Traveller's Tales

The one day I go to work without my laptop is the day I get bludgeoned by ideas. I learned something cool though; not only can I type passing well on my phone’s keypad, and not only is the predictive text functionality fairly good, but gmail on my phone is a decent way to save text if I’m stuck without any other way of working. Maybe not great, but good enough.

So yeah, I finally got a really, really important scene of The Grey Lord written. Lord ventures a bit deeper into certain themes, and one scene in particular requires some fairly horrific imagery. I’m happy to say that I’m extremely pleased with the scenework, but I’m really starting to wonder how sane poor Erik is going to be by the end of Lord. He’s starting to slip nicely into the role, though, and assuming he’s able to retain his sanity (and, hopefully, a shred or two of essential humanity), he’ll continue to be a great study well through the end of the last of this first series.

Naturally, my inspiration wasn’t constrained to Lord; some wicked ideas popped into my head for The Grey Lady as well. Fortunately, they were a bit simpler and easier to communicate, so I’ve already incorporated them into the puzzle design of Lady. I’d explain more, but I’d be giving away a key element of a new cipher for the game and I can’t imagine that’d be much fun! Just… trust me, it’s evil and diabolical, and I’ve got it all wrapped up.

It’s not a word, actually; ‘synchronicity‘ is, but not ‘asynchronicity.’

According to the link, synchronicity is ‘a coincidence of events that appear to be meaningfully related’ — so I am going to define ‘asynchronicity’ as ‘a jumble of events that appear to have absolutely nothing to do with each other.’

I find writing uses both liberally, both in the narrative and in the development of the story itself. Just like in real life, it often happens that the things you observe (or design) as synchronistic are, in fact, just random events, while asynchronistic events often wind up being very closely tied indeed.

Anyway, the reason I’m interested in asynchronicity right now is because the deep diving I did into Erik’s epiphany has ended up generating some really fascinating repercussions on the deific level of my creation – some fascinating insight into the relations of the Gods themselves, and as a by-product, I’ve unearthed a nasty, conflict-filled (and therefore interesting) reason for something epic and terrible to happen. I can’t tell you what happens, because that would ruin the fun, but I really, really want to. Really.

Instead I’ll ruminate on how it was asynchronistic.

Erik does so many things in these stories, but this was one thing he wasn’t originally intended to screw with at all, let alone like this — I had another scene entirely worked up, at some time much later in the story, using another character entirely (so quite a bit further along, in fact). But this is a fascinating opportunity to forge an earth-shattering kaboom into the tale seamlessly, in a way that’s utterly appropriate, and when stuff like this happens I just can’t force myself to rein in the story. It’s grown on its own, without me, and while ultimately the question of whether I’m the master of this story or simply its reteller is one for another time, the fact is when weird stuff like this happens, you go with it.

It’s not synchronistic, because I made it all up, intentionally — the very definition of an anti-coincidence. I made it up specifically to not be related, and it ended up being related anyway, just not on a level that’s apparent at first.

See, this is one reason I really like writing fiction. It seriously messes with your head. Stuff comes out on paper you never planned, didn’t expect, and that makes you wonder who the hell was at the keys when THAT got written, because it sure as hell wasn’t you. But… hey… err… it’s good… so I’ll just leave it in and assume that whoever did it, won’t mind if I take credit for it.

Anyway; appropriate content for the title I suppose. Sum total: more writing done. Lots more to do, but Lord is looking good.

The vacation did it. I haven’t posted about vacation, and I will, soon, but I went on one, it was basically what I wanted — better in some ways, worse in others, but overall just what I needed — and it reconnected me to my inner world better than I expected it might, even though the amount of writing that happened during the vacation itself was fairly minimal.

I’ve always been obsessed with Erik’s part of the storyline. Not because I’m obsessed with Erik himself, but because this part of the story was really the reason for being of The Grey Knight in the first place: the Birth of a Dark Lord. Knight set up Erik to take the role, but he’s only just realized that the shoes fit by the end of Knight, and he doesn’t really even understand why he’d want to put them on. Obviously, there’s a choice he needs to make during The Grey Lord, a series of decisions that must either align him or alienate him from this new identity.

That moment, that crucial epiphany, has been the subject of my latest efforts. What he does with what he learns — or even what he discovers — I’m not going to give away. But I will say I’m pleased with the results. More than anything, I wanted it to be believable, to be a reasonable, rational series of events that would lead anyone — everyman, even — to that critical juncture.

