Warrior, Wizard Deleted Scene

I wrote this scene for “Warrior, Wizard” up a while ago, and after a lot of consideration, I decided that I’d probably have to drop it from the final project.  I like the scene, but the story’s getting far longer than it was supposed to already. While I think it does a fairly good job of expanding on both the dynamic of Jaren and Alera and some details about the world itself, there’s just no place for it in this particular story.  There are, obviously, some bits of this I’d tweak if revisiting it, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out as a first draft.

So with no further ado, here’s the scene:

***

“I don't see why we even took this mission,” Alera grumbled as she followed Jaren up the slope, ducking tree branches as she went. “Isn't this the third time that Kard's ended up in this situation?”

“It pays well,” was the only reply Jaren offered. He couldn't defend the mission past that, since it was more dangerous than the pay was worth and Rowen Kardanere really didn't have an excuse for his latest blunder. The boy was currently being held by a group of bandits he had taken off to deal with. He had, as usual, taken too big of a bite to swallow and found himself in need of rescue again. Rowen really should have quit the League half a year ago.

“So in order to get paid, we have to keep him alive,” she said.

“Again, it's good pay. And if we manage to subdue the others and bring them in, it's even better.”

“And there's, what, three of them? So all we have to take out three of them without killing them before they decide that it's not worth keeping Kard around for ransom.” She grunted as a branch Jaren had brushed aside swung back and smacked into her shoulder. “Should be easy enough.”

“Oh quit whining, Quill,” he told her. “Besides, if we take care of Kard first, it's an extra hand.”

“If we can even save the kid.”

“Quiet. We're getting close.”

Jaren stopped her and pointed. Through the foliage they could make out a small shack. “There's smoke,” he said, keeping his voice low. “They're probably outside.” He gave a quick glance at the sun's position. “Maybe eating, though I can't be sure. One of us should circle around to the back of the shack to set up a pincer motion. The other should at least attempt some negotiations to give us time and see if we can keep the fighting to a minimum.”

“And I suppose I'm stuck with negotiations.”

“Yeah, well, you're not my first choice for diplomat either. Ow.” He barely acknowledged her as she slugged him. “But you're good with words. I wouldn't stand a chance.”

“I swear, when I get back I'm joining the Five Lilies,” she grumbled.

“Hey, if you want to demote yourself like that, sure.” He grinned and padded off before she could respond. It wasn't often that he got a halfway decent retort in against Alera, and he hated spoiling the few he managed.

He approached the shack from behind. It was a small structure, and Jaren wondered briefly how three men—four with Rowen—could even live there comfortably. As he approached, he glanced around. There were two men outside. One must have been inside with Rowen. The two were, as he had guessed, sitting around the fire as they ate, engaged in bawdy conversation.

He approached the rear of the shack and peered through the window. He couldn't see Rowen, but he caught a glimpse of the other man. He was searching for something, but not frantically. He crept along the side of the house and checked on the fire again, being careful that the two men didn't notice him. There was an unattended, half-eaten bird on a spit. He couldn't be sure, but it was likely that the other man had been with them earlier and would be rejoining them shortly. If they were to launch a surprise attack now, they were likely to get caught off-guard in turn by the third man.

He saw Alera off on the other side of the clearing and waved to catch her attention. With a few quick gestures, he managed to communicate that the third man might reemerge. She nodded and stepped back into the trees.

There was a tense minute before the third man exited the house and joined the other two at the fire. A few moments later, Alera stepped out into the clearing, grabbing their attention with an exaggerated “Gentlemen!”

The men looked up. “Well, look what we've got here,” said one of the men. His greasy hair was long and disheveled and it didn't look like he had shaved in a while, creating the perfect image of an uncivilized wild man.

Another man, bald with a long, tangled beard, spat on the ground. “Looks like some fancy mage girl. You from the League, mage? Government job?”

She ignored him. “You have a boy here. Rowen Kardanere. What are you planning on doing with him?”

“League wants him back, League can buy him back,” said the third, the man who had been in the house earlier.

“The League isn't particular eager to have him back. Ransom won't be high.” Partially true. Any sort of ransom came out of their pay, and they were counting on little to no ransom for the job to be worth it.

“Well he doesn't have the build for heavy work out here,” the long-haired man said. “Can't be feeding dead weight. And he did try to kill us. Might do it again if we let him go. Only option we've really got is to dispose of him. We'll make it quick and painless. That's fair, ain't it?”

