Mist and Shadows

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.

After doing a little calculation I have realised that since commencing this website I have written some one hundred thousand words. In other words the length of a full novel.

Of course, given how scattered a lot of that writing has been, a full novel has yet to be completed.

Hopefully the next 100K of words are both written faster and more focused so that by the time they are done that novel may at least be finished, or at least the first unpolished draft of it is.

Another week, another update.

Still slowly improving the output, this week breaking the 8K mark. next week hopefully will be back over 10K for the week.

Of that around 5K was on an untitled short story which is around two thirds complete. Should have the rough draft done by the end of the next week, but who knows when it will get a rewrite.

It is time however that I absolutely must get back to working on, and completing, a novel. All this time and all these words and little to show for it. So I am now going to get back to working exclusively on my first novel, bar a day or two a week for short stories and Cara’s Choice.

Week five has turned out to the second best week this year in terms of output, with a little over 7000 words written, so at least I hit the minimum desired mark of 1K words a day.

Still, for all that, it was only half the output of the first week of the year.  The next couple of days seem to be clear currently and I hope to get some serious writing done during them.

The week saw the completion of the first draft of The Bronze Man, after many weeks of meaning to get it done.  I also started work on two other short stories which I hope to have completed during the next week.

Between parent’s visiting, cleaning up for parent’s visiting, Australia Day and admittidly some general slackness of my part, week four was another week well below par.  Only wrote on three days with around 3500 words done.

It is really starting to get to me this lack of progress that is going on.  I want to write, I need to write, yet something seems to be holding me back.  Perhaps it is that little nagging voice at the back of the head which is saying why put in the effort as it’ll never amount to anything.  I really need to stomp on that hard.

I think I need to reappraise how I am going about this and what I am working towards.  I do have some ideas on that regards and will be working towards them over the coming weeks – more shall be forthcoming as it progresses.

Week three has come and gone. While it was better than week two, it was still a little lacklustre, only around 5000 words written. Not sure exactly why I haven’t been able to manage better these last two weeks.

Currently I’m working on a number of synopsis. I’m trying to get the basic stories of a number of novels written down so that later I can move back and forwards between them as the mood strikes me and at least have a point of reference besides what may be in my head.

I’m also planning to do some extensive work on a series of short stories – I want to get a few finished and on the site soon.