Mist and Shadows

After last week’s stirling efforts I had hoped this week would follow a similar course.

I was wrong.  While it wasn’t the worse week on record, it was still pretty poor.  I had two decent days, without being great, two mediocre days and three days of abject failure.

On the positive side, I have got a short story close to being completed, and, baring anything wierd, it should be done so in the next day or two.

Looking back over the last eight weeks, or fifty-six days, I have written around 63500 words.  A bit over 1K a day.  Less than I would have liked, but at least above the absolute minimum I had set.

So there I was last week thinking how well things were going and so I started this week full of hope and even got the fourth chapter done and then on into the fifth.

And then I ran into the wall.  For some reason chapter five really wasn’t working despite having the synopsis for the it there.  I just couldn’t seem to figure it out even after three days wrestling with it.

So rather than stall out trying to fight through it and loose all the recent progress that had been made, I felt it best to push around rather than through the wall.  So the plan is to skip chapter five for now and move on to other chapters, all of which have synopsis written for them, as well as trying to finish off one or two short stories that are half written.

Some of you may have stumbled upon a site called TV Tropes before. If you haven’t, it is well worth the look – but be warned, it is a trap. You venture in to look at just one thing and two hours later you still haven’t got around to reading it.

Tropes are devices and conventions that writers use that generally aren’t cliched but are commonly employed.  Despite the title, it is not just about TV, but covers a wide gamut of media – TV, movies, literature, comics, anime etc.

One of the tropes lists is Medieval Stasis, something I have mentioned before, but by different names.  My references to it have been the apparent stagnation of technology and history often plagues fantasy.

The opening paragraph of the entry reads;

So, you have a Heroic Fantasy with a long history, in order to account for the fact that the Sealed Evil In A Can has been forgotten. So, you fast forward about five thousand years (or merely place the Sealed Evil’s Back Story that far back), and reveal a world… exactly like the one you started in! Same technological level, same form of government, same culture — you wouldn’t even need to dress differently to fit in.

If one thing irks me more than most it is this.  History and cultures change.  it is something I try and work hard on in my stories and my world.  Nations rise and fall, as do people and cultures.  Technology advances.

Hopefully as I get more written this becomes apparent.  I have stories that span from the stone age right through to the age of sail and gunpowder.  The Maedari are the main culture of I write around and even they change.  There first appearance is as stone age hunter-gathers who migrate into lands occupied by early non-human bronze age cultures.  From there they become a kingdom during the bronze age before it is destroyed by a newly arrived culture, the Chelosians, towards the start of the iron age.  The survivors are either subsummed by the Chelosians or migrate to harsher lands where they fragment into many tribes or nations.  From there they languish as a minor, scarcely important people until, in time, they form a new union and the Maedari Commonwealth is formed.  The various tribes of the Maedari evolved in their own directions though between the fall of the Kingdom and the rise of the Commonwealth and have their own differences – in a way like Australians and New Zealanders share a common heritage but are different, or the Irish, Scots and Welsh – all Celtic but all different.

Anyhow, that is in a large part what my writing is about and I hope that my skills can in someway match the vision and dreams I have for my world.

Week seven kicked off in high gear with a 6000 word day, and while that pace couldn’t be sustained by the end of the week I had managed almost 18700 words, the best weeks output by a substantial margin.

All of that was done on Winter Wolves, rewriting the first three chapters and expending on the synopsis to commence chapter four. The first draft of Winter Wolves is now at around 18,600 words.

The plan now is to keep up that effort and to complete the rough draft as soon as possible so as to commence the polishing and spruiking and what not.

Thus far the first three chapters have introduced the major characters and most of the minor ones, and hopefully given them all personalities (though this will need to be worked on more when polishing). They have introduced a mystery – well more than one really. And it has also had a minor battle – little more than a skirmish, but enough to whet the appetite.

And now onwards with the story and the writing.