Now I just need to tie up all the loose ends, once I figure out what those are...

25,717 words.

I'm kind of lost on how to actually finish things off, so I figure it's time to write another blog post to figure that out. Lessee, so, what's everyone doing...

Adrien's funeral went along well enough (for everyone other than Antoine), and now he's good and buried.

Mindy has all the historical and cultural artifacts she needs at this point, and doesn't need to steal more things. Her deal with Plushenko is working out fine, and Bossdon is going to attack Plushenko on schedule. None of this has anything to do with the main story so...

Antoine has been recalled out of the city, and the elder mages have promoted Chance and Felicia to replace him. They are now busy doing paperwork related to that and aren't going to get back to the art project for a while, by which time they will have lost all momentum, because it wasn't their project in the first place, it was Adrien's and Antoine's, and they will neglect to get back to it and forget all about it.

Felicia might get around to visiting the Eenin Culture Center to look for the pearl, but not in a timely manner and she won't actually find it.

Need to mention that Rita Harwood gets promoted to journer. Possibly some other random character along with her, to replace Chance and Felicia.

Nathaniel has gotten what he wanted - to distract the mages away from looking at the Golden Flame.

The Eenin are happy again. No one is coming to steal their stuff after all, as far as they ever knew.

According to my original notes, Sue Ellen was supposed to have been freed from Antoine when he left, and been passed over to Mindy. That's actually a whole extra side story that I completely forgot about. Maybe I should figure out how to put that back in... Sue Ellen does come back up in Myan.

Maybe need a scene about Jacob returning to the university after he finds out Antoine has left.

I also need to rewrite the spirit cougars in Temple. They really aren't anything at all like the spirit wolves. The wolves come about when humans are bestowed a fire petal from the Golden Flame. There are no actual wolves in Aunlania - the spirit wolves got there because of Edward.

The spirit cougars, meanwhile, are all from actual cougars. Their views and outlooks on life are very different from human norms, and this is reflected in how they communicate (to Janis, it was mostly in riddles). I'm probably going to have to redo Iorli from the beginning.

I need to add something about the lemming basket back in Amulet I, assuming I hadn't already (I might've done that actually and just forgotten about it). And figure out what chunks of Amulet I v2 about Hidden Glory I can salvage, and where to add it in Amulet I v3 part 2.

Done with Nanowrimo 2016

50,208 words.

7,550 words for Amulet I.
42,623 words for Temple.
Discrepancies because the Nanowrimo validator counts more words than Scrivener.

So now I've set up James for a staged assassination by the Mudawi Three. I'm not sure at this point when I'll try to write the rest of it out. Maybe during Christmas break.

It's been a fun month. I think I'm getting better at this writing thing. Other than that, I don't have anything profound to say.

Working on Amulet I Part 3

48,457 words. I've started using the official validator to count my words for me, and it gets more words than Scrivener does. Somewhere I've gotten padded up by about 50 words.

Aliacorba's second ritual didn't turn out to be an actual official ritual. It turns out that the cougars were already bound to the pearl from a previous arrangement, and so when Aliacorba finds it, the cougars transferred over to him with it. Sentient cougars for basically the same reason as there were sentient wolves. I like the way that the scene turned out, but it didn't get me as many words as I was hoping. It was close to 4k by the time I was done.

So then I had to come up with another 5k words from something else. I reread what I'd written for James after he went back to Lagarnica. I liked the first two scenes. I also recalled that I need to put the Mudawi Three somewhere in Amulet I, so why not have them try to kill James for Lady Celena, who wants him dead so that her own son William will inherit House Duchene? Only, James runs into them first before they meet up with Lady Celena, and now he's going to talk them into helping him fake his death so he can run away again. Then he'll go back to his beloved Moraina, who will hopefully still remember him and want him back by then, and everyone will live happily ever after.

That's the plan, anyway. I'm about halfway through the conversation between James and the Mudawis. I think I can come up with 1500 more words for this by the end of tomorrow...

I think I'm done with Temple...

42,782 words at the moment. At this point, I've basically written everything that needs to be written from scratch for this. Everything else has already been written in a form that can be heavily revised. That leaves me 7200 words in the hole...

I've covered Chance's entire story. First he's in the top of the tower at the beginning, and then he reports what happened in Fianin to the king as the end of his arc.

I've covered Josephine's entire story. She was on the ground on the outside for the first half of the battle, and then she was following the wolves around inside the tower. The ending for her arc was when she picked up Jalai from Jacob and started walking off to Myan.

