Piece of the puzzle

So, I know that I've mentioned before that Eastgate is only the first book in an intended series of 9 books. It probably seems a little insane to be plotting out the greater picture of a book that's not even written yet. Why worry about the puzzle when the first piece isn't even cut out yet.

 There are so many what if's that speak against plotting out a lengthy series as an unpublished author:

What is no one decided to pick up the first book?
What if the first book gets picked up, but it tanks?
What if you somehow get picked up, but are only given a contract for 3 books?

What if... What if... What if

Honestly, I never really intended the story of a couple of rogues who get thrown into opposition with the Dark Lord to ever be a big epic. Frankly, I'm not the kind of guy who wants to draft things into big epics. I tend to like the characters and situations that don't lend themselves to big and sweeping, and when I'm put into a situation where I have to think big and sweeping, my ideas tend to get a little weird (think multiverse collapsing around a single being who is made of the very essence of the universe).

But, brainstorming this story, it just kind of got bigger and bigger as I kept thinking "well, I can't make it too easy for these people" and "if that's going to happen, they have to earn it by going through something like..". Before I knew it, I had a big picture that I knew wouldn't fit easily into a trilogy, especially given what I knew had to happen right in the middle (not like at the end of a second book, which would be the end of Act 2, but dead in the middle to literally change the entire story for it's second half).

Once the notion of how big the story had gotten made itself at home in my mind, then I started fretting over exactly where I should begin. I mean, really the story could have the same long line as Lord of the Rings (Average person comes into an item of power and must go one a physical and person journey to use that item in destroying a great evil). The difference is that I'm not writing an epic quest.

First Lines

So, I read a bunch of writing blogs.

Not like, a thousand of them. I mean, the number of writing blogs I check out with any regularity is somewhere in the low double digits. The number I check in on daily or almost daily is single digits. I know some people are devoted to things like blogs and web comics, but I've never been able to do it.

Anyway, one of the things that always comes up on these blogs is the issue of first sentences.

If you read and believe these blogs, many of which are written by successful authors, then first sentences hold a ton of weight in the world of publishing. Apparently a first sentence is supposed:

• Grab the reader with something that makes them question what comes next in the book. Asking a question in the readers mind that must be answered.
• Present an accurate picture of your entire novel
• Present some form of excitement to pull people into the book and make them not want to put it down
• Be powerful enough that if someone read just that sentence, they would want to buy the book
• Grant 3 wishes, including wishes for more wishes.

Okay, so I made one of those up. The point being that according to all of these people, the first sentence holds the weight of the novel on it's shoulders. 

Gee, as if starting a story wasn't hard enough. 

I've had a bunch of different opening lines for Eastgate in the various false starts I've had with it so far.

So, lets take a chance and look at a few of them and discuss some possibilities for NaNoWriMo.

Character - Seren Galaru

In a hole in the wall bar, there lived an elf.

That's was actually the original opening line to Eastgate on my first attempt. No kidding.

If you're not a Tolkien fan, it's totally aping the opening line of the Hobbit "In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit." Anyway, I originally opened the story that way not only to ape Tolkien, but because I thought it was a great way to introduce the one character I originally thought I had a handle on- Seren Galaru.

As one of the first characters created for this story, Seren too had her roots in that Evanescence concert I went to last November 1. Just as Amy Lee was the model on which Eira Wynn was built, Taylor Momson (lead singer for The Pretty Reckless, who opened for Evanescence) is the model on which Seren was built. Their styles and looks conflicted (medium build brunette vs super skinny blonde) as did their dress (goth-ish with fairy skirt vs classic leather jacket and heavy boots), and me those differences worked well together.

The fact that Momson just kind of looks like she's vaguely related to Galadriel made making the second character an elf a give in.

Seren was also instantly conceived as the badass, because it's something that you never see done. Take that in for a second. An elf (not a Drow) is actually the angry one who goes off with fists swinging into any situation. Sure an elf may break out an amazing fight, but they normally are just thought of as sitting around trying to look serene and feminine, even when they're played by a guy. (Hugo Weaving is the exception to this rule, because even in drag, Hugo Weaving could still kick your ass)

Anyway, because it was NaNoWriMo and because I had absolutely zero time to do any sort of character brainstorming before I started writing (I had the idea at like 11pm on November 1st, I was starting late as it was) I just instantly went for the stereotype. If Seren was a badass, and Seren wore a leather jacket, well then Seren must be a hard drinker. Every bar is like Cheers to her, cause everyone knows her name there.

The problem was that the more I thought about that after stepping back from the story, the more that stereotype bothered me. Sure, I was fine with Seren being a drinker, but just to have her act like some badass teenager didn't seem right for someone who was probably like 600 years old.

The fools! I'll show them, I'll show them all! Mwa-hahaha

What makes a good villain? 