“I suppose that it would be on our head instead of yours, wouldn't it?” she said as Jaren slipped silently towards the shack's door. She did a marvelous job of not noticing him. His eyes would have instantly blown her cover if their positions had been reversed.

“I suppose it would,” the first man said. “Of course, like we said, you could buy him back.”

“So we're haggling for him, then,” she said. “How much do you want for him?” Jaren slipped inside unnoticed while negotiations continued, thankful that the shack had an animal pelt instead of a door.

It didn't take him long to find Rowen tied to a chair, a gag in his mouth. The boy's face lit up he saw Jaren, and he had to shush him before he tried making noise through the cloth. “They couldn't stand your voice, huh?” he said quietly as he cut him loose.

Rowen shrugged sheepishly. Jaren yanked the gag off, not bothering to be particularly careful.

The boy looked at him from beneath a mop of curls, giving him an embarrassed grin. “Oops?” he said, keeping his voice low.

“Where are your knives?”

“They're carrying them. Sorry, Jaren.”

Jaren started skulking around the shack, making sure to pay attention to the conversation outside. He winced and hoped that Rowen wasn't doing the same as he heard the ransom prices Alera was trying to haggle them down to. “You're good with knots, right?”

“Yeah, why?” There was a thump and a grunt from Rowen as the coil of rope Jaren had found hit his chest.

“Good. We're bringing them back alive. Make sure it's tight.” He glanced by the door and saw a solid wooden stave. One of the men apparently favored them. He grabbed it, grateful for a luck. It was a lot easier to not kill someone with a stave than a sword.

He poked his head out from behind the pelt that was serving as the door and nodded at Alera. She finished her sentence and seamlessly worked in a cough, signaling to him that she had seen him.

The men offered another sum. Alera made a show of pondering it. “Agreed,” she said. The men were taken off guard by her sudden agreement, and in that moment, she extended an arm towards their campfire. It suddenly flared to triple its size and intensity, and the men toppled backwards. It only took them a second to regain their senses, and they swiftly grabbed their weapons and charged at Alera.

Jaren was faster. He clocked one of the men in the skull with the staff as he charged and plowed into a second man. This distracted the third enough that he stopped. Alera held her arms up and flicked her wrists upwards. Pillars of stone rose from the ground, pinning the men in place.

“Kard,” Jaren said. Rowen scrambled over, grabbing his knives off of the ground, and began binding the men's arms. When he was done, Alera flicked her wrists back down and the pillars retracted. She exhaled deeply and plucked one of the birds they were roasting from the fire to eat. Rowen gave the bald man a little kick. Jaren responded by smacking him.

“If you're going to beat on them, do it while they can fight back.” He headed over to Alera and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Good job today.”

She tore off another bite of meat, rapidly chewing and swallowing before speaking. “Thank you. You did as well.” She took another big bite. “Even though you made me do all the work.”

“C'mon, Quill. Give me some credit, would you? Would you prefer that we just charge in?” He started hauling Rowen's abductors to their feet. “Besides, we still need to get these guys back.”

“So what's my cut for helping tie them up and take them back?” Rowan asked.

“We don't gag you on the way,” Jaren said. “Keeping them from killing you wasn't a good enough cut for you?”

Rowen looked down and turned red. “Okay, okay. Just asking.”

Magic and Technology

Oh boy.  Magic and technology.  Wow.  That’s a tricky subject.

There are a lost of ways to play the relationship between magic and technology.  There’s what I call the Inverse Law of Magic and Technology, which is the idea that magic and technology somehow interfere with each other.  The more technologically advanced a society is, the less magic will work, and the more magical a society is, the less technology can be developed.  There’s the fact that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science.

But for whatever reason, magic tends to exist primarily in medieval settings (with plenty of exceptions).  And in most of those medieval settings, there’s very little advancement in terms of technology, culture, government, etc.  It’s called Medieval Stasis, and it’s something I really want to avoid.  The reason for that is that, if we think of magic as a science, we can compare it to science through history.  New methods and applications of magic can be discovered.  There’s potential for a magic-based industrial revolution.

And yet, there are only two series that come to mind that avert this medieval stasis thing: The Last Airbender and the World of Shannara.  The latter has a political struggle involving the rise and fall of the Federation that spans multiple series, as well as the order of the Druids.  There have also been developments in airship technology.  And, of course, there’s the fact that this is a post-apocalyptic earth and there are a ton of chances to show off lost technology and its interaction with magic.  The latter does it even more impressively, with the world going from having some rudimentary steam technology to flat-out steampunk, bending being implemented into a professional sport, and metalbending and lightningbending becoming more common in just two generations.  And the whole transition somehow feels completely natural.

