Traveller's Tales

I obsess over research.

I mentioned this in passing a while ago, but I really didn’t get into how much I really obsess over it; just that I like to do it.  The example I gave then was about researching suspension bridges so I could extrapolate to make a magical one; what I didn’t mention was that I researched for two days solid, and then a bunch of hours stolen from work (er, I mean while I was having lunch) rounding out the details.  Now I can tell you about the oldest suspension bridges, about contests that were held to develop creative means of making them, about components of a suspension bridge, variants, and all sorts of things that, trust me, you probably don’t want to know.

Anyway, I’ve got a new bit of research going on now, inspired by the growing prominence of the Fey in the second book.  Casnodyn was the sole representative of the Courts in the first book (and, as he repeatedly insisted, he was never there in his official capacity at any rate), but their influence is going to be felt much more strongly in the second and thereafter.  Since I’d already used the name ‘Casnodyn’ as a prototype name, and since I know Casnodyn is Welsh, I figured, what the heck, I’d get some more Welsh names to cover the other Fey.

That’s when I found the Enwogion Cymru.

By Monday I’ll most likely have launched right past simply grabbing some Welsh names, sped at top speed through the obsessive loop and crash-landed in a place where I know enough about Welsh historical figures to teach a class.  This, of course, was not my intention, but I’m too caught up in it now to care.

That’s why I love research.

(Yes, I did the above pixelart as a mind break from the research.  I shamelessly stole the pattern from here, so if you want to make a more real-world version than mine, go for it.)

I haven’t talked about the writing for a while.  That’s not because nothing has been happening, but rather because it’s been happening quite a lot and, well, I wanted to actually write, rather than write about it.

So, although I haven’t stopped writing, it’s time to write about it now, because something neat happened and I want to blather about it a bit.

There’s a part of the story where Erik, our leading man, finds himself in Highbranch, a city (if you choose not to tangent on the link) predictably tree-ish in nature.  It’s not a casual visit; in fact, he’s a prisoner there, and finds himself under heavy suspicion and questioning by various and sundry officials, but he’s not strapped in chains just yet, as the people who live there believe in things like due process, at least to an extent.

At one point, Erik is instructed to visit a specific place in order to see some ancient artwork that his enemies claim prove his association with the fellow currently giving everyone fits.  The first time I wrote this bit, I assumed that this location was just your basic art gallery sort of place, and I simply segued to Erik seeing what he needed to see.  It worked at the time, but as part of the overall re-treatment I’m giving the story, I realized there was another way to do this that would have a great deal more impact.

So, rather than letting Erik just bamf into that art gallery, I decided to let him walk there, as I had a scene in mind where his entry and journey to the center of the exhibit was a slow crescendo to panic and revelation.

That’s when the throwaway detail became not so throwaway.

I had never really fleshed out the art gallery concept beyond it being, well, some random art galleryish sort of place, so while I gave Erik and his new friend, Elori, some time to get acquainted on the way, I ruminated on it a bit.  Erik’s antagonist in this part of the story tells them to go see an exhibit ‘near’ this specific place, so obviously the antagonist had known something I didn’t.  So, as I wandered the massive, curving boughs with Erik and Elori, I had this sudden vision of what that place really was.  Suddenly I had a new hook into the world, a new insight into the people, a new subtly impressive place to see and a feeling to share.  I’m endlessly excited when I discover new places in this poor, ruined fictional world of mine, and this no-longer-just-an-art-gallery place quickly became an object of wonder and delight — so much so that the pages that followed were an utter blur.

I won’t give the details away, because a blog post won’t do it justice.  But not only does it give Highbranch yet another level of depth and realism it didn’t have before, it reconnects Erik with the tragedies of his recent past in a way I hadn’t been able to work out before, and it gives he and Elori an awesome, genuine bonding moment they will need in the hours and days to come.

So, moral of blog post, never throw away a detail — you never know what you’re selling short when you do.

Good things happening in my writing world.

Old: In a well-worn notebook I’d hidden in one of the Myriad Boxes I Have Not Unpacked From My Move, Way Back In February*, I discovered a seriously huge number of notes regarding worldbuilding and forward series thinking.  The best part of this isn’t the recovered notes, which alone will be lovely to re-assimilate (and will contribute copiously to the Codex Vocrotha in the weeks to come), but in fact a long-lost character interview with none other than my very favorite arch-nemesis, the Warlord, Paldor Daln.  Expect to see him as exposed and self-referential as you’ll ever see him, in a post very soon.

New: a scene rewrite, for The Grey Knight.  Yeah, I know, I’m supposed to be done with this one, and normally I won’t “optimize” a scene, but this just gives me so much more bang for the page space that it has to be done.

Also new: movement in the agent category.  Nothing definite at the moment but forward momentum is always positive; when I have actual news I’ll report it.

*I’m not actually averse to unpacking, it’s the Finding A Place For The Things Which You Have Just Unpacked process that’s tricksy.

I’m going a little crazy with the Codex at the moment; apologies for the one-sided focus, but I’ve been having troubles with my laptop (again) and I want to make sure all of the ancient information I still have on there gets on the server before the damned drive defecates on the linens again. Though I know it’s not as cool as new chapters in the novel, it’s really getting me stoked; the logical brain loves the connections between events, and the creative mind loves probing the events themselves, so it’s all part of revving up the engine to get back up to speed.

Today, we have new entries on the Golden Reign of the Kâlindur, on the tree city of Highbranch, home of the Solindriel, and, lastly, an entry on the Vasriel themselves — the progenitor race of both Solindriel and Tenebriel — who ceased to exist as a race during their exile in the Adaric Archipelagos.

Starting to think I’m almost ready to get back into the book. Heave! Ho!