Well, that's really debatable. Make a villain too good, and he stops being the villain, and just starts being a sort of Machiavellian hero. Readers/viewers starts to root for the villain. This ultimately makes the story a much more gray area, and weakens the argument of the story (unless your argument is that there's no black or white, only gray).

The other problem is that your villain has to be be somewhat realistic. Snidley Whiplash twirling his mustache isn't believable because he's so one dimensional. He has no purpose other than to join together with Dick Dasterdly and Old Man Withers (who those meddling kids unmasked as The Creeper) and tie as many damsels to train tracks as possible. We don't believe him because even the villain doesn't spend all his time plotting nefarious deeds. He has to have things he likes (that aren't kicking puppies). People who like him (who aren't scarf wearing dogs that laugh at everything). He has to be multifaceted. 

These problems are doubly compounded when you're dealing with a villain who isn't the Big Bad of the story. 

When you're dealing wish a villain who is under the Big Bad, you have to find some form of justification for him serving the greater evil. You also have to find a valid reason why he doesn't try to usurp the Big Bad. You have to do both of these while making him believable and not just another Nazi soldier from Raiders of the Lost Ark (seriously, did any of them besides Toht have character traits other than "wears a uniform" vs "bald and shirtless"? Belloq doesn't count, he was an opportunistic bastard, not a Nazi). 

I bring all of this up because I'm facing this problem in working out the lead villain of Eastgate - Baron Sotiras Archontas. 

The element of horror

Unless you live under a rock, it's pretty obvious the pictures are above are from a Silent Hill game (they're from Silent Hill: Homecoming to be precise). Now, there are many things that the Silent Hill games get right, and the absolute aesthetic of the world is one of them. The games creators make their "otherworld" a mix of rusted metal and strangely organic that when you're playing a game, you can't help but think "This is what hell has to be like".

Now, I bring this up not just because I'm a Silent Hill fan (which I am), but because the look of Otherworld is very much something I want to incorporate into Eastgate. 

Now, I'm pretty sure that the notion of using the look of a hell dimension in a high fantasy story will probably cause some people to think I'm losing it. I'd argue, however, that Eastgate is a story about a world where the Dark Lord won. It's a story where Tolkiens 'scouring of the Shire' happened to the entire world (or, at least the entire world that anyone will be seeing for a while in this series [oops, was that a spoiler?]).

Anyway, since this is a very Tolkien inspired world, I'd been  wondering (this is months ago mind you) what would a world taken over my Orcs look like? If you think about the world of the Orcs as presented in the Lord of the Rings films, then most environments had a fiery glow to them. Trees are laid to waste in order to stoke the fires. Forges are readily available. Things are dirty. Metal is prominent, and since these are not a people that think much about hygiene or preservation, it's probably all going to rust in short order. 

It's like the basement of any Saw movie. Heck, look at this orc helmet from Moria, and tell me this doesn't look like a Saw prop.

It's horrible to human sensibilities, yet to these Orcs, it probably just seems like normal. 

This is where my mind connected to Silent Hill. 

Time is on my side

One thing that always bothered me in Tolkien was the fact that in this far away world ( yes, I know Middle Earth is the direct translation for Midgard, which was the Old Norse word for the world of men, so it's not like Tattooine or anything) they still somehow used the Gregorian calendar.

And I don't simply mean that Tolkien used a 365 day year. No, he literally used the calendar on his wall. This is why every year on September 22 people celebrate the birthdays of Bilbo and Frodo. Middle Earth runs on a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week, 12 month a year calendar.

It seemed strange to me that he did this considering that the man made up enough backstory to his works that he knew the names of Bilbo's great grandfather and Pippins fathers uncles best friends former roommate. Why did he leave the calendar completely unaltered from the modern calendar.

So, in building the world of my story, I've been thinking about developing a new calendar. Nothing strange like the nonsensical calendars of the Star Wars Universe that have something like 10 months and then some weird holiday week and so forth. Just a set calendar that isn't the one you'd find in your kitchen.

Now, doing this has presented me with a couple of problems.

Costuming -or- How do I keep my characters from being naked

So, in the post I did about Eira, I mentioned how the setting of the story has sort of shifted since I first had this red-headed-brain-child. When I first envisioned the story, everything was very slick. Visual cues would be thinks like the first Underworld or Dark City. Hell, even parts of the Matrix would fit the visual aesthetic that I initially thought the story would hold. 

That kind of changed thanks, in part I am forced to admit, to the Hunger Games. I watched that film, after trudging through the book (which I wasn't a big fan of, though the second and third books were major improvements in my eyes), and I couldn't help but think that these oppressed people sure looked happy and healthy. Wow, if they're so pretty and well off, why don't they just rise up and fight back. Clearly things aren't as bad as they seemed. (Keep in mind that the entire novel is narrated by Katniss, so it's actually possible that the situation in District 12 isn't that bad and Katniss is an unreliable narrator. If you take the movie as a viable adaptation, it could actually point to this in the book since the film is clearly a third person point of view).

