Mist and Shadows

As the month slowly winds towards an end, the rough draft of Tears of the Mountain is starting to take shape at last, with the last week being especially productive. The word count has now passed 30,000. Of that, apart from three hundred odd words, it is all of the main plot. The secondary plot hasn’t been started yet, nor a couple of other scenes that need writing up.

The aim is to finish up the main plot line and then go back and write the secondary plot. Once that is done, it will be time to work out how best to weave them together and then write up the ending which ties it all together. While the main plot is drawing to an end, I’m not sure how much more the secondary plot will add to the rough draft – my guess is it will come out to between 40 and 50 K in length.

And then the real work commences.

This first draft is very minimalist – almost more a synopsis. For the most part descriptions are very limited, conversations basic and some characters not fully fleshed out. In fact two characters have had their relationship completely changed halfway through. The two, as I previously mentioned in How To Stop Them killing Each Other, where threatening to derail the whole plot and so changes had to be made.

There are eight characters in the main group – unfortunately some are little more than names at the moment. I need to work out some more details and work that into the story. The main concern is the only woman in the group, Abhiala. I don’t want to cut her out – that would leave no women in the story. The original part of the plot she was going to be involved in seems to have been axed, leaving her with little to do. I’m not turning her into a amazon action-girl – it doesn’t fit – but I need to figure out something for her to do.

So much work to be done still – almost makes you want to start another story instead.

Progress, for whatever reason, has been a little slow this month. The last 2 days have seen around 25% of the work done and the 75% over the last week. At least it is picking up a bit.

I’ve managed to get 20K done so far on the rough, rough draft of Tears of the Mountain, and am about halfway through the plot points. Oddly the story isn’t halfway through though. The group has been travelling for just a week with three more to go to reach their destination and have just started their first minor fight. There was a brief scuffle at one stage earlier on, but that doesn’t classify as a fight. And I still have et to do three more minor fights, a naval battle and a major land battle. Or start working on the subplot. I had hoped to complete the rough draft by the end of the month, but that may not happen.

In other news, somehow I’ve managed almost nine hundred downloads on Smashwords, and have somehow snuck up to #11 on the most viewed author over the last 3 months there. Of course, many of those others are trying to sell their books and I’m just giving it out for free, so that is certain to skew numbers in my favour.

I’ve reached an interesting, and unexpected, development in the rough draft of Tears of the Mountain – two characters who actively want to kill each other. I knew they were antagonistic towards each other when plotting out the story, but I didn’t realise just how much until I started writing. The difficulty lies now in keeping them apart. I could just let them off each other, but that would demolish the plot, but on the other hand I need a way to stop them which seems plausible and not heavy-handed.

An explanation of the background may be in order here.

The Amari city of Adranatti Vesa lies across the northern sea, and grew rich on gold and gemstones until the mines dried up, but by which stage it had become an important trading centre. Adranatti, like most Amari cities, is a princedom, under the nominal rule of the Amari King, but in reality most are semi-independent city-states. When the Prince of Adranatti, Tol Venatro, went to war with his western neighbours, his younger and more popular brother, Cantarossi, took the opportunity to usurp him and exile him, leaving him and his army trapped between hostile forces.

Both princes desire to find the fabled lost city that the Amari call Illiatoriun, said to lie in the deep deserts and to house a vast wealth of treasure. When the professor, historian and explorer Halir visit Adranatti, they both try to get him to find the city for them. His curiosity getting the better of him, Halir sets out to find it, and in his party are two men, Tol Marassi and Logawa, who work for the rival brothers.

They don’t like each other. In part because they work for rival brothers, doing the dirty work for them. Also in part because they both come for cultures that have a long history of feuds – think how the French and English perceived each other for centuries and were seemingly always at war. Both men are killers and are determined that their prince should come out on top.

The problem is I still need both of them alive for future events but both seem determined to derail the whole plot with their feuding.

It is certainly making the writing of the draft interesting to sat the least.

I have in the past had a tendency to want to write the whole story in one go no plotting, no rough drafts, just the finished story. It is kind of a bad way of going about things and can explain why so little in the past ever got finished.

Even today when I am actively writing rough drafts, I still tend to try and put too much detail in, rather than just getting the gist of the story down, though it is improving.

The new method I am trying seems to be helping, plotting the story out first and then doing rough drafts from that. They really are rough when looking at them, with scant details. One scene as an exampled has a couple of people entering a room to meet a man. Pretty much all that is written is that they enter and the man is sitting behind a table. No descriptions of the room or the man, nothing about what is on the table or what is is made of, of light sources or anything like that. All that can be worried about later, once the rough draft is completed.

It doesn’t mean though that nothing much is happening. Yesterday I took one of the plot points off the board and started working on it.

The plot point comprised of just 16 words;

-Leave Adranatti.
-Head north through farms and jungles.
-Marassi and Logawa argue.
-Reach pass through mountains.

Somehow from that I wrote 1500 words of very rough draft. Large parts of a two day trip were glossed over, descriptions were exceedingly minimal, conversations were curtailed, yet it came out to 1500 words and included new plot details I hadn’t considered earlier. When it comes around time for a rewrite of it I’ve got no idea how long it will turn out to be. Not bad for a 16 word plot point.

I spent a large chunk of yesterday in finishing up the plotting of Tears of the Mountain and now have a cork-board covered with notes, mostly in order. There are still a couple of scenes that need to be slotted in somewhere, but all the plot details are now written up in note form.

First time I have done anything like it; hopefully it will help when it comes to working on the rough draft, which is the next step that needs completing.