Jordan Price's Reviews > Vertigo

** spoiler alert ** About this Story
Wild Bill—what a character. I never had any plans to write from his point of view. It just happened that way.

Initially, Channeling Morpheus was supposed to be a one-off that began and ended with Payback, but the original publisher thought it would make a great series, and so I began trying to figure out how the heck I’d proceed. My tendency would normally be to pick a single protagonist and write the whole series from their point of view. It’s harder that way, because you need to work in a lot of backstory and subtext around the very strict point of view, but it’s also very rewarding.

I’m not sure if I sensed that Michael wasn’t really a leading man, or if I just wanted to see if being in Wild Bill’s head was as do-able as having Michael hear him talk. I knew that if I did write from a place of Bill, it couldn’t sound like it was coming from the head of any old person. The voice needed to be perfect. And I was scared. What if I couldn’t pull it off? What if the eloquently trashy turns of phrase sounded great in my mind, but fell flat on the page? Plus, wasn’t I cheating, in a sense, if I dipped into Bill’s mind and actually showed his perspective? It seemed like cheating, like I should be able to convey what he’s thinking and feeling through the filter of Michael and, if I were doing my job as a writer correctly, showing just that part of him would be enough.

In the end, though, I decided that whether it was cheating or not to dip into Bill’s perspective, I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could write like he thought. I don’t remember having a lot of false starts trying to get into a Wild Bill state of mind. Once I decided to do it, I just buckled down and wrote it like it sounded in my head, and hoped for the best.

One thing that surprised me was that the Wild Bill fans preferred to read from his point of view. That doesn’t make sense to me, because if you’re reading from Wild Bill’s head, Michael becomes the focus of the attention. I’d think Bill would seem sexier through Michael’s eyes, in Michael’s point of view, when Bill is the object of attraction. But no. The Bill-fans want to be Bill. Just goes to show how much more alchemy is at play here than logic.

As I polish and typeset this second edition, I’m struck by the pull of their lust for each other. I think they both get that nothing good can come of hooking up…but when the urge is too strong to resist, there’s no stopping it. I think that dynamic carried through the rest of the series beautifully, that they’re both so needy for each other, and both so full of broken places inside that no one can really heal, that there’s no way it’s going to end up with them picking out curtains. And I’m glad. Wild Bill would be sorely tempted to steal Michael’s piece and put it to his temple if he ever seriously considered picking out curtains with anybody. Even Michael.