This got me thinking about my own story, and I realized that if I was going to sell that Eastgate was a ghetto, I better damn well amp up the poverty. This led to me going back to the drawing board on how I initially envisioned people. Gone were pretty leather coats and goth high fashion. 

This left me, and still leaves me, a week and a half away from having to type those oh so crucial first words (for those counting, I have a draft of the story that's already several thousand words in, but I'm going to begin at square one again and push forward in the interest of not being able to cheat) and I still don't know what anyone is wearing. 

NaNoWriMo is Coming

So, as you've probably guessed, I've signed on to do NaNoWriMo. If you haven't noticed that, you need to look up at the Title and Description of this blog. Go ahead, take a minute, I want us to all be on the same page. 

All caught up? Good.

Anyway, as I've mentioned before, I had initially concocted this story as my idea for last years NaNoWriMo, and had to call it quits a couple of days in, when I realized the story was just far too big to pound out without a battle plan. Now, while I wasn't surprised that I had to drop out last year, really before I'd even begun, it was a little sad. 

In 2010, I'd jumped head first into NaNoWriMo and managed to complete my 50k words despite all the shit life threw in my way. I felt like a goddamn champ for doing it too. Getting up with the sun and chugging coffee while I pounded out a chapter of pure genius (quiet you!). That story was very different in tone to the project last/this year, and I'll admit I had a better handle on it then I did in my attempt last year.

The fact remains that NaNoWriMo is a bitch. It requires finding time to write on even the busiest days. On the NaNoWriMo site they talk about how little time a day writing the 1,667 words a day to meet the goal actually takes.

Those people are goddamn liars.

Honest to god, working on NaNo in 2010 it required at the very least 2 hours a day, sometimes more. That means basically locking yourself away (figuratively if not literally) every day to get some real writing done. I remember being at my in-laws over Thanksgiving, and everyone else was watching movies... and there I am on the sofa in another room trying my best to punch out 2,000 words because I was already behind. It really sucked. 

Writing is a solitary endeavor, I totally understand that. And I understand that under deadlines, like in any other job, you occasionally have to miss things to get the job done. The thing that sucks about NaNoWriMo is that it takes place around a major holiday that people use to gather. Which means that to continually do NaNoWriMo means to continually miss some of that time. 

The biggest problem with NaNoWriMo is the absolute insecurity that again I will brick wall on this project and won't meet my word goal. Beyond that is the insecurity that once NaNoWriMo ends, that I'll fail to finish the other 50k or so words needed to make a full length novel. Maybe that should be their new slogan:

NaNoWrimo- Be insecure for a month and beyond. 

Then again, NaNoWriMo is great because of that insecurity. You are forced to write crap for NaNoWriMo. Chapters will be terrible, stray plot lines will go everywhere. Yet, in the end, you will have a first, or as Carrie Vaughn has called it (and I think I will too) a "zero draft". Which is miles ahead of not having anything.

That doesn't mean a single soul is ever going to see that zero draft. I've tried showing people my zero drafts and I don't feel I ever got anything useful from the process. It just made me feel awkward and made it weirder for me to alter what I'd written in order to make it fit things that happened later.

Anyway, that's enough of my whining. The only way to push forward is to shut the hell up and just do it, I guess. So.. tally ho, I guess.

Until the next time I need to vent my worries over this project....

Mythology - how much is enough and how much too much

Anyone who has read Tolkien knows that sometimes the background takes over. What is referred to in the Lord of the Rings films as "The Watchtower of Amun Sul" and then never explained, is given paragraphs of back-story in the actual novel Fellowship of the Ring. At the end of Return of the King, Tolkien was forced to add an appendix that was nearly 1/3 the length of the entire book in order to properly flesh out the background of things that had happened in the story. Every person, every town and every tree had a back-story in Tolkiens works. He died still working on his bible to Middle Earth, the Silmarillion.

So the question has to be asked; in writing a fantasy novel, how much mythology and background lore should I create, and how much of that should I include?

When I first started brainstorming this story, I basically wanted to do a "sequel" to Lord of the Rings. I intended to take the whole of both Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers as canon, and then devise a point somewhere in Return of the King where the worlds diverged. Somewhere along the way evil won.

That was all the background I intended to give that wasn't directly tied to the characters.

The problem was that the more I thought about the story, the more unfair to the world it seemed to just rip off Tolkien willy-nilly for my history. One idea lead to another and soon I was working on the ground floor trying to structure my own mythos.

Which presented their own problems.

Awkward Questions

So, filling out a character worksheet that I got online, I have found myself faced with a very awkward question.

