Backstories. Details that make the story and the characters more likely by revealing bits that happened in their past or even before and tie in into the present. Something that makes the story more complex.
Something I feared for all those years before I gave writing a try – and even the first years. How can I, who has nothing but an idea, make a story complex enough to stand a chance?
I am back with another jumble of thoughts about something that is part of any violent story, not only limited to fantasy though it’s fantasy I read the most so my prevalent point of view will be for that genre.
Heroes and villains will both go through much and not everyone is lucky to emerge without at least a token of remembrance for the perils endured. And based on several factors, how the character and those around him perceive battle scars can vary.
A friend once said: “the larger an HDD is, the faster it gets filled”. I realized that I could say the same about my ‘to be read’ list – it can grow faster than I can reduce it by reading the books listed there.
At this point, the excel file with potential TBRs is 70 items long and most of them are in series, ranging in length usually between 3 and 6 books. If I average it at 4 and add to it some classics that I don’t bother to put there, it gets me somewhere to potentially 300+ books. That is without counting books that will continue existing series (as I don’t put those to that file). Even if some might not make it out of the TBR list, the choice is still quite large and I keep discovering new TBR candidates every now and then.
So, I’ll go into some factors I have for choosing a book to read as well as to factors about adding them to the TBR list.
It’s getting close to three-year-anniversary since I started writing. It brought me to think a bit about how it started and how it went and to see how I changed in that regard. Doubt is still pretty much constant companion yet it is more often accompanied by hope. I hope that during those three years, I learned something and that each draft is better than the previous one.
Now, where I see the changes?
So, I am back with another hike post. This one is something I’ll start on a bit of detour: back in May 2017 when the hiking club was putting together a plan for 2018 (with me as a guest to the 9 leaders), we lacked something for the ‘slot’ of 30.6. and a few days before, there was a video from Slovakian mountain resort where a group of bikers was startled by a bear on one of the trails. And I had the ‘genius’ idea to suggest to go there. Surprisingly, the suggestion was accepted.
So, that’s the backstory, now for the hike itself.
So, after a month, I’ve returned to the story started by The Path of Flames. It was faster read than the first one and I was given some answers that I felt were missing in the first book. Now, for the details (mostly spoiler-free as always).
This is something I’ll try to post possibly monthly, a look back at some of the mountains I visited and are, in some way, memorable to me. At this point, I have a list of almost 80 candidates but I am not sure how many will pass. These posts would be a mix of personal stories with photos and some ‘hard facts’. Maybe some interesting things, should I know about them.
I’ll begin this with ‘Lysá hora’, the highest peak of Czech ‘Moravskoslezské beskydy’ mountain range.
If there’s something that hiking helps me much with, it’s my health. The amount of hiking I did was growing progressively. In my late teens, I was at 10 hikes per year and total around 200km. These days, I am (depending on several factors) somewhere between 30-40 hikes per year and 700-1000km walked during those. And over the last 10 years, my health gradually improved. I’ll try to have a look back and share how much.
I think I’ll never be a planner when it comes to writing. When I was writing my May update, I was going through the first draft of #1 on a quick edit pass mostly aimed at some typos and obvious issues, as well as to just get the story back into my head and make notes about possible continuity issues between #1 and #2 so I could have a look at them when preparing the beta draft of #1.
Two weeks passed and so I am back with another hiking post. This time, I was going towards a place that is known more by the ski resort near the main peak but aside from that, it’s really calm place with quite a low amount of people there. As it tends to be, that’s mostly because it’s hard to reach.
Tomas - the wandering dreamer 
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