Tag Archives: Writing

Two years on the journey

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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.

From six characters to forty

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.

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Intermingled

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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.