User

So I knew that my villain had to be a pirate.  And I was left wondering what she was going to steal.  Captain Hook kidnapped Tiger Lily and the Lost Boys, ordered Tinker Bell to be kidnapped, and planted a bomb to kill Peter Pan; he seemed to specialize in kidnap and murder, not theft.  Then I thought about Hook's drive to kill Peter Pan, the spirit of eternal youth, and I thought: that's what Mrs. Scales wants to steal - youth.  But I saw a problem with that thought.  You can't quantify youth.  It's not a substance but an absence.  It's the absence of age - the sum of the years and experiences that have not yet come.

So how would a villain steal youth?

Remember that lack of empathy from the movie clip yesterday, that signature calling card of evil?  That's how.  You can't take away something that doesn't exist yet.  But if something inside you twists your soul and causes you pain, like lust or greed or ambition, you can force someone to bear the burden of your pain as long as that person is less powerful than you are.  If you don't care what bearing that burden does to your victim, you can force her to do terrible things.

Like Captain James Hook, my villain ran from a violent, insatiable clock - the thousands of years that had deformed and twisted her.  And because she had no empathy, she could force innocent children to bear the burden of her age.  She fit the profile of all abusers.  In her mind, she stripped her victims of power and will and an individual soul and saw them only as vessels that existed to receive what she could not stand alone.

Warlords who steal children from their homes and force them to fight act this way.  So do brothel owners who buy or trick or steal children from their parents and force them into prostitution.  So do factory owners who entrap children into long days of labor with little or no pay.  Each of these abusers denies the reality of who a child is and what she needs: safety, protection, education, and provision.  Abusers see only their own need for power or gratification or money.  They are pirates.  They are users.  And they are evil.

If I was going to kill a villain, I wanted to kill that kind of villain.  But how could I show a villain this evil in a book for kids?

Read Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death, available now at Amazon for Kindles and Kindle apps or at Smashwords for all other e-readers, including Nook and Kobo!  You can try before you buy at my website.