Story breakthroughs and Serious Aside
Posted on Monday, August 9th, 2010Today, I had a great breakthrough in my demonic love story. I’ve been unhappy with character motivations for keeping the girl at the Lord’s manor house, when there’s no reason for it… a point which was again flung in my face when I realized that my magic system didn’t quite work like I had hoped it would. So, in addition to simplifying my magic system, I’ve decided that the main male demon is going to be an ambassador of his race to this lord, instead of using him as nothing more than a second character for the main character to fall in love with (which is always a bad idea, and wasn’t entirely true, regardless. He was simply much less important in the first half of the book). I’ve included for your perusal (so that you can see how I work) a copy of the changes and how that part of the story will change. I think I’ll be able to adapt the one chapter I’ve already written to reflect this easily enough with a second chapter and a few scattered scenes to cement the change. Unfortunately, it means that my rough draft will probably end up being about 125k words (counting magic system changes to the plot as well) instead of the 100k I was aiming for. While this means a lot of work during the editing stage, it will simply remind me that I will need the wordcraft to be really tight before I consider sending it out to agents. Oh, I’ve also decided that I need a completely different name for the race instead of “demon”… tell me, what do you think of Kissrie for the race name? Corny, Cool?
Original: Seirei is a demon who prefers to not use her birthright magic, and thus she is considered flawed among their race. Kii, a male of her race decides that he will marry her (since she is beautiful and kind) since he desires a woman he can protect over a woman who would be his equal. Before he can propose, Seirei saves a lording named Tenoe from an assassination attempt and is captured in turn by Tenoe’s guards when they arrive. Seirei is held captive and is then forced to stay with the lord because Tenoe wishes to study the connection between their two magics.
Correction: Seirei is a member of the Kissrie, a magically adept race similar to humans. She is a very weak member of the Kissrie in magical power and her family has very little political power due to their “diluted blood”. Kii, a childhood friend of Seirei’s and a member of a higher house is trained to be an ambassador to the humans and travels to the Lord Sumae’s manor with Seirei’s family who happened to be heading a similar direction. He decides that Seirei will be his wife and she cares for him as well, but is unsure if it’s love she’s feeling. However, a marriage to him would raise her families power immensely. They talk about making such a commitment, but decide nothing for certain. When they are only a few hours away from the capital Seirei walks Kii near to the road to the manor to say goodbye, agreeing to see him again after his work has been done. Unfortunately, on her way back to her family, Seirei is captured, having endeared herself to the Lord’s son by saving his life. The lord insists on a hostage to be kept to seal the pack and Tenoe the lording asks for it to be Seirei. Though the Kii tries to convince them that it is he as a trained “ambassador” that should be held hostage the Lords son demands and is granted his request that the hostage be Seirei. Kii demands that she be given the choice, and if she disagrees, then he will be the one to stay. The lord agrees and Seirei frustrates Kii by saying yes to the proposal, since she is running from the knowledge that Kii wants to marry her and she hasn’t decided how she feels about that yet.
As you can see, the second is much longer, much more in-depth and even has motivations that will deal quite well with the sub-plots. Since I’m not much of a plotter I find that I tend to start off with all of my ideas as a big mesh that sounds much better in my head than it looks written down on paper. Thus, my first drafts tend to be overly focused on the main plot, with sub plots being thrown in wherever I happen to find them and ignored until I start the editing process. Technically, the rough draft is done, but I’m still adding in pieces, re-arranging and playing. I haven’t written the ending yet, due mostly to me procrastinating. I know how the ending goes, but in the wilds of Nanowrimo, I had been led astray by my own sense of competitiveness (I came in with the second highest total in Calgary though!). In my desperate attempt to get words, I started following my original plot, which I had changed prior to November. The old plot didn’t work and therefore, nothing about the scene was working… yet, I kept adding words to it. Finally I realized what was wrong was that I was being a slave to a part of my outline that no longer fit. It will be great to get in there and change things around.
On a different subject, I went to visit the Forward Motion forum earlier this week and I found a post that I had made months ago, before I’d even put up a website. I mentioned that I tend to read blogs even more than I listen to podcasts. If you go to my links pages you’ll see all of the blogs I heartily endorse you check out, but the point I made in my post was that following people’s blogs tends to feel just a little bit like stalking must.
Often people will talk about things in their blog that are quite personal, and even if they aren’t we are still putting out private information about ourselves. People who have a daily blog will tell you all about what they are doing every day and we the reader will follow along behind them, at just the safe sort of distance used by stalkers who don’t want to get caught. It is a bit of a creepy way of looking at all of the social media programs actually. By far, the worst one that I’ve seen is twitter where people use apps to let others know where they are and how far away from home they are.
Sometimes it feels as if the internet has stolen our safety and given us a sense of anonymity in return, giving us power that we are missing in our own lives. While this fact does sound horrifying and like my story plots above, much worse that it needs to, we need to remember that we are actually the ones in control. It would also help to remember that the same anonymity lets us feel that it’s safe to watch people online with no fear of reprisal. Before we start placing blame, we would do well to look to ourselves first.
Tags: Blog, D & D, Dungeons & Dragons, editing, Kii, motivation, Nanowrimo, Novels, Psychology, re-writing, Seirei, Sociology, Stalker, Tenoe
Posted in Blogs by B.A. Matthews | 9 Comments »