I've covered what Nathaniel's group was doing, including the bit part with Sarabelle. There's not much left to it other than to mention that Lady Valdren held up her end of the spell recast, and I can just stick that in somewhere without needing a separate scene. Maybe it could be something that Pedro and Sarabelle mention in the The End scene.

I've written basically Ashley's entire life story at this point. I haven't decided what happens to her after she finds out what she did to her sister by getting Felicia to steal the totem. There might be one more scene to her arc when I figure that out. The original idea was that she kills herself, but I'm not completely sold on it at the moment.

I've covered what Mindy did during the battle, and did rewrites for the scenes that introduced the mango drug, that I'm going to need to rewrite again. The rest of Mindy's arc was covered in the 2004 version. I tried to rewrite the hospital scene, but there didn't seem much point. It's already all there. It just needs to be revised for details. Later on I'll need to plug in more mentions of swamp mustard. Lord Malovek doesn't get any screentime at all, but he did make the bombs she was throwing...

I've covered all of Jacob's parts in the battle and talking to Brightspot and getting Jalai and etc. He doesn't really have an arc in this particular story, he was just useful as a POV.

All of Janis is already covered from 2004.

That leaves Thomas. In order to explain what his story was about, I pretty much need to finish writing Part 2 of Amulet I. So I guess I'm going to write 7200 words toward Amulet I now, starting from when he wakes up after the first ritual.

The main problem is that I didn't leave myself any notes about the first ritual. I have a completed scene for it, and it's great but it's from the POV of James, who didn't know fully what was going on during it. A lot happened in it, and I only remember the gist of what I had in mind. If there are any notes, it's probably in a Jer's Novel Writer file... still wish Jer had continued to work on it, it was great. Oh well. I guess I'll just have to wing it and hope for the best.

The reason I stopped before, I think, was because I didn't know what the second ritual was going to be like. Now I know it includes the pearl. And I have a few ideas of what the pearl was used for. But, still not sure where the cougars fit in. I guess I'll just write whatever comes to mind and see if any of it goes anywhere.

A bit stuck at the moment

37,316 words.

I wrote out Chance talking to the king. Other than that, my planned chronology seems to have dissolved into a pile of goo.

It turns out that there's no way Jacob could've talked to Brightspot, picked up Jalai, and gotten back down off the mountain with Jalai in time to talk to the king the day after the battle. Glavni is supposed to be a 3-day journey by land through thick forest, and even if he flew there, he couldn't fly back with Jalai, so he'd have to go overland. The earliest he could've talked to the king would be a week later. Thus: now the second round of reports to the king is a week later, and Jacob's entire report happened in the second round, not the first round. I'll have to revise that out later. Fortunately, a week later fits fine for Chance.

I also need to make Josephine's scenes more meaty. She is the only one of the Mudawi Three that hasn't taken on a permanent guard duty type job. By the end of Temple when she starts watching after Jalai, she will have one. This needs more character impact than it does now. Thinking about it mostly makes me wonder how to fit in a scene or two in an earlier book where the Mudawi Three actually do what they're there for (to assassinate people). Probably would make the most sense somewhere in Amulet I.

Then: well, the key Big Decision that Thomas needs to make about Janis would've had to have happened in the library immediately after that fight, and not later on back at his house like I was thinking this whole time. So now the big moment happens from Jacob's point of view, which kind of loses a lot in translation, because Jacob doesn't know any of the context for what it was about.

So I have to write that part of the scene again from Thomas's point of view, and give it a good reason to exist other than to show just that part. It also changes what the cougars would've done as the battle was coming to an end. If the spell was broken in the library, the cougars would've noticed.

I also need to write the second ritual that Aliacorba did at the end of Amulet I, for the spell that Thomas broke in the library. Otherwise it's not going to come out right when I try to write about him breaking it. This is probably going to be what I write next. Looking back at my Amulet I draft pieces, I'm pretty sure that somewhere in there I wrote the first ritual all the way through. I hope I did. For the purposes of Temple, probably I'll have to start with a summary of it.

Before I can do that, I need to work out in my head what the second ritual entailed and how the cougars got involved in it in the first place. So far, all I've figured out is that I'm not sure if there even needs to be cougars in the story...

I still haven't written the scene where Ashley tells the Eenin where Janis was, either. Just not sure yet how to do it.

And then Thomas still needs to report to the king too, in the second round probably. He can just meet up with Jacob there.

