Mid-Day 21 and an Epiphany

Well, for most of the past year I've been bugged by the fact that my original plotline for Amulet I is unworkable, even though the story behind it sounds like it should be reasonably good. But when I went to try to write it for last year's Nanowrimo, all of the characters rebelled against carrying it out.

The basic gist was that Iorli the spirit cougar (Aliacorba's uncle) and Edward the Tainted get into a fight over a magic amulet from Hidden Glory, who is a chaos mage that lives in a faraway spirit realm. They try to kill each other, and Edward taints Aliacorba out of spite. Aliacorba then kills Edward because he hated what was done to him. All of this was based on a fight over a Diablo 2 amulet between two friends on battlenet, which caused them to stop speaking to each other and eventually caused both of them to leave the community. I borrowed that sequence of real-life events when I needed to come up with a backstory for Aliacorba for a roleplaying game in 2002.

So now, instead of trying to follow that outline at all, for this year's Nanowrimo I've been doing something completely different, with almost a complete change in cast among the MCs. The only one that's still the same is Aliacorba. Iorli is completely gone, Edward is a completely different character than what I'd originally envisioned when I made Aliacorba, and now there's two other major characters that didn't show up until much more recently.

Ahlosarka, Aliacorba's brother who is a warchief, showed up as a minor character in last year's attempt and immediately told me that he was a major character and that everything I had him do in last year's attempt was wrong. Especially his early death.

Charles, Edward's brother, got mentioned in last year's attempt after his supposed death, which while he wasn't actually alive and able to tell me, he somehow conveyed that he shouldn't have died that way either. He demanded that he had a much bigger part than I'd been planning for.

I had two other characters from last year that sort of showed up out of nowhere and decided to stay. Arrun is also in it as a minor character this year, and I'm wondering if James Duchene is going to make an appearance this year or not - he hasn't shown any signs of wanting to join in yet.

Meanwhile there were those amulets that I was stressing about this whole time, wondering how exactly they were going to fit in, to the point of thinking I should just cut out all the parts about them later on. The stuff about Hidden Glory just didn't seem like it was going to fit in the same story - and in some ways that's still true, because there's a lot more story behind Hidden Glory than what gets included in Amulet I. None of which actually belongs in this same book. (At least not so far ... dun dun DUN...)

So last year I managed to drag it out to about 20k words before the characters made me drop it. This year, it's up to about 26k now, all of the characters are cooperating (insofar as they don't stand up and demand that I not write what I'm writing), and it's turned out to be a story of Edward moreso than Aliacorba thus far. At least, that's the character that most intrigues my beta reader, and I'm inclined to agree.

In order for me to make it to 100k, I need to write 6k words per day for each remaining day. I only managed about 3400 yesterday. I got stuck when I was trying to write a scene between Ahlosarka and Charles. Someone in the rpol chat channel was watching a tv show about explosions yesterday - e.g. things not to put in the microwave together, what happens if you combine lithium with water, etc. - and so, since I had nothing better to do, I made something explode in the story. It was a grain silo that had previously been set on fire. Compressed flour will explode if it's heated up enough. Made perfect sense. My characters went out to look at it, and I knew I wanted to do something more interesting than "oh, a random grain silo exploded because it was on fire" but I didn't know what. As I was headed off for bed, Hidden Glory started trying to say something about being involved.

And right after I was settled in under the covers, it all suddenly clicked together. It was like ... FOOM! O.O

Hidden Glory leaves an amulet at the ruins of the silo. Ahlosarka finds it and recognizes the significance. Ahlosarka thinks it belongs to him because he found it. Charles thinks it's his because it's his silo. They get into a fight about it, which doesn't bode well for their brand new alliance, and things go on from there...

And it fits so perfectly. Ahlosarka instead of Iorli as the equivalent of LittleMinions, with the same personality and general outlook on life. Charles instead of Edward as the equivalent of Esquared, same. I did not plan it this way at all. And they're fighting over an amulet under the same basic circumstances as LittleMinions and Esquared did (except turned sideways, inverted, shoved through a tunnel, etc.), in a way that's a lot more realistic than what I had before. With the right kinds of firepower to back themselves up and everything.

So what do we have now?

A plot that is based on the D2 amulet fight like I'd wanted, in a way that makes so much perfect sense it's still astounding to me. Amulets in a story with the title of Amulet I. And thinking over the scene just before the current one, where Aliacorba and Edward have a lengthy heart-to-heart, I can even sort of vaguely see that Edward will eventually taint Aliacorba by the end of the story - which was the main goal of this whole endeavor. I don't know whether Aliacorba will actually kill Edward for it or not, but that's not as important as the fact of his tainting.

Needless to say, this means Janis is on hold until I figure out what actually happens to Aliacorba. But I knew that already, and she's still just going around in circles at this point anyway.

Wordcounts are now:
Janis - 22,075 words
Amulet I - 26,071 words
Total - 48,146 words