So anyway.  I’m struggling with how to work the technology in Warrior, Wizard, and it’s consequently going to sound like a lot of anachronisms if you’re not paying attention.  You see, due to enchantment (one of the four primary schools of magic), things can be made to act like items in our world, and it can be done more simply.  Here, someone said “hey, wouldn’t it be great if there was a device that would keep things cold?”  And then we spent a lot of time and effort developing the technology needed for the refrigerator.  There, someone said “hey, wouldn’t it be great if there was a device that would keep things cold?”  And then an enchanter spent some time enchanting a wooden box so that it would keep whatever’s in it cold.  Boom.  Invention of the coldbox.  Enchantment isn’t an easy process, but it basically allows objects to do something a mage could do, only a bit more efficiently.  So instead of light bulbs, they have light orbs.  There’s water running through pipelines, but the process of transporting it is different.  So what happens is I end up with a society that is, for all intents and purposes, a medieval world.  Swords and sandals and sorcery.  But it’s a world where there appear to be eclectic lights, refrigerators, running water, and the like.

And that’s the issue I run into.  How do you explain this magic technology without going on a huge discourse about it?  And really, the only thing I can think of is that I…don’t.  I just let the technology speak for itself since I don’t have room to speak for it at this point.

Warrior, Wizard Rough Draft Preview

Hey, everyone!  Like I said, I’d be posting the rough draft of the opening scene of “Warrior, Wizard” when I finished it.  Keep in mind that this is still the rough draft of the scene, may end up only being part of the full scene, and probably has a lot of work that needs to be done yet.  This is solely for preview purposes.

So with no further ado, I present:

Warrior, Wizard

One kill.

That's all it was. One more dead body. One more outlander defeated. One out of dozens.

But that one kill was enough to make Jaren Manse sit down. To actually stop and think. Not to contemplate who the man was or where he came from or why he had come. No, he had stopped asking those questions hundreds of deaths ago. This man was important because he was not his kill, but Alera's. Jaren had held nothing back on this mission, but for the first time ever, Alera Quill had outperformed him.

Forty-seven. Forty-seven to his forty-six. It was one kill. Just one kill, Jaren told himself. It didn't matter. And besides, this is what he had wanted. The two of them stood on equal ground now. Alera could keep up with him.

He just hadn't expected to be so shaken by it.

He sat on a log on the beach and watched his partner lobbing fireballs at the outlanders' ships in the fog covering Lesaria's shores. Few discovered the land. Even fewer returned to tell the tale. It was, in large part, thanks to the League, a collection of guilds and adventurers acting as everything from mercenaries to postal service to military. All able-bodied peoples were welcome, and there were plenty of well-paying jobs, but there were few who truly gained glory and notoriety. Jaren realized that he and Alera now stood a very good chance of becoming a part of those few.

As the ships started to catch, Alera walked over and sat on the sand beside him. She was a pale-skinned lithe girl that Jaren thought of as short, though that was admittedly because most people were short relative to him. She exhaled deeply and brushed her long black hair out of her face. “That was a good day,” she said, looking up at him. The bleak mist really drew the color out of her violet-grey eyes. Jaren just nodded in response. “The mission went well, don't you think?” she prompted.

He nodded again. “Yeah,” he said distantly. “Yeah.” He managed to find himself again and turned to his partner. “You outperformed me today, you know. Good job.”

“What? Is that why you—you meathead!” She punched his shoulder, though he barely even felt it under his armor. “That's what's got you like this?” She gave a small chuckle and shook her head. “So how badly did I beat you?”

“Just one,” he said.

“One? Just one?” She laughed. “That's what has you like this? Please, Jaren, that's more of a tie than anything. Luck of the draw. Besides, we're being ranked together. It's not like the count even matters.”

He removed his helmet and let the cool ocean breeze dry the sweat against his face. “...Yeah. It's just...weird.” He looked over at her and saw that she was staring out at the burning ship, a distant look in her eyes as well.

“Yeah,” she echoed. “Weird. I'm as strong as you are now.”

“Yeah, it only took you eighteen years, too.”