It's Prep Time for Nanowrimo 2016

I'm kicking around several ideas, but so far leaning in favor of working on Fortress Launne some more. It's the only thing I've tried during a Nanowrimo where I actually get more than 50k words, and it's been long enough since the last time I looked (Nanowrimo 2014, basically). Reading back over the blog posts from Nanowrimo 2014, I think what would make the most sense is to rewrite Temple.

It also occurred to me that what Aliacorba gave to Iorli in exchange for the protection of the spirit cougars on his family line was the pearl. I was reading a post where I was pondering this out loud and the thought just popped up: "the pearl of course." Of course. Hmm.

Other options: well, I could more-or-less fanfic Numenera. In the first game of it I was in, I had a character named Lanash Jahat. Lanash didn't like the less than stellar morality of the rest of the group, and so I wanted to have him wander off while I replaced him with a different character that was more suitable (a mercenary type who wouldn't care how money was earned, as long as he got his share). The GM didn't agree, and decided on a complicated way to throw out the whole rest of the game in favor of everyone following Lanash around when he wandered off. He neglected to mention he was going to do this to the rest of the players, however, and it didn't go over well, and although everyone else gamely tried to follow along, all of the spark died, and the game ended soon after.

Anyway, so I had thoughts for what Lanash was going to do after he left the rest of the group - basically pursue his original goals from his backstory. So I could write a whole adventure focused around that. Maybe put in some other characters. I also had other character ideas before the game, including one for a lattimor, that might work as another focus for a story.

I also have a Numenera game running on rpol. Pretty sure I could come up with stories out of that, too. Especially since Brent mentioned that he was going to write backstory for his character in it. So we'd be working on very similar things and presumably our brainwaves would sync up better during write-ins...

I guess I have almost a month to decide. I'm starting early because Alcar and Kelli have both started talking about it and seem stoked. Kelli and I might've also convinced Regina to give it a try. Guess we'll see if that pans out.

A few brainstorm notes

So of course I started having ideas about how to fix the second part of Amulet I after I went to bed, after Nanowrimo was over...

1. The Duchenes move in.
2. Moraina sets up her hut at the edge of the encampment, by the river, because she doesn't want to live in the fort.
3. Moraina helps out the spearhunter that fell into the ravine right before a hurricane.
4. The leader of the Eenin of Branitel visit Moraina and they become friends.
5. The Eenin ask Moraina what the story is with the Duchenes. Moraina tells them.
6. The Eenin help Edward because they like Moraina, and because she'd helped them out with their spearhunter.

That would make things a ton simpler than trying to come up with whole new complicated things for the entire universe to do. :p And what's even better, I've already written #1-4. I don't know why I didn't want to make Moraina a more central part of the story before, but really, why wouldn't she be? The Eenin are matriarchal, of course they'd want to talk to her over talking to the Duchenes, plus she's descended from Drunin, and they can compare notes about their life experiences as nin people. It'll also make the Duchenes super uncomfortable to have to go through her to talk to the Eenin, which can get nicely dramatic. :)

General updates

I'm at 31,032 words near the bottom of the 21st. I'm a bit behind, but hopefully will manage to catch up over the weekend, assuming I can come up with things to write about. I'm kind of stalled out on just about everything at this point.

Amulet I - I caved and wrote down the entire backstory for the Demon part of the storyline, beginning with when Allen's mage circle summoned him in the first place, and stopping when they were in Aunlania. Amazingly, I'd never written any of this down anywhere before, other than bits and pieces in Light's Spiral into Blackness (an oWoD Dark Ages game I ran on RPoL). That got me 610 words. I suppose I should continue it in backstory mode to explain what the Sundering is, since at this point I have no idea how to tell that part of the story. This is what first drafts are for for most people, aren't they? To ramble on endlessly about backstory and info dump until I figure out what the info actually is?

As for James, I get the impression that the next scene to write is going to be set far in the future from the first scene, and it'll involve Charles coming home, and I won't know what goes into it until after I find out what happens with Charles and Felna.

Triangle II - well, I got past the part where Rebecca tries to eat Janis. There are now about 2600 words to a set of scenes that don't seem to have any purpose. And now I'm back to where I was before, with no idea where to go next.

Amulet II - I opened it and looked. I think what I'm going to end up doing is keep the main plotline about the Glorian artwork, the university vs. Mindy's farm, etc. and dump most of the other bits about land disputes. The land dispute parts were boring to write the first time, and as they say, the readers always can tell when the author is bored, so I might as well just dump it.

That means heavy revision moreso than adding new words. I'm not even sure how I'd continue from where I left off - which was, of course, why I probably stopped in the first place.

