I’m going to indulge the fantasy every writer has, which is talking endlessly about her book. Well, not endlessly. But I’m still bummed about the agent thing, and I thought it might be neat if I select my favorite moment from the chapters of Seven Archangels: Annihilation that are already online .
In Chapter One, which went online last week, while the hay fight is glorious, the moment that makes me laugh out loud is the encounter as Gabriel searches for a four-leaf clover. As the conversation between Gabriel (disguised as a boy) and the other two little boys goes on, you begin to get the idea that something isn’t quite right. Gabriel has fallen out of character as a little kid, and the six-year-old…well…
Gabriel grinned. "It's as simple as picking out a square in a field of triangles."
The boy looked breathless. "Do you find you can train the human eye to register only the squares?"
"Absolutely!" Gabriel turned his attention back to the plants at his feet. "Human vision is very easy to fool because the brain interprets visual patterns the way it expects to and rejects any data it doesn't expect—"
"You don't have to tell me," said the boy. "I take advantage of that all the time."
At this point, I usually snicker out loud while reading.
In Chapter Two, my favorite moment isn’t funny: it’s wrenching. When Remiel goes into Hell in pursuit of Gabriel, she’s in disguise as a demon. The problem is, although she can fool Mephistopheles (she comments that most Cherubim have the social skills of a smart brick) she knows she’ll never be able to fool Satan. In order to get a chance to help Gabriel, she’ll need to actually become the demon she’s impersonating — all the way down to her heart. And then, hoping it doesn’t end in the loss of her own soul, she does it.
The first way to be Camael was to hate Remiel—it was something easy enough to do, to loathe that ineffective slave of their Creator, the one God had bought off with status in exchange for rejecting the other half of herself. And once Camael hated Remiel, the rest flowed easily: to hate the things Remiel loved, to hate the things that reminded him of her, and then the logical next step, which was to despise himself because it was one of the things she had loved and because Camael himself reminded himself of Remiel.
_Stupid Cherub,_ Camael thought to Gabriel. _Why did you have to get yourself captured and put me in this position to begin with?_
I may continue these moments with subsequent chapters as they go online. What do you think?