A little background- I found the sheet while looking for character worksheets. I found this one with it's 100+ questions and decided that, even thought it was actually intended for role players, that the breadth of the questions would make it a great outlining tool for writing a work of fiction.

So I'm filling it out, and in the question about childhood (which I'm hoping their taking as a broad term to define anything that happened to the character before they hit college age) they have the question:

1. Are you a virgin? If not, when and with whom did you lose your virginity?

Well, this isn't an unjustifiable question, and the more I thought about it, the more sense it made that this was a question that really does define a lot about the character. If the character isn't a virgin when and how they lost their virginity can have a significant impact on how they interact with people of the opposite sex, and can even play into how people perceive them. If they are a virgin, the grand question of why they are, especially depending on how old they are, is bound to come up... and again plays a vital role in defining the characters social interactions.

So, filling this out for Eira, and suddenly I have to step back and say "Well, is she?"

See this is more complicated than it might seem, because a large part of the Eira's character is that she is both impetuous, but that she's also been shouldered with a ton of familial responsibility since she was a teenager. Earlier in the worksheet, I'd already determined that she didn't have her first real kiss until she was 17. That alone says a lot about her.

The virginity question, however seems so much more awkward.

Can a 32ish year old woman be a virgin without being socially awkward? I mean, I don't perceive Eira as a sexual character, that's Seren (more on her later), but she's also not a shy or awkward character. I just don't think she's someone who's ever really had a chance to date or really become involved with the opposite sex. This actually ties into something I have been kicking around later in the series (well past book one), when the possibility of Eira and another central character (who may or may not be in book one.... I know but I'm not telling) getting together romantically.

The notion that Eira was a virgin never entered into that equation. I didn't think it needed to.

Now, however that question is on the table, and I'm not at all sure how to answer it.

Character - Eira Wynn

Okay, so, let me begin by discussing the character who is, arguably, the protagonist of my little adventure - Eira Wynn.

The origin of Eira is actually pretty halfhearted.

The notion for the plot of the story came first- a Frodo Baggins like character failed in his quest to destroy "The Dark Lord" and now, some 800 years later, a new band of heroes must try to depose the triumphant evil, but they are a group who never wanted to be heroes in the first place. I had been rereading Lord of the Rings at the time, and so the notion of the "what if" seemed pretty logical. At some point in the story something had changed and evil had won. Pretty simple, right?

Except that left me with the question of "Who exactly is going to be the person to defeat the Dark Lord this time around?"

Anyone who knows me know that I'm a fan of rogues. I love characters who live in the grey area of morality. Han Solo, Malcolm Reynolds, Batman, Robin Hood, Danny Ocean- these types of people were the best characters to me. They had their own moral compass and society be damned what they thought of it. That meant that whoever took the lead in this story was going to have to be morally grey, and preferably badass.

The night I concocted the idea for the story, the first day of NaNoWriMo mind you, I was actually at an Evanescence concert. Wanting my story to have a darker, slightly goth (but not bleeding black or wearing fetish gear goth) tone, I basically just decided to envision the main character as Amy Lee. Not much of a stretch if you think about it. The anime series Ergo Proxy already had a main character who was the spitting image of Amy Lee and it ended up working pretty well.

Why couldn't I do it?

Mission Statement

I've tried to compose blogs in the past and they've never come to more than a post or two before they become forgotten. Largely I think that's because they were, for the most part, aimless.

So, I'm going to try to head that problem off at the pass this time, and set out a goal for this blog.

The intent of this blog is going to be about chronicling the writing of a piece, currently called "Eastgate", for this years NaNoWriMo competition. The piece itself has been slowly building in my head since last years NaNoWriMo, where I initially attempted to write the piece. Things didn't turn out as planned, and I dropped out of the competition because I didn't have enough of the story worked out to actually write it, and I felt it was a piece that demanded to actually have some thought put into it.

So, I've worked for a year, starting and stopping, outlining and brainstorming, all in an attempt to make this story work. It's gone from a story about 2 people to a story about 7 people. It's gone from the intended first book of a trilogy, to the first book of nine. I've gone from directly ripping off Tolkien to using his frame of thought as a spring board for a new world. The Tolkien ideas are still there, but now they're a part of a new tapestry.

Was it worth stalling? I think so. I think that the story now is a much stronger idea that it was this time last year. Then again, this was an idea that I only came up with on November 1 of last year.

Anyway, this blog is to chronicle the things that are going into this story. I will post as I flesh out characters, or see scenarios go in different directions than they had before. I will not post pieces of the story, and I'll try by best to avoid lots of specific story spoilers, because frankly I've found that keeping the story to yourself on the first draft helps you get through it.... it also helps keep the tiny insecure critic in the back of my head from overrunning the story.

So, here we go....