Temple - I suspect that I'm going to have to start working on this over the weekend. I need 9000 new words by the end. Probably won't make it, but it works better to aim high.

Myan - well, I have about 3000 words for the zombies demolishing Myan, then going to Fortress Launne, and attacking Lady Valdren's haven and the university. I stopped when I got the parts where I have to figure out who wins and who's going to be where to oppose them.

Passed 25k Today

Well, the theme of this whole Nanowrimo seems to be to do lots and lots of beginnings, and then stall out when I get to the part where plot needs to appear, and then move on to something else instead of trying to push through. So far I've done:

Amulet I - I wrote about 2200 words of James going back to the Duchene estate in Lagarnica, and meeting his current wife and new brother William. I'm not really sure where to go from there at this point. The new wife wants to kill James off so that William will inherit the estate. But I'm not sure if I'm all that excited about that storyline, not enough to actually write it.

Triangle I - I haven't done anything with this since the first day. 2200 words about Frank getting installed into his new body. It'll get broken up into individual scenes and put into appropriate places in the rest of the story later.

Triangle II - I have the most words on this one so far. 17.5k following what happens to Thomas in Jacob's house, getting the cure done, and then they and Josephine went off to Wild-hunt foodbeasts under the full moon. Meanwhile, Janis has a bunch more conversations with her grandmother. It stalled out where Janis was headed to talk to the city Eenin. She ran into Rebecca, who wants to eat her. Unfortunately, I'm not actually sure how exactly the protection on Janis works, because, once again, I need to figure out what the heck Aliacorba and Iorli agreed to, and it's stuck until I do. It has occurred to me, though, that Aliacorba would've had to give Iorli something in exchange during the pact, and I don't really know what that could be.

Amulet II - so far I haven't even opened this one. It's the farthest from my mind at the moment.

Temple - nothing on this one yet either. I'm assuming that this is going to be a huge project, and might be procrastinating starting on it until I've run out of all other, smaller things in the series to work on. This is probably going to be soon though, if I continue to be stuck on all the stuff I've already worked on.

Birthright - this was where I focused today. I wrote 3300 words covering what happens after they open the magic box. They ended up on the plain with the lamp post and met Arthur Glorian, and had a lot to say to each other. Then I tried to write about what happened after that scene, and I'm not actually sure what needs to happen next, without doing a lot of rereading of past material.

Myan - 1100 words so far. I started writing the attack on Myan from one of the zombies' point of view. They went through the center of the city, and then to Fortress Launne, and now they're about to attack the anchorpoints of Nathaniel's spell. The zombie that I'm following is headed over to the old art museum. Since zombies don't do a whole lot of thinking, or observing, of basically anything, I can almost freewrite what happens. Basically I'm just trying to get an idea of what actually happens, and I'll probably have to revise most of it later when I redo it from the point of view of actual characters. Once I figure out which characters that'll be.

Just a short update

I've done basically nothing since the last post. Originally I thought I'd spend some time working on it over Labor Day Weekend (going on right now), but then the apartment complex said they wanted to raise my rent by $56, and that kind of threw me out of writing mode. I've lined up a new place to move into in a couple months though. And I need to start packing.

Things that have occurred to me however:
For Amulet I Part III, what needs to happen is wrap-up for both James and Charles. So it won't just be James going back to Lagarnica. It will also be the other end of what happens with Charles and Felna, during the Sundering. What will that be exactly? Well, it so happens that I also need to put in a battle between Nathaniel and the Demon somewhere, scheduled to happen less than a decade after the events of Amulet I. So now I'm entertaining the notion of somehow having both of these events happen at the same time. And it would also explain how Nathaniel knows about the Duchenes during the court scene in Triangle II if he has met Charles.

Meanwhile, Rumen is tugging for my attention again. I'm now in the middle of ruminating about the part where he carries Jenya to her people. Might do another attempt at writing that soon.

Second Draft: The Second Drafting ...

So far my second draft process for Fortress Launne seems to be:
1. Assemble all the drafts into one big file.
2. Skim them while compiling them into the one big file, but don't edit anything.
3. Make a duplicate copy of each draft to actually work on.
4. Do detailed rereads of each one. Make an outline of what the story looks like it's supposed to be.
5. Iterate. Rewrite the older stuff, write new stuff to fill all the holes.

I haven't done #4 for Amulet II or Myan yet, but it's certainly been a helpful exercise for the others.