She flicked a small ball of flame at him with a grin. “Oh shut up, Manse. Still,” she added as he swatted at the flame, “I'm really glad you stuck with me all these years.”

“I'm glad too. You know, I think we stand a chance of making the lists this year.”

“What, us? There's only two of us.”

“And Ezeo Nohr was only one man, but look at what he accomplished.”

Alera laughed and stood, taking Jaren's hand and pulling him to his feet. “Ah, yes, Master Ezeo. Remind me again, is he on par with the gods, or greater than them?”

He gave her a playful shove. “Shut up! He's an impressive man, you runt.”

“This runt beat you today, meathead.”

“Yeah, well, enjoy it while you can. You know that there's no way I'm letting that happen again.”

“As if!” She grinned. “I've tasted victory now. I won't let it slip past me so easily anymore.”

They joked and talked like that on their way back to the League. The organization had started as just a single, simple guild hall, but had grown larger as dormitories were added for adventurers. Additions to the hall were needed to accommodate the League's growth. Blacksmiths and enchanters flocked in to sell their wares. The League expanded as its fame and popularity increased. In the three years that Jaren and Alera had been members, it had finally overtaken the city. What had once been known as Amnestia City was now simply the League. Many of the same shops remained, but vendors knew their sales base consisted of two groups: adventurers and tourists.

“So the Winter's Requiem have invited us and Deadeye out tonight,” Jaren said as they entered the city gates. “Celebrating the outlander defeat today.”

“Really? Is Ashna coming this time?”

Jaren thought. The reptilos man wasn't exactly shy, but.... “I'm not sure. I wouldn't expect him. He's not fond of being around so many humans.”

Alera rolled her eyes. “Why doesn't he just invite some more repitolos? Does he not get any say? Anyway, I assume you're planning on going?”

“Of course. They're footing the bill. I'm not going to pass on a free meal.”

“And Deadeye will be there.”

He hesitated. “Okay, yes, and Deadeye will be there, but come on, Alera. Free food. You're going, aren't you?”

“Of course,” she said, doing her best imitation of his voice. “They're footing the bill. I'm not going to pass on a free meal.”

“Hey, Quill, remind me again why I didn't dump you with the first guild I could to go solo?”

“Because you know I'd make you look bad in the lists.”

He shook his head. “Don't get cocky, yet, Quill.”

“Don't get cocky yourself, Jaren. We did good today, but we've got a long way to go before we make the lists. Think we can do it within the year?”

He put on a great show of thinking hard about it before answering in his best imitation of her. “What do you think, meathead?” It was, admittedly, not a very good imitation. Water splashed out of a nearby trough as they passed to splash him as the mage took her revenge.

“Come on, Jaren,” she told him. “Let's pick up the pace. We've got dinner to catch, and I'm famished.”

He grinned. “Agreed. C'mon, I bet we can rack the bill up enough to make Drolm actually faint this time!”

***

Well, that’s how the story opens.  There’s a lot I’d like to change yet.  The whole scene feels a bit too dialogue-heavy, several of the names of things may change (though the names of the protagonists and Meela “Deadeye” Ran, Ashna Szil, and Arten Drolm will probably remain mostly the same), and I can probably write it much better once I’ve got the full story laid out in front of me instead of just half of it.

Thoughts, though?  How did you like it?  Any suggestions that I’ll want to keep in mind when rewriting?  Let me know!

Warrior, Wizard Status Update #3: Worldbuilding

It’s that time of the year again: holiday season.  The time of the year that pretty much guarantees that I’m too busy or too distracted to write.  However, while I haven’t been able to sit down and actually write on Warrior, Wizard, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been working on it—or at least on the larger universe surrounding it.

Yes, I’ve been doing worldbuilding.  Here’s a bit of what I’ve got so far.

I’m focusing primarily on the human customs at the moment.  I’ll be delving into the reptilos, ogre, and gnome cultures more in the future (also possibly renaming the races as all those names are just working descriptions), but they don’t show up in Warrior, Wizard very prominently since our two primary characters are male.

The place I decided to start with my society was by bucking some standard fantasy conventions.  Fantasy is so frequently a genre that elevates the “fair” above all else.  Going by the four most standard fantasy races, the elves are prettiest and therefore the best, the humans are below the elves but run pretty much everything else, the dwarves are demoted to comic relief and get no respect, and the ugly orc knockoffs are savage beasts unfit for more than being canon fodder.

