Its odd to think that just three weeks ago this project didn’t exist. Since then it has all taken off; the two main character have burst to life, the world is building itself around me, the first two novelettes have been written (and are waiting on polishing/editing) and a third is in the process of having its rough draft written. There are even ideas for another seven novelettes. Not a bad effort.
It all started through reading a few things a few weeks back. I had started making my way through The Complete Chronicles of Conan by Robert E Howard again, and was also reading a few threads on some forums about favourite fantasy cities, as well as about how ebooks were a good thing for a resurgence of the shorter forms of story telling.
At the time, as mentioned in a previous post, I was thinking about my writing style and realised I preferred the shorter, pulp style. I was trying to work out a way of constructing a fantastic city that would work in a pulp series – my first thought was to slip it into the White Bull series, but I realised that it didn’t really fit the style. And so the idea came to me to start a new, proper pulp heroic fantasy series. Thus was born the setting.
It all started with the characters, as you would expect for the genre. They very quickly stabilised into view, though remained nameless for a short while. Carse, also called Blade, pretty much hasn’t changed since the first impression of him, that of a tall, languid man who was in part a dandy, but beneath that was a thief, an assassin and a dabbler in magic. Fianna, or Peregrine, did change from initial ideas. I wanted to go with a shorter warrior compared to Carse. The initial thought was to go with a dwarf, but that quickly changed as I decided to stick to a mostly human setting. The next idea was a swordmaiden who came from the wild hill tribes, a stark contrast from the civilised city dweller that Carse was.
Before I came up with their names, I was just using Peregrine and Blade to refer to them, which have remained as their nicknames. I have been waiting something like twenty years to use those names. Initially I gave them to a pair of rangers, way back in the day when I was young and ‘borrowed’ liberally from whatever at the time I was reading. Those characters vanished long ago, but the names hung around waiting to be used.
The next item was to come up with a city to act as their home base. The fist story I wrote saw the city spring to life. Much of it is yet to be explored, and I look forward to finding out more about what lurks within it as the stories write themselves. But beyond that there is the rest of the world for the duo to wander, to explore and to have adventures in.
As soon as I have the third novelette written I plan to bundle them together and make them available for people to read.
Mist and Shadows 