The Flattening of a Temple

This was the one I wrote first (2004), and it has by far the most setting holes. It was also highly melodramatic - I can definitely tell that my writing skills improved as the years went by. The ones from 2007 forward are very readable as-is. Temple on the other hand, I think I'm basically going to have to rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

I'm probably going to keep the original structure idea, sort of. Start the story with the epic battle scene. Then have the king start an investigation into why that happened. Once the background is laid out, go back to the battle and cover all the parts that the king isn't going to find out about. End with Pedro. Of all the parts of the original draft, I really like the last few sentences with Pedro and Sarabelle.

The outline I made has pointed out a number of important holes in the story, too. Notably with Felicia. By the time I figure out how to fix that, I'm hoping it will also help with figuring out Antoine and the rest of the mages.

Other than that... well, I tried to reread my notes from all the tinkering I did between 2004 and 2006 or so. But I'm probably going to ignore most of it. It was a useful exercise for something, I'm sure, and all part of the process.

Amulet II

It basically has occurred to me that Triangle I -->Amulet II --> Temple is a story arc about the Reiter House. The tower gets built in Triangle I and demolished in Temple. So this one will likely make more sense from Antoine's point of view when I figure out what his point of view was in Triangle I - and also what Felicia's goals were in Temple.

Triangle II

The outline for this one turned out to be straightforward, much to my surprise. The first half is going to draw heavily on the Janis draft of 2006, where I basically wrote everything Janis is going to do and why, but didn't have the scenes in the right order, or the right setting elements pinned down yet. Then in the middle will be the court scene from Taint. And then there's a whole other half I haven't written yet, which will be from Jacob's point of view.

In general, the structure reminds me of Amulet I because it's in three parts (sort of). Only, the middle part with the king's court is actually quite short - only about 3 chapters or so. Whereas Aunlania is the longest part of Amulet I (so far, anyway). Also: the Janis part of the story, which will be around 20k words long, just like the Edward part of Amulet I ... can in fact actually be a completely complete story with all loose ends wrapped up and etc ... just like Edward's story would be if Lucien's spell actually worked.

I still find it kind of amusing that I had no idea that there was going to be a single coherent book in this part of the timeline until after I'd finished Nano 2006. Of course, on the other hand. I have a sneaking suspicion that what I'm writing isn't actually 7 novels. It's more like 15-20 novelettes, where each segment is 20k words long....

Amulet I

The broad outline for this one is relatively straightforward ... probably. I sort of plotted out a sensible order of useable scenes from the 2006 and 2007 attempts. And then there's huge new blanks to fill in again for what happens after I run out of outline, that explains why the Duchenes and the Eenin are talking to each other.

I don't know why I have so much trouble with this one. I'm starting to have doubts about whether the Duchenes are even supposed to be in the Fortress Launne series, since, as noted, the Edward part of the story could be its own completely independent story. Plus the random scene about Charles and a tree and a prophecy and etc. I kind of wish I'd gone with it now, just to see where it went, because the only other time a scene like that randomly appeared (Thomas and Arrun fleeing Edward in Amulet I 2005), it was because I was doing the whole rest of the story wrong.

The Fall of Myan

So far I've reread the first draft and reread my notes from this blog. The rough outline I'd figured on before is probably what it'll end up being - where it starts out by following Suunja, then he eventually runs into Martha, whereupon it then goes over Martha's storyline about Endron Oil, and then moves Suunja and Martha forward together until they run into the zombie storyline. Then it would cut back to the Rouge Rogues. Something like that.

Eventually I run out of both outline and draft, though. I haven't written what happens after the zombies start their attack. I stalled out on what specifically the attack strategy was. At some point I'm still going to have to figure that stuff out.

Birthright

This one also has a three-part structure. It starts with scenes of Janis and Felicia at the Culture Center, and ends with Jalai in Mindy's house (along with others). The whole middle is a mobster story where they fight over possession of the magic box. I don't think I should intersperse anything in between - better to just let the readers immerse in that one for the whole go. I have a fairly detailed outline for the mobsters. The biggest problem is that it needs some kind of satisfying ending, where everything gets resolved to the mobsters' satisfaction. I can't just suddenly take the box away from them and leave them all hanging.

Triangle I

A lot of this one is ready to go as-is. The biggest problem is a complete lack of motivation for Antoine. I need to give him either a really good reason to try to kill Frank, or, he was trying to do something else and poisoned Frank by accident. Either way, there needs to be more to the character than what I have at the moment. And have it somehow also be related to everything else the mages do in the other books.