Okay, so it’s not exactly writing for the novel, per se, but it is important writing work that I’ve been putting off, and it’s all part of my master plan to get myself properly back into the swing of things. The Codex Vocrotha, you may or may not know, is my work-in-progress repository for backstory, historical information and bizarre trivia relating to my stories. Worldbuilding for me isn’t just helpful, it’s as utterly necessary as the stories I write, the characters who take part in them and the ridiculous levels of research I do to make sure real-life details don’t break the fiction due to my own negligence. An example: if I put in a magical suspension bridge, then I had damned well better know how suspension bridges are supposed to work in real life, at least in a general sense, so when I describe a bridge, a real-life engineer reading my book doesn’t say “Oh for crying out lout, that’d never work!’ but instead says, “Huh, that’s kinda neat, that material would have to have incredible tensile strength, but imagine what you could do with it!” Well, that sort of detail carries over into backstory with me — thus, the Codex.

Anyway, I know, ultimately, that I’m writing fiction, but internal consistency is incredibly important, and setting down the details for the histories, the characters that have come before, the special magics and all that other wild stuff is as important to me as telling the stories that use those details as their foundations. So in that spirit, from the brand-spanking new entries from the Codex, I present the Nightmare Imperium and the Maltharian Kingdom. Both of these feature in The Grey Knight, if historically (in the first case), so they are absolutely relevant to the current stories, but if you start following links I can’t promise you won’t end up somewhere utterly bizarre, thinking to yourself “Where the hell is THAT in the book?” Not only is it possible that I may not know, but there may not actually even be an answer, ever. Yeah, it’s like that.

(And yeah, it looks like a basic uncustomized wiki. Sorry ’bout that. I really don’t have time to customize it myself just now. Maybe soon.)

I think most writers probably are, at least the good ones (not that I’m necessarily a good one — I’m fairly certain you can be psychotic and still be a lousy writer. But I digress). A relaxed view of reality is really sort of a necessity when you’re writing fiction, especially fantasy, but I think some authors allow themselves a sort of private belief in their worlds, something maybe not entirely healthy in the traditional sense.

I had a conversation with my friend yesterday at lunch about the novel. She’s been the one championing my book all this time and she knows more about “my world” than most people — she’s been hearing about it at lunch and over email for probably 3 years now. And yet we get into a discussion yesterday about a really obscure part of the history of this place I write about, and I’m getting into all this detail (letting me talk about my world, by the way, is a really bad idea in general), and suddenly she laughs (comfortably, as she’s already familiar with my personal insanities) and says “Chris, you do realize that none of this is real, right?”

Naturally, I laugh back and answer, “Of course I know that, I make it all up!”

And yet I allow a sly wink to the invisible camera when I say that. Lovecraft once proposed that the dreamlands are no less real than the lands we inhabit, suggesting that both experience and imagination share at least equal importance in terms of our growth, our beliefs, even the means by which our brains store those memories. Ultimately, the difference between the two is negligible, undetectable — memory shifts over time, the events of your youth gain the hue of fondness and lose the edges of sorrow or irritation, becoming no more truth than the imaginary friend you once played with or the monster in the closet. Ultimately, if you travel this path far enough, the question of reality becomes a strange one indeed.

Why do I have such a clear channel to this place that doesn’t exist? Why can I tell you what happened to the Kâlindurian King on Thârin in the year 1523 D.R. as the Nightmare Imperium fell? How is it I can recall the story of Queen Da’Saahn’s betrayer, describe in intricate detail the rotting tapestries of scorched EldomÅ“n or the bizarre phased calendar used by the Daloric Empire to predict weather for its farmers?

Naturally, I made it up. Naturally, the place I write about doesn’t really exist; the characters are shades of my imagination, the histories wild flights of fancy. I do not believe they are real, any more than I believe I may find Superman flying through the skies when I look out my window. I’m obviously obsessed with my fictional creation, and I’m pleased that I can turn my obsession into fiction that, hopefully, someone will enjoy.

Then again, maybe it exists, somewhere near where Randolph Carter took his silver key.

Or maybe I’m just psychotic

I’ve been told several times now that I need to make a map for my novel. It’s one of those tired old cliches that every fantasy novel needs a big scribbled-upon map for people to stare at and refer to during the course of the book. I could be a cynical bastard and say it’s because the names are so wacky and the narratives so poor that without the map the average reader would be completely lost, but as a matter of fact I quite clearly remember a sense of youthful wonder, even magic when I first saw Tolkien’s map in The Hobbit. Part of that magic, certainly, was the undeniable fact that the fellow had a sense for the visual as well as the verbal, but it’s enough to force me to ignore my cynical thoughts and remember what drew me to fantasy in the first place.

That said, Napoleon Dynamite has as much artistic ability in his left pinkie finger as I do in my entire body, so the question immediately goes from one of necessity to one of execution. How the devil to do a thing like this? Truth be told I do have worldmaps, created in the extremely early 90s in Lotus Freelance Graphics, horrid polygonal things that, while accurately describing the relation of cities and landmarks in my world, do absolutely nothing magical in terms of appearance.

Enter the technology of the new millenium, or more precisely the software of ProFantasy Software. Stubborn, bull-headed software that absolutely requires that one do things in ways that appear at first to be utterly counterintuitive and highly annoying, but ways that I must admit grow on you. Having scanned a copy of my old maps, I plopped the bitmap in as a background and then proceeded to struggle with Campaign Cartographer to try and make a decent map out of the thing. After several ruinous attempts and one trip to the net to find a font I was missing (BudHand, if you must know), I’ve finally come up with something that’s not horrid, and at least is a damned sight better than what I’d started with.

So now I’ve got a map, or nearly so. I like the tool more the more I use it, though I do honestly think that some of their design choices are a bit overly stubborn. That said, so am I, so perhaps that’s why it’s growing on me.