This is a thought that returned to me today: is using placeholders (mostly for names) when writing a blessing or a curse? Can it get out of hand or backfire?
When I started working on my fantasy story, even before writing, I knew that naming the characters will be probably the hardest part. I always had troubles with coming up with names, even for my game characters, especially in World of Warcraft, Diablo 3 or even The Sims…
Continue readingIt’s a bit over two years since I started working on my story. I hoped to have the first book done in summer 2018 and in a way, I am on track with that. Yet, there’s one big trouble: the intro as I call it, or prologue if I used real book terms.
The amount of information I need to put in the early part to set up the world is just too large for something like a prologue, if it had the size of one chapter. In that way, it feels too dense on information yet does not say enough. It’s something I suspected since the start and was not sure how to deal with it. Now that a friend who is one of my alpha testers pointed out this problem even more, I realized it’ll need serious revision. Truth that I tried to ignore, curse me…
At this point, I consider my initial plan for Summer 2018 release pretty much scrapped, no matter what approach I take. Once again, my working title ‘Project Eternity’ is becoming the harsh truth. So, what are my possibilities at this point?
So, it’s a bit over two years since I started working on my story, and well over five years since I went from “maybe one day” to “seriously thinking about it”. I still don’t feel ready to talk about it much, and I do here because of the partial internet anonymity. Even that took time.
Truth is, I am still afraid what people around me might think when they learn the truth, which is the reason that I am still quite picky about those who truly know what I am up to (including that it is me, and by that I mean knowing me at least somewhat). Being gamer and generally shy person who sticks to himself most of the time, I was often considered a bit strange. How worse could that be if those around me knew the truth?
More often than not, I listen to music while writing. The choices might be quite diverse at some point. In this post I’ll share some of my choices (generally speaking, not naming songs).
In the days after returning from my holiday (which I am describing day by day in my posts), I was back to writing after two weeks of break where I did not even touch it, though I was thinking about it. Even though I found myself having very little time to think about it when I was busy hiking, what time I had… well, I made it count really well.
After my return, I hit it hard. From Monday to Friday, I busted out 8 chapters at incredible 27700 words! Sometimes it went far too easy and I struggled to keep writing fast enough to not forget the details of my thoughts. But this writing rush brings some downsides to it…
This will be a crossover post about how I sometimes get inspiration for my story while walking through the hills. It might not be just the landscape, but anything. The weather could be a factor as well. Reading books can be good inspiration for duels or battles but for the atmosphere, just going out to the hills works better than anything else.
Nature is often magical. It’s good to have some inspiration just from walking around and being able to think, undisturbed. It’s even better when the landscape itself gives you ideas. Here are a few times it happened to me.
Continue readingA few days ago, I was reading a blog post about writing, and one of the points was to avoid distractions. Today, I was writing again and after being done, I decided to think about how much of that time was actually spent writing. I was not using stopwatch or seriously tracking it (as it would be another distraction and would slow me down even more) but as some guess it should work well.
So, my progress was one chapter. Okay, 90% of it, I’ll need to finish its ending when I think out the details. Anyway, it was around 3000 words and took me something around 4 hours. How much of it was actually spent writing?
There is a bit of time lost when I switch to music player to add something to the playlist (I’ll probably make a blog post about my choice of background music at some point). But the main point is alt-tabbing to internet browser. I rarely prepare any facts I might need in advance and so it often happens that when I need to check something on the internet.
That can be something as simple as spelling or meaning of a word (I verify that by reverse translation and synonyms), something I used several times to make sure I use a word correctly (this is mostly when using a work I’m unlikely to use in daly life).
Most of my time spent not writing while writing is spent tabbed out to wikipedia. There were times when I was checking the usual habitat of a plant or animal just to make sure it is not misplaced.
Today, my search included various articles from felines through rodents and even seagulls as I was writing a chapter where several characters explore tropical rainforest islands. Eventualy it brought me to look up bow fishing (first question I had: is it even possible?), ability of birds to eat and eventually catch fish as well as some searches related to volcanoes (which are present on the islands).
I guess that of the four-ish hours I spent maybe one hour looking up stuff. By the way, capybara meat is supposedly tasty. I chose bow fishing over hunting rodents anyway.
While details in this matter are not always needed in books, no hero would probably complete his journey without single coin in his/her pockets unless he would have a great deal of luck, contacts everywhere or just a bunch of questionable techniques to achieve anything.
While my thoughts in this regard were greatly inspired by games, I’ll start this chain of thoughts somewhere else: Harry Potter series, which had a few scenes featuring money: Harry’s first visit to Gringotts’ bank and seeing the stashes of gold, silver and bronze. Draco “buying” his place in quidditch team by his father gifting them Nimbus 2001 brooms. Or the moment where wizards arriving to watch quidditch world cup confuse the local landowners as they want to pay the rent for their tents with their wizarding gold coins instead of GBP or the 1000 galleon reward for winning triwizard tournament. That’s just a few.