I guess that's it for where things currently stand.

Edward revisited

I finally opened up all my drafts of Amulet I again, and reread the first part of Edward. That was the opening 20k words where Edward first became tainted, up to the point where they left for Aunlania. It's actually quite good. I was originally thinking to change the motivations around a bit, have Edward have a more direct role in his own demise - but I like what's there, where he was really just a pawn in a plot to hurt Lucien. So I'm probably not going to change around much at all. The amulets that I was going to work in will still be worked in, but won't be as central as I was originally thinking.

So, brief outline of what I have in mind now:
1. Mario Romero wants to usurp Lucien's abyssal throne.
2. The maiden Elmara, a shallow flighty kind of girl, has Edward's attention, and she wants a particular style of amulet she saw on someone else.
3. Edward makes a deal with Halkur Tan to get some. It involves Halkur Tan going on a perilous journey to another realm. Halkur Tan comes back with several, but notices that one of them would make the journey a lot safer for him next time (he goes there a lot), and wants to keep it. Edward doesn't want to give it to him, because it's Elmara's favorite color. Halkur Tan gets mad at how ungrateful Edward is, and wants to teach him a lesson - but also has enough sense to know he can't, because there would be dire consequences from Lucien Duchene.
4. By the time Edward has the amulets and presents them to Elmara, she has already lost interest and found something else to want instead. Something that Master Wormon had, which is why she was paying more attention to him than Edward during the masquerade ball.
5. Mario Romero observes all this from a distance (as a noble himself, he can attend all the same balls), and then overhears Halkur Tan griping about it to all his friends in a local bar. Mario encourages Halkur Tan to go ahead and do Edward in anyway, saying that he would back up the Wilds Tainted when Lucien responded. Which was of course a lie; Mario just wants the heir eliminated, then a fight between Lucien and the Wilds Tainted to deplete Lucien's might, and then he would take out Lucien in the abyssal realm. The amulets incident was just the opportunity he needed to talk the Wilds Tainted into angering Lucien.
6. So Halkur Tan catches up with Edward in a dark alley and taints him.

There's a bunch of minor things to tweak in what I have, mainly which parts Edward already knows, and there needs to be some conversations referencing the amulets. But on the whole, it's pretty solid already.

It's entirely possible to scale up Mario's motivations more in prequel books, flesh out a personal vendetta against Lucien in particular, but for the purposes of Amulet I I'm just going to keep it simple - a usurpation of a throne.

Suddenly, during a long roadtrip, it all became clear

So I figured out what the pact was between Aliacorba and the spirit cougars. And I didn't end up having to do the writing exercise I thought I'd need. Basically, I went back to the original version of the storyliine and played it forward, comparing with the non-WoD version as I went. I can't recall the exact thought path anymore, but the answer fell right out. Aliacorba didn't want any of his descendants to suffer his fate. Which is so obvious and makes so much sense.

After the ritual, when Edward was freed to return to the Great Mother, the Wild taint energy had released as a spirit wolf, and the dark abyssal taint had transformed James, Aliacorba knew he was dead. He'd severed his own link to the Great Mother to give it to Edward, but without realizing the full implications of stepping outside the cycle as Tainted himself. Which was that he lost the ability to see the flow of life force energy and the connection to the spirit realms. When his own remaining energy was gone (because he could no longer generate it, since he was no longer alive), everything that made him who he was would be gone.

It was a painful destruction, and he knew that his own descendants, who were also descendants of the spirit cougar clan, would suffer the same way if it happened to them. So with some of his remaining energy he enacted a ritual with the spirit cougars to never let any of his line fall to the same fate. The only one who could break the pact was himself, using his own tainted energy.

He would have walked into the morning sun after his official death, but members of his family convinced him to stay around.

And then, a few hundred years later, he had to break the pact and destroy all that Janis was in order to save her life. The reasoning went, she had the right to take her own life if she would have preferred that he let her die instead. That was part of their culture's way. (Of course she wouldn't and didn't.)

That big piece was what I needed before I could continue working on Amulet I, finish Temple, and figure out how to proceed with Birthright.

Thoughts about Amulet I

Now that i've just reread all the trials and tribulations involved in writing three drafts of Amulet I, I've had some more ideas about how to proceed.

1. It might actually be possible to adapt the original D2 amulet story to the beginning of Edward. That is, instead of having the war be Lucien's, maybe Edward brought it on himself - by sending a friend to buy magical amulets from someplace that he couldn't go himself (such as the druidic peoples), then refusing to give a particular amulet as a gift. Friend becomes mad, sabotages him elsewhere (for example at a ball where he was trying to attract the attention of a lady), they have a fallling out that leads to him becoming kidnapped and etc.

