Making of: Tear of the Desert

Every story begins with an introduction. Ideally, it captivates the reader, and introduces the topic and the protagonists. This first story also offered me a unique opportunity that I couldn’t let go waste.

Origin

The base of this story origins from my experiments with this project. In this phase, Miray was able to do the dream travels with aid of a machine. She met Dian in the real world. When he didn’t believe her that she was able to jump between worlds, she abducted him to the Orient Express, her favorite retreat.

Later I discarded the idea of a “travel machine”. However, the charme of this scene was too good to be wasted. Instead, I dedicated the entire first story to it, and chose a classical plot of a thief who tries to escape by the train.

In the first concept, Miray already unmasked the thief in the baggage car, when she found the loot in his baggage. But then I realized that I would leave a plot twist unused that I could only do in the very first story. The story starts from Dian’s point of view as a narrator. Miray joins in later, together with a number of other characters, so her true role is not yet clear. I could use that fact to unsettle the reader: Is she the heroine she is pretending to be, or is she the Velvet Fox, the mysterious antagonist of this story?

In the meantime, I had changed the story at least five times, including a version from an objective narrator’s perspective. It turned out to be a bad idea to change the basic concept while telling a story. When I edited the story, I found a lot of reference errors and other relicts from previous versions. Altogether, it was a tenacious and frustrating work to fully tell the story and remove all errors.

Research Work

The internet is an excellent source for research!

The main topic of this story is the Orient Express. Thanks to a countless number of photos on wagons-lits-diffusion.com, I learned a lot about the composition of the cars, their shape, the time tables, the train routes, and the clothes of the crew.

Still, one has to be careful. One example: Today, Belgrade Station is a through station, but it hasn’t always been like that. At the time when the story took place, the Beograd Station was a terminus. In 2018, it was taken out of service, and the train traffic was routed to the new station.

Another trap were the different time zones that the train was passing on its way from Constantinople to Paris. I only noticed that in my first proofreading, and I added the scene where Dian is pointed to his incorrectly set wrist watch. Certainly, Dian wouldn’t have thought about adjusting the time when he woke up on a toilet somewhere after Sofia.