I really wanted to avoid that and did so by taking a different direction with beauty and race.  There are four main skin tones among humans.  I can’t exactly describe the tones since I’m not really an expert on skin tones (I live in a very homogenized location), but going with the Fitzpatrick Scale as my indicator of skin tone, the tones would probably be about 2, 3.5, 4.5, and 6, with the two middle tones being the most common and the lightest tone being the minority.  I want to give the world a more Mediterranean feel than the Medieval British Isles feel that most fantasy has.

I’ve also been thinking about “beauty” and what is and isn’t “attractive” in this world.  As we all know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  It’s relative, and different societies in the past have had different standards of beauty.  This society favors the strong, so I’m trying to reflect that into the standards of beauty.  Neither the portly nor skinny are particularly valued: instead it is the strong.  With the physical fighters this is obviously seen in muscle, but with mages, it’s more a manner of how they hold themselves—and the apparel they wear.  A mage can get by on being slender (though being particularly thin would generally indicate malnourishment) because they wear robes denoting their strength.

Two practices are also fairly common: tattooing and decorative scarring.  Both are generally regarded as fairly ritualistic and are almost always done to commemorate special accomplishments, so it’s not like everyone is walking around covered in tattoos and/or scars.  Also, naturally obtained scars are considered highly attractive and sharing “scar stories” is a very common icebreaking conversation.

Which brings us to gender in society.  I specifically wanted to avoid writing a patriarchy, but also didn’t want to write a matriarchy.  I think a large part of why patriarchies evolve is because men generally have more natural strength than women.  So the men would hunt and the women would take on a social role, and men have ruled the world while women rule the men from that point on.  However, magic throws a wrench into things.  With a skill based on study and intellect that trumps pure strength, men and women have been pretty much on equal standings.  This leads to a lot more women who are actually physical fighters.  No one’s telling them they can’t.  Skill’s not a gender issue, and with enchantment and enhancement, it’s not like physical strength is the final say in everything. 

It also led me to think about the family structure.  Since characters have both first and last names, who do they take their surname from?  What are surnames like after marriage?  I had several different paths I could have taken with this.  One was joint names like some couples do now.  Of course, this could potentially end up with someone taking both their parents names ad nauseum and after just a few generations you end up with a John Smith-Doe-Miller-Wayne-Anderson-Richards-Smith-Koerner.  Another option was for the males to take the father’s name and the females to take the mother’s name, like a family I know.  However, I didn’t really like that idea, and I had already given Alera and her father the same surname.  Those were the same issues with the child having a different surname from the parents altogether.  I finally decided, though, that a new surname was chosen upon marriage.  Sometimes one half of the couple would keep their name or a name would be chosen in reference to one of them.  After all, names and the standing they have can mean a lot.  For example, I imagine that there was a Manse Smith (the surname here isn’t particularly important), and his son and said son’s wife took “Manse” as their surname.  The name “Manse” was passed on for generations to Jaren Manse.  If Jaren gets married, he’d probably insist on keeping the name as well.

So yeah, those are some of the little pieces of the society that I’ve been focusing on.  And from the types of things they are, you might think it’s an attempt to be politically correct or “progressive” in my writing.  In reality, though…it’s not.  It’s really just my attempt to make a world different than ours, and different than standard fantasy.  Medieval Europe is far too stock, so I blended it with a bit of ancient Rome and Greece.  Elves and dwarves are commonplace, so I wrote them down on a list of things I wanted to do, crossed them off and marked them with a big “NO.”  Humans are generally limited to a single Caucasian race, so I made the lighter-skinned humans the minority.  Elves being held up as the standard of beauty just annoys me, so I went a different direction with it.  As for the role of gender?  That’s largely a holdover from early Fire Emblem inspirations that I wanted to keep.  In The Sacred Stones, I’d take Amelia over Gillam just as soon as I’d take Joshua over Marisa.  And besides, you’ve got magic in the equation.  When Lute (the biggest inspiration for Alera) is flinging fireballs around like nothing to take out enemies three times her size, it really makes you resent females in fantasy being reduced to the white magic girls. 

So I guess maybe there is a little gender equality behind that particular choice because turning all female fantasy characters into nuns is stupid.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking on lately.  There have been a few other things, like some customary greetings (a kiss on the forehead between males), common forms of entertainment (theatre has grown very popular in the last few years), and the color of robes mages wear (a fairly simple system that will tell you what mage class and disciplines they are at a glance).  However, those are some of the more notable social things.  I hope you enjoyed reading about them, and I hope they excite you for that preview that I have coming!