2. It's probably possible to use all of the good parts of both 2nd and 3rd drafts, if I revise the starting premise for Part II yet again.

The Duchenes arrive and set up in the old abandoned fort. First few scenes show them settling in and getting the basic history of the place from the locals already there. Edward is seriously ill, and their main goal is to find a way to make him well. The locals talk about the native shamans. They go actively seek out the native folk because they're desperate.

That would have the native folk come visit the fort, which would use the parts from Draft 2. Then, later on, they're still going to have to go to the Hall of Trees, so there will be scenes in the villages too (Draft 3).

Possibly Moraina has a larger role in all this, since she's most likely to be able to relate to the natives, given her background (descended from the druids of the old land).

3. In Draft 3, there was a part where Edward basically gets hurt irreparably. This was caused by the native folk not understanding his condition. Well, I'd like to ditch that. Instead, there are missionaries that periodically go into the forests to try to convert the natives (or convince them to abandon their lands, or spy on them). They generally are never seen again. Well, one group of missionaries stop to try and "help" Edward - only it backfires.

So with that in mind, I'll do a Draft #4. But not for Nanowrimo. It'll be more of a massive revise rather than new.

A Post!

Been a while since I've checked in.

I stopped working on Myan basically after I finished writing the previous blog post. Ironically it's probably the one that I have the best clue about how to finish - but my mind has wandered off to other projects.

At the moment I'm back on Nanowrimo 2007 - Edward. Some brainstorming rose up over Christmas break, and then I reread what I already had, and now I'm trying to figure out how best to use the brainstorm ideas. Basically, the ritual I'd written before - plus the scene immediately before it - are getting crossed out. They'll be useful for prose fodder later, but I'm paring back to the point where Charles realizes that Edward is dead, and moving forward from there.

So, what's next? James needs to get Charles back together again, and then they need to go talk to Negituka and Aliacorba about designing a ritual. Those scenes will cannibalize the first draft discussion I already have. Then I write the updated version of the ritual. If all goes according to plan, I'll know how to proceed after it's over, too.

Another online community I'm in, called the UCF (stands for any number of things depending on who you ask and when you ask it, but "Us Cool Folks" is a good stand-in), has plans for a February writing marathon similar to Nanowrimo. That's when I'll probably doing the bulk of the above-mentioned writing.

All in all, I'm feeling better about writing as a whole these days. In the Fortress Launne series, there are now: Edward (2007), Amulet II (2005), Temple (2004), and Myan (2008). (In 2006 I wrote stuff, but nothing coherent, apparently. o.O) The worldbuilding around all of these is starting to fall into place. There's a lot of work to do, but at the moment it doesn't feel overwhelming. I think I can I think I can. :)

The Rumen stories are on the backburner at the moment. I worked out a bit of backstory for one of the other protags in The Hand over Christmas break too, but it's staying in rumination mode for the duration.

Things I'm allegedly working on

In no particular order:

1. Edward. Need to move forward with what happens after the ritual. Either that or rewrite the ritual from Charles' point of view.

2. The Emerald Sword story from last September. I'm five chapters into it. It's on the backburner at the moment, with some inspiration going into it from the (currently defunct) Dragon Cave game.

3. Vengeance. I started chapter 3, where Craig is standing in Hernando's main audience chamber, meeting the MOC for the first time. I sort of faltered to a stop when I realized that I don't understand Hernando's motives clearly enough - namely, why don't they just kill Craig off and be done with it? (And perhaps more important, do I actually need to have a motive worked out in advance or not?)

4. Tragedy of the Hand. This is the one I haven't started yet, just have lots of notes drawn up. It's inspired by the Within Temptation song. If my current level of procrastination keeps up, maybe I'll just do it for Labor Day novel next September...

5. Stranger on a Bus. My 2005 Labor Day novel. Ten chapters done, two or three left to do. I've been stalled a bit because I have to come up with some kind of coherent wrap-up ending, instead of just continuing to make stuff up off the top of my head ad infinitum.

6. At this point I haven't the foggiest idea what my 2008 Nanowrimo is going to be about. I might take another stab at Birthright. I tried that last November but then got very focused on Edward, and never really got into Birthright at all.

More on Edward

Yesterday I wrote around 500 more words and got through the rest of the ritual. It took a while to figure out exactly how it needed to go. Basically the part I was missing was that it had to go wrong - and that regardless of how the shamans were planning for it to go, it wasn't going to happen that way.