Then there are classic mentions like endless gold pouches or just the fact that someone might get upset by losing some money while playing cards and cause a bar brawl. Pirates that tend to be out of gold just as soon as they find a place where they can get some rum.
The original plan was to use nine Pieces of Eight to bind Calypso, but when the first court met the Brethren were, to a one, skint broke. – Joshamee Gibbs, Pirates of the Caribbean: At world’s end
If things happen fast, currencies will probably not be something of an issue but in longer story arc, it could very well happen that a character (especially if he/she is driven out for any reason) will be facing the slowly drained purse in addition to any other hardship. Example could be Inheritance series where Roran is forced to pirate a ship because he (and the Carvahall refugees following him) could not pay the full journey; or the bounty on his head.
Now, full circle back to what I mentioned at first: gaming. Here and there, nostalgic people who enjoyed the hard days of World of Warcraft 1.x (not me, I started in 3.3.5) remember how even 50 gold meant something compared to days now when Blizzard implemented a huge spider mount that costs exactly 2 million gold to give the richest (in game sense) players some way to empty their pockets. The fractions below gold don’t matter any more. Same could be said about Diablo III where the lack of unit below gold causes massive inflation and after some time spent playing the game, any number lower than a million means almost nothing.
In regards to my own writing: a gladiator tournament happens in my story. By the very early phase (pre-first draft thoughts) I was working with placeholder prize money of 50000 gold (damn me for lack of specific currency name). Even in the first draft there was no mention of specific amount, only that the reward is a small fortune, especially for the main character who is on the verge of adulthood.
In that stage of pre-writing thoughts, the weapon he obtains some 10-15 years later was guesstimated to cost around 75000 because of the ingredients needed to forge the very special alloy. Another irony: while these ideas are some 10 years old, it was only a few months ago I had any specific ideas for what the ingredients will be and some weeks ago I finalized the list and still need to decide sources of some.
Two years ago, 21.7.2015 (at 9:17 CEST) I started the long journey to put my ideas for a fantasy story together. After a nudge from my fellow World of Warcraft player who told me the truth that there’s no reason to not try, I started writing a sample chapter. Now, two years later, first book is somewhere on transition between alpha and beta version and I decided to reflect a bit on what happened in those two years.
Two years of what I estimate to be much more. I did not give it working name “Project Eternity” for nothing.
Of course the number is not exact, but the sample I wrote had only a few of the characters that take part in the story. Some of those that appear in chapter 1 were not created before the moment I actually started writing the chapter (a story I’ll share later). The sample was from somewhere in later part of second book (hard to guess before I get there) and at this point it’s soon about to be dismantled as during writing book one and preparing story of book two I realised I’ll need to change timing of some events.
Anyway, in first book, there’s around forty to forty-five named characters with some more to appear later. And for some, I still lack a name I would be satisfied with even after several changes. It’s my biggest hold-up at this point.
Today was another of those days when I was writing a bit and something that I had a few times occurred to me again. It’s the moment when I am searching for the word to say something and somehow it comes to my mind even though I did not know I know the word. In reality, I did not even know such a word existed.
This happened to me maybe two or three times before, unfortunately I don’t remember what words they were and at this point I am not willing to scroll through 240000 words of text to find three of them. But I know what it was this time.
I was in the process of describing a frost elemental, which I decided that will look like a mixture of snow and ice, strangely mixed together. And then as I was thinking how to best say that, the word came to my mind.
Intermingled.
Wait, does such a word even exists? Seems that it does, because Word did not underline it red as a typo. Okay, step two, Google translate. Check, it seems that such a word really exists. Good.
In case of interest, here goes the elemental’s description as it is now in the very first pre-alpha version. Since the story is still in development, I removed character names from the excerpt.
[name removed] saw various elementals before. He saw earth elementals that looked like dried soil, flame elementals that looked like cooling magma and mistwalkers that looked like a bunch of mist taking on a specific shape. This frost elemental looked like irregular intermingled mixture of ice and snow. It had larger crystals of the same elemental ice he just picked up forming up the base of its limbs, the joints being made of what looked like tough, frozen snow. The torso looked like thin layer of the same ice encasing enormous snowball but [name removed] knew enough about elementals to know that inside this is the creature’s core, a piece of elemental ice with such power it would never melt on its own.
The elemental’s face looked like it was gently sculpted from a snowball and the creature even had something that could vaguely resemble a hair – thin strands of what resembled willow branches covered by thin layer of hoarfrost. Of course, in case of this elemental there was nothing covered, the ice just somehow kept that shape.
Note: mistwalker is what I call a specific kind of air elemental.
Tomas - the wandering dreamer 