Warrior, Wizard Status Update #1

Things are not going as planned.

I thought "Warrior, Wizard" would be fun!  Because writing is fun!  I love writing because of how fun it is!

Naturally, I've spent so much time not writing that I've forgotten that writers only pretend writing is fun so that they don't go Coo Coo for Cocoa Puffs.

I think the thing that's getting to me is the length.  WW is getting daunting because it's a short story that's apparently pretty long.  I'm not breaking it up into chapters because, at this point, I can't.  I wouldn't even know how to since I'm writing it chronologically, a word that in this case means, ironically, out of the proper order.  Even when I finish it, I don't think it's going to feel like a "chapter" story.

This is different from pretty much everything I've written before.  Most of what I've written have been chapters for novel-length projects or updates for blogs (which are like chapters, only shorter and there's more of them).  Chapters are usually about 5-10 pages long in my usual style (12 pt Times New Roman, single-spaced--I'm an idiot who hasn't quite figured out how to measure length by word count).  The few short stories I've written have also been around that length. 

But WW?  I'm twelve pages into it.  I've just passed the 7000-word mark.  And here's the thing: I'm not even half done with it yet.  It is easily twice as long as I expected it to be.

That's not to say that I haven't made good progress in it.  I don't have time to write at NaNoWriMo speeds (and it's clear that even "finish WW" is going to be an unrealistic goal for the month), but at least half of that has been written this month.  And while I'm not to the halfway point, I'm close to it.  I only have a few more scenes to write.  And then a few more that I had skipped over.  But then I'm to the turning point, where Alera and Jaren are at approximately the same strength.

Which means that I'm finally almost to the beginning.  Non-linear order is weird like that.

I've also been brainstorming on the world some.  After some long, hard, consideration and weighing all my possibilities, I've come to the enlightening conclusion that it's all just a bunch of shit that doesn't matter in the first draft.  Sure, I can toss it ahead of me and slog through it, but all I've accomplished is that I've made a mess and everything stinks of poo.  No, what I should be doing is focusing on planting the story, and then taking that same crap and sprinkling it behind me afterwards to fertilize it.

But back to the length.  Let's say that, at my "not-quite-halfway" approximately 7000 words, I'm actually at half because I look back and say "there's a lot I can cut out."  Double that so that I've got 14,000-16,000 words for the finished product.  That's an awkward length.  For comparison, NaNoWriMo's goal for "completed novel" is 50,000 words.  The first Harry Potter book (i.e., the shortest) is about 77,000 words.  Meanwhile, flash fiction is about 500 words or less, short stories run from about 1500 words (pretty darn short) to 5000 words (pretty long).  Get up near 10,000 and it's hard to call it a short story anymore. 

So if I can't cut a whole lot off of WW (since I certainly can't/won't pad it to four or five times the length), what exactly is it going to be?  Apparently, that puts it somewhere between "novelette" and "novella."  And since I hope I can actually publish this story, who exactly do I go to?  Sure, you've read short stories in magazines or anthologies.  And I'm certain you've read novels.  But novellas and novelettes?  They're not exactly common.  As much as I'd like to try getting it published somewhere that actually has some repute, I may have to try to find a market for it on an e-reader.  Who knows?  Maybe it'll catch on.

Of course, if this whole story turns out to be a steaming pile of salvageable junk, I'll be upset.  Maybe a synonym for upset.  Livid, maybe.  Yeah, I like that.  Let's go with livid.

NaNoWriMo and Warrior, Wizard plans

If you haven't heard of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, it's basically an attempt to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November.  It's not about writing a good novel, just about getting the words down.  Quantity over quality.  Editing can wait until December.

I've attempted to do it for a few years now, and failed each time because of distractions.  So this year, I've decided not to participate.  Instead, I'm going to push myself to finish "Warrior, Wizard."

I've been working pretty hard on WW.  Not the actual writing part, but the preplanning part, which is taking a lot longer than I've expected.  Once I started writing, I realized that I needed to know how my magic system worked.  And once I started writing again, I realized that I also needed to know how exactly my world worked.