I think I’ve done that, and I think I’ve thrown in a twist or two that will surprise, horrify or delight, or possibly all at once, which would make me deliriously happy.

More chapters to come. I really feel this one starting to come together. No promises… but I think the dam on Lord is about to burst.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the novel-writing gig, it’s patience. Things move at their own pace; the world is dynamic and by and large does not revolve around me, much as I’d like it to. As a result, I’ve learned that the stuff that’s really, really important to me will, from time to time, collect some dust, and that there’s often nothing I can do about it.

That sounds defeatist, but it’s not. In fact, it’s freeing; acknowledging and accepting that certain things are beyond your control allows you to take the energy you’d otherwise waste railing against immovable objects and spend it on things you can actually affect. And sure, some things demand impressive amounts of effort in order to advance them forward. But it’s important to learn the difference between ‘difficult’ and ‘out of my hands.’ If it’s #1, fight! But if it’s #2, at some point you’re just going to have to let it go anyway… so let it go and use that extra energy productively.

The sequel, in this case, has been the target of my extra energy. Keeping tradition with Knight, Lord tracks a small core group of characters through the story but regularly pops into the stories of many of the secondary characters. Since a lot of my secondary characters from Knight are… well… no longer available, there’s a bunch of new faces, and one of them in particular has been a tricky one to get to know. If you’ve read the first book, you’ll recognize this tricky new character as Grand Duke Talish Kalegor — you haven’t actually seen him yet, but you’ve felt his presence since the first time you got into Kur D’Shan’s head.

Most of my friends know that when I find a new character I go through an interview process with them — I set up a fairly standard historic bio so I know what they look like, what their voice sounds like and where they came from, and then I write a scene where I’m interviewing them, asking difficult questions of them. Usually I do this until they surprise me — and yes, that’s crazy talk, see the ‘I really am psychotic’ post below — but this guy’s different. He just doesn’t crack. He’s completely self-assured, utterly confident, completely responsible, and thoroughly unflappable. When I hit him with a question that should evoke an emotional response, he stops to gather his composure before answering. When I smack him with a difficult critique he acknowledges the flaw. In short, he’s even better at this than I am, and I wrote the longest interview I ever have searching for a surprise that never came.

And once I realized that this, his ability to beat me at my own game, was the surprise I was looking for, he came together for me, and his first chapter is nearly done. I’m pleased to report that I like him quite a bit, which is good because he’s obviously in an adversarial role and I hate having antagonists that are too easy to hate. Originally I was thinking of someone like William Atherton for this role, but now that I’ve figured him out it’s definitely more of an Ian Holm sort of thing.

Back to the sequel, and as for news about Knight… be patient.

Editing The Grey Knight has taken a lot of time. It’s my first novel, it’s a difficult market to break into, and the story (and its delivery) is nonstandard in enough ways that I’ve had to do a lot of thinking, fast and otherwise, in order to take the core concept and make it marketable. As a result I’ve been largely avoiding its sequel, The Grey Lord, because… well, because I’m an anal structure wonk. The first novel has a definite, specific and deliberate structure to it, and solidifying that structure has been as important (if not more so) than any of the other edits I’ve made to the manuscript. Since I want to echo and expand that structure in its sequel, it makes sense to hold off developing the sequel too much until the first book’s structure is set and I’m happy with it.

Well, as it happens, over the last couple of months I think I’ve come to the point where I can be happy with the first book’s structure, so for the first time in ages I’ve done some non-editorial writing — entirely creative and nonjudgemental. It’s just as satisfying as I remember to see characters take over a scene, and it’s both surprising and rewarding to see some of the secondary characters from Knight stand up to the plate and fill in the empty spaces that the carnage from the end of the first book left open. And now I’m glad I waited; I’m fixing structural issues before they cause any problems, taking the many lessons I’ve learned over the last few years and applying them to Lord as I go instead of via multiple rewrites.

And what’s most pleasing to me is that I like this new story. No, I didn’t expect to hate it. But Knight has been in my head for almost as many years as I’ve been alive, and it was the story I absolutely positively had to tell, and once it was told I wasn’t sure what to expect. I love the characters, and the place, and I care a lot about what happens next, but I wasn’t sure how it would gel, how it might compare against the story I’d been trying for most of my life to tell.

If this is any indication I think Lord may do pretty well at that.