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.)

So today, I needed to get my awesome go-getting literary agent a copy of the one-page synopses that detail what happen in the second and third books of the series — The Grey Lord, which I’ve mentioned here before, and The Grey God, the third book, which I haven’t.

There is, of course, an excellent reason for me not having mentioned The Grey God before, and that’s because, well, I haven’t really thought much about it yet.  Oh, sure, I knew it was the end of the first big story arc, and it was going to be awesome and have armies and fights and climaxes and heroes and villains and dark evil wicked cool things in it, and I even wrote one scene of it as a prologue to the first book that I’ll probably leave out, but aside from that it was a bit… oh, amorphous, I suppose.

Anyway, I had a one-page synopsis already written for The Grey Lord, and it wasn’t even all that bad, so I sent that along quickly with a modicum of spit and polish (light on the spit).  I was delighted to discover, as I went through my files, that I had also dutifully written a one-page synopsis for The Grey God at around the same time as I’d written the one for TGL.  Eager to send it along, I popped it open to see what I’d come up with, and immediately saw that it was Cack.

The reason it was Cack, of course, has something to do with not having thought much about it yet.  I’d even go as far as to say that it had a Lot to do with it.  Quite a lot, in fact.

So that’s what I’ve done, from mid-afternoon until, well, about twenty minutes ago: I’ve thought long and hard about The Grey God, and ultimately come up with some stuff I really like.  New places to go, new things to see, new research to do and, most importantly, some great conflicts to mark the end of this particular cycle in the story.  Hopefully, I’ve also come up with a one-page synopsis that is not only Not Cack, but is also a reasonably good representation of where I want to take the story and how I intend to get there.

So that was my day, which was awesome, providing yet more circumstantial evidence that I really do enjoy this writing thing.

As for the reasons I’ve been away for a bit, I’ll cover that in a later post.  Not quite ready to talk about that other stuff yet, because I’m superstitious, but I’ll get around to it.

Between laziness, multiple crises and my lovable online addiction, I haven’t done much in My World(tm) lately. In some ways, this is bad, because I need to figure out exactly where I left off on book two. Although I outline (and had already done so extensively for The Grey Lord), I don’t write in a linear fashion, so there’s bound to be some confusion as to how exactly I was meaning to get to point G from point D, when point E was already taking me towards point J. That sort of thing. If it sounds confusing with letters, it’s much more so when there aren’t any, so it’s going to take some thinking to work out exactly what the hell is going on.

In some ways, though, this is actually pretty good. In between re-reading the parts of the second book that are already done, I end up questioning my original assumptions about the story, inserting my characters into alternate scenes and seeing if the story plays out better in other ways. There’s also a bunch of research to be done (speaking of which, does anyone know the smallest possible size a wood molecule can be and still be large enough to connect in a sheet? I’m sort of using this chart as a rough guide, but I’d like to know how much I can reasonably shave off from the thinnest bond size. It doesn’t have to be sturdy or even cohesive outside of another supporting structure, it just has to be thick enough to be technically a sheet of contiguous wood), so the left-brain right-brain interplay has caused a lot of interesting daydreaming, and from the daydreaming there’s some great new ideas popping up to fill in the blanks. Feedback loops are fun!

I guess that means that I’m revving up again. That’s good. It’s not “writing every day” good yet, but it’s definitely getting there.

(PS, after some more research it looks like I’m probably in the 10-100 nanometer range for my wood molecule, but I’d still like to get a properly informed and educated bit of information, so if there’s any bored microbiologists within viewing range of this blog, please set me straight!)