairytales, her role isn't quite as cut-and-dry. PD runs on a lot of the regional folklore of the Harz, as well as an oblique take on the fairytales I like to call The Variable Number of Birds (The Twelve Swans, The Seven Ravens, etc.) where a girl has to seek out her lost brothers, who have been transformed into birds. HT has The Lindworm as a running theme (and perhaps leitmotif.) However, neither book is quite as direct in its fairytale parallels as LT.
In regards to character arcs, I wouldn't so much say it was spreading the arc over two books as it was exploring the next two phases for Vanja that made sense to me to follow LT. In LT, we see her learning to trust other people to treat her with care, but then the abuse victim's next step is going to be "they treat me that way because they don't know the real me."
So for PD, it made sense for her character journey to be "people can and do want me for who I am." Unfortunately, it's also "who I am, and who I want to be, will be weaponized against someone I love." And even though she's not wrong, there's more going on that makes her land on a very questionable solution. And it's deliberately questionable! The larger point is that you can do the absolute best with what you have and sometimes, through no fault of your own, it's still just not enough.
And then we get to HT. Now, here's the thing. There are two very important character dynamics that I wanted to unpack here:
Emeric had a couple foibles, but was already a good kid in LT, and in PD, he is doing his absolute best. (See above.) TBH, he was kind of carrying more than his weight in the relationship in some ways. But we've also seen that he can be judgmental, presumptive, and petty. And Vanja had never had to be the mature, responsible one in the relationship... until HT. Now Mom said it's his turn to have the abandonment issues.
Vanja now has sources of validation that aren't Emeric: the work she's doing as the Pfennigeist, her family, her few friendships. That doesn't mean she's "fixed." I let this kind of sit in subtext in HT, but the first sexual relationship she pushes herself into, after Emeric, is with a stereotypical handsome, charming, nice guy who should be what she wants; the only other fellow she sleeps with, she breaks up with after she realizes he reminds her of Emeric. The suitor at the beginning of HT is just fine. Vanja has her coping strategies now, but she's still profoundly not over losing Emeric.
All to say, Vanja's overall arc in the trilogy is becoming someone who can be an equal partner in that relationship, both emotionally and, uh, career-wise. So her arc in HT is, to put it lightly, "girl who is going to be okay." We've done "you can let people in," we've made it through "they will love you as you are," and now we're in "with everything you've learned, can you choose that for yourself." (Wink.)
It's baby's first trilogy, and looking back now, there's things I'd change and things I'd nail to a church door, but overall I'm proud of the end result! It also went through the heaviest edit of all my work (we cut nearly 1/6th of the original draft) so I may share some of the deleted scenes someday.
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