At this point, I've decided that while the "Warrior, Wizard" I finally release to...wherever it is I release it will be a final draft, it's also not going to be the final final draft.  It's more like a beta release, or a pilot episode, since I plan to revisit the world of Lesaria.  Or maybe not Lesaria, since the name is definitely not final.  I like the world I've started setting up, and I'd like to refine it.  History, themes of racism, the world outside of the isolated island it's set on, the political dynamics, the different cultures and subcultures...these are all things I'd love to explore, but WW is not the story to do that.  WW exists to tell the story of Jaren and Alera, and in this case, brevity is the soul of wit.  A reader doesn't need to know who Caro Plith is or what influence he had on the study of magic since Jaren is our POV character and probably doesn't even know who Plith is.

So after I've gotten the basics of the world nailed down a bit more (which I've almost finished), the plan is to write.  Try to push out at least one scene a day until I've gotten the whole timeline done.  Put the scenes in the order I'd like them.  Look at how it works, then remove, add, and change scenes until I find something that works.  Tweak them to make them flow together better.  That should be the point where I can officially say that the story has moved from "rough draft" to "completed first draft."  Then I find some people who can give me feedback.  Get critique, edit accordingly, and rewrite until I'm satisfied.

What will I do when I'm finished with it?  I'm not sure.  I might send it in to a few places.  See if I can get it published.  Experience the joys of rejection letters.  I've only gotten one so far, so it'd be nice to get a few more before I can get anything published.  And then?  Then I set it aside for a while.  Work on another project.  Actually get some things written before I come back to Lesaria, because why on earth would anyone want to work on a single project?

I mean, come on.  That's just ridiculous.

Writing: Why I Currently Hate "Warrior, Wizard"

Step 1: Listen to audiobook that mentions elves/fairies/the fey/some other name that means the same thing.  Hear a reference in the text that mentions how the people are strong with magic, but have frail and physically weak bodies.  Think of the Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards trope.

Step 2: Think of how that form of development might cause some tension between a warrior and a wizard.  Begin to formulate the concept.  Decide to use anachronic order and solidify the characters a bit.  Smile as things start falling into place.

Step 3: Start writing.  Realize I have no idea where to start.  Start at the beginning and decide to go roughly chronological, at least at first.  Brainstorm and make a list of scenes that I want to include.  Smile as the plot starts to actually take form.

Step 4: Make it through the first scene and start on the second.  Struggle with it.  Spend a lot of sessions opening it but not making any sort of progress whatsoever.  Tear my hair out over it.

Step 5: Work on actually developing the magic system some more.  Get the basics down.  Take pride in the fact that the development is moving past "Fire Emblem class system ripoff."  Use the inspiration to launch myself back into the project.  Feel my excitement build as I open up the document.   ...Find myself moving barely five sentences forward as I try to slog through the thoughts.

Step 6: Try again.  Cheer as the world starts falling into place a bit.  Press through the difficulty of starting and get in the groove.  Find out more about my magic system as I write (like the entire empathy system, which I hadn't thought to add).  Finish the scene.  Stand up and raise my fists in the air in triumph.  Uncork the champagne bottle.  Drinks all around!  It's a time for celebration!  Take pride in knowing that, now that I'm on a roll, the rest should write itself.  Smile smugly while sitting in my fancy recliner, dressed in my most pretentious robe and smoking five pipes at once.

Step 7: Move on to the next scene and instantly experience a complete writer's block as I realize that I really have no idea what the missions my characters take on will be like and that I don't even know if I'm going to include non-human races in my world.

Yaaaaaaaaay....

Anachronic Order

I'm currently working on a short story/novella called "Warrior, Wizard," which is about two friends (who are, as you may have guessed, a weapons user and a magic user) who end up struggling with the growth of their strength at different times.  It's based around the concept of "Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards," or the fact that in gaming (and other forms of media, but this is most noticeable in tabletop and video gaming), warrior classes develop at a steady rate while wizard classes start weak but become insanely powerful.

This is a different discussion altogether, though.  I could go on about it, but all that's really important to know is that I'm writing a story where one character always feels like they can't compare to the other, but the balance shifts halfway through.

When I set out to write this story, I knew from the beginning that I didn't want to tell it in chronological order.  I wanted to show that, as much as my mage struggled with feeling inferior at first, my fighter felt just as inferior later on.  I didn't want a gradual shift but a side-by-side comparison.  And so I set out experimenting with anachronic order.

Anachronic order, or rather, nonlinear order, can make for a wonderful storytelling device.  It can be used wonderfully a lot of different ways for a lot of different reasons.  In "Warrior, Wizard," it's to show that the two aren't really as different as they think and that both have their periods of feeling inadequate.  It provides a sense of dramatic irony.  While the mage feels like she's a burden when she needs saving, the audience knows that she's the one saving the fighter a few years down the road.  It plays the two dynamics against each other.