Now I'm at another pause point, where I'm wondering whether I'll need to write the same ritual again from another character's POV, or if I should continue forward even though not as much info went into the ritual scene as I was hoping.

No new work on Vengeance either. They've reached Hernando, and I'm still ruminating on how to set up the scene.

More progress on Edward

Huh. 54,185 words.

Again I sat down and felt an urge to write something, even though I didn't really know what to write. So I just started. A scene came to mind, and I wrote it down. A figure moved in it, so I wrote down what he was doing. And now he's doing the ritual, all the important people in it are there... I'm not sure how exactly it's all going to go, but it doesn't seem to matter, because they're doing it on their own and I'm just watching.

Hmm. And now I'm done, and I have 873 more words. They got the shadows out of Edward and into James.

There's something not quite right about the shadows taking over James. There's nothing wrong with any of the rest that I just wrote. Just the part where the shadows are actually going in, something's not quite right there. James is objecting too much, like it's not supposed to happen that way. My subconscious is saying that we're going back to rumination time to figure out what happens next. So I guess that's what I'm doing.

Continuing on toward the end of the story

Well, it's not Nanowrimo anymore, but I'm still working on the story. I'm basically just one big scene from the end, though it may turn into several more scenes of aftermath. They're now at the point of the big climactic ritual that I've been building toward since they set foot in Aunlania.

And I'm now at 53,312 words. Tonight I finished the scene I'd started last Thursday; basically I got distracted by a bout of temporary insanity completely unrelated to writing fiction, but I think I'm getting past that now. So the rest of that scene netted me 1200 words. Then I went back and changed the ending of another scene, adding another 300 or so, making it around 1500 new words for the evening.

Overall, even though my wordcount hasn't been as high as the past couple years, it was a good Nanowrimo. I have a story that is almost all "right" - and the stuff that needs fixing is relatively minor. This is much different from my previous two attempts. The very first version only barely got past 20k words, and that was already stretching things. It just felt wrong the entire time I was doing it. The second version got to nearly 54k words, and more of it felt right than wrong, which is how I got that far - but eventually the total weight of major things wrong dragged it to a stop.

Which means that I basically followed the same process as I do for writing supershort stories in the form of roleplay posts. I write a first draft, then rearrange it into a second draft, then tweak the second draft to death. Then I dump the whole thing and write a third draft from a completely different starting point than the first two, using material from the second draft as content fodder. This can take anywhere from four hours to a week.

Apparently when it's a novel, it's the same process, but it takes three years. I'm discarding a total of 74,296 past words, though I'll probably go back and cannibalize chunks of the second draft later on when I flesh out some of the character bits that aren't directly relevant to the main plotline. There were some really nice scenes that I'm hoping to use somehow.

This year the story is still dragging me along. I didn't think I was going to get back to it, but then I sat down and my brain demanded that I start writing. So I did, and I'm glad I did. :)

Passed 50K

Today I passed 50k. Twice.

The first time was the standard sort of passing, where I input everything I had into the validator and voila! purple bar!

Then I went back and deleted my pile of discard words. In every WIP, I keep a "Volume 0" where I dump all the stuff I wrote, decided I disliked, and replaced with complete rewrites. I ended up with around 1500 discarded words for Edward. So I deleted and validated again to see how many words I had to replace to make it past 50k. It turned out to only be around 700 or so, so I did that and passed it again.

Now I'm at 51,750 words (including the discards). The story isn't done yet, though it might be somewhat close, so I'm going to press on with the remaining time and see how far I can get by Friday night. I'm not so much moving forward as I am backfilling some scenes that were missing. There's at least one more of those to do - an important conversation between Charles and James. After that I should be all set for the climax ritual that changes everything and everyone.

In a broader sense, this story seems to be a three-parter. The first 20k were focused on Edward. This second 30-35k seems to be focused mainly on Charles. After that there ought to be another (at least) 10k that focuses on James. Whether I'll actually write the part about James anytime soon is still debatable, as I've got basically nothing at all in mind for what happens to him after he goes back to Lagarnica. I might not be able to until after I finish the Emerald Sword story, because that's what will set up how Lucien Duchene (their father) got to be the way he is by the beginning of Edward.

And of course the other fork is what happens to Edward and Charles, which hopefully will explain where Fortress Launne came from. At least, that's what the story was supposed to be for originally. I hope it still ends up that way. We'll see. ;)