I'm not entirely certain how I'm going to tell the story quite yet, though I'm leaning towards finding an important event near the middle of the timeline and working forwards and backwards from there.  How I'm writing it, however, is chronological order.  It's maybe not as fun to write, but I think that I'll need to in order to figure out what exactly it is that happens so that, when I'm working on the order of the segments, I can refer to past events that have happened in-story.  It'll be less fun, but will also mean less rewriting.

But let's look at some other bits of media that have already used the device.  Four, to be exact: a movie, a live-action TV show, an anime, and a book.  All from different mediums (though you could make an argument for television being the same medium, even though one is animated and one live-action), all from different genres.  All use the device in a different way, but all to wonderful effect.

The first one I want to talk about is Memento.  Memento is a movie about a man who, after an injury following the death of his wife, loses the ability to make new memories.  The movie actually has two interspersed timelines: one moving forwards that consists mostly of the protagonist giving exposition, and one moving backwards, which details most of the action in the film.  The timeline moving backwards shows us exactly what is going to happen, but since most of the scenes begin in medias res (or "in the midst of things"), we're not left wondering what's going to happen, but how it's going to happen, and how the current scene will lead into the previous one.  Not only does the narrative choice make the movie interesting, it's stylistic.  The story is told in anachronic order to mimic the protagonist's short-term memory loss.  In each scene, we only know as much as the protagonist does at the time.

The next one is LOST, that show about the people who land on an island and then there's mystery and more mystery and magic and science and what's that in the woods and time travel and so on and so forth.  As easy as the show is to poke fun at for its convoluted plot (and its inability to get around to answering questions and its constant dropping of plotlines and WAAAAAAAAALT and so on and so forth), I absolutely love the show for two reasons.  The first is the attention given to characters.  But the second is the narrative style, which was what most people love about the show and has been imitated frequently since.  Every episode of LOST tells two stories: what's going on currently with the people on the island, and what happened in their lives to bring them to that point.  It becomes clear early on that all of the survivors of this plane crash are connected in some way.  The flashbacks are all out of order, and it's used to give you the story piece by piece.

The next story I'm going to talk about is House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.  While there is plenty going on in this story, anachronic order is used to provide a sense of confusion.  Most of the book is framed as notes on an incomplete dissertation on a documentary.  It's unclear whether or not the documentary itself uses anachronic order (though it very well might, especially if it's interspersed with interviews that reveal the nature of the house earlier than the narrative does), the notes and dissertation perspectives are fractured, with the dissertation being compiled of bits and pieces that may not have originally been parts of the same chapters or even intended to go in the final product, while the notes seem to jump around in chronology some as well.  In House of Leaves, this adds to the general surreal feeling of the novel, where it's hard to tell what all is true or real.

But perhaps my favorite example of  anachronic order is in the anime Baccano!, which uses it masterfully.  The show begins with a young girl working with a newspaper trying to figure out how to tell the series of events surrounding the Immortals.  It takes place over three years (1930-1932).  Each year has its own arc, with 1930 focusing on the (re)creation of an Elixer of Life and a few mafia families, 1931 focusing on a multi-party train heist, and 1932 focusing on the Genoard family, with the young daughter searching for her asshole of a brother.  All three storylines are connected through the characters, and even the individual arcs themselves are told out of order.  In fact, the very first episode shows scenes from the end of each of the storylines.  Baccano! is consequently very hard to follow the first time around, but there's a point to the order the story is told in, which is explained in the very first episode: as in life, there is no true beginning to a story (in fact, the 1930 storyline actually begins in 1711), nor are there main characters.  The jumping around from period to period focusing on multiple characters emphasizes this perfectly.  A character described as "main character-ish" is only the debatable protagonist to one story (in which he's no more crucial to the plot than many other characters), and the characters with perhaps the most screentime are connected to all three plots--but largely just tangentially.

Basically, as confusing as it can be, I love anachronic order.  It's a wonderful way of framing a story, if done for the right reasons.  So now my job is to figure out what order to tell "Warrior, Wizard" best.  Randomly?  Jump around between relative stories?  From the ends to the middle?  Or, as I'm leaning towards, from the middle to the ends?  I'm probably going to go with that last one, since it will provide the most contrast.  Now I just have to write the darn thing.