Virol and the Doctor part 1

So for my first(ish) post back  I wanted to talk about character archetypes. I had an idea in mind and it was just waiting for me to write it. Then I spent the weekend visiting family because my niece was born and Monday I squandered in typical first world internetian behavior. So. There's gonna be a poetry video. Also, I might post a more truncated post before Monday officially ends if I can.

So about character archetypes, I am going to be talking about two circumstantially similar characters. This may be an exercise I have performed before but it's happening nevertheless.

The more recognizable character is of course the Doctor of Doctor Who.   The other is a man called Virol, my own creation whose public existence only perpetuates in my self-published novella Ashes of Silver.

For those people who aren't familiar with the Doctor (and they do exist) there are two basic aspects of his character you need to know about him. One, that he is very clever. Two, that he is very old. It gets more complicated than that obviously, but that is a boiling down of things that make the Doctor the Doctor, more so than his face for sure.

Just so happens these are the two same important things to know about Virol. That he is both brilliant and ancient.

Now that I've established that I have to go. Next half goes up tomorrow or else very soon.

Pax.

Release Dates and Live Readings

Arenanet announced the launch date for Guild Wars 2 today, which is kind of a big deal.  I'm excited, because now I can tell people when the game is coming out, instead of saying, "This year."  By the way, it comes out August 28.

I've been implying that spending time with loved ones is a blessing and a curse.  On one hand, I get to spend time with loved ones, but on the other I have (or take) much less time to work on productive things like writing or job applications.  I don't really feel like driving around everywhere picking up and dropping off applications when there's guests around to hang with (and beat in Brawl).  This was a particularly strong example of that sort of day.

It happened.  I got to that point in Final Fantasy Tactics A2 where you're forced to take on a new clan member even if you don't want to, and it's a unique hero that can't be sent on dispatch or anything.  That kind of ruins the game for me, because I like my clan's set up, but I can't leave the continent now because that event's just sitting there.  So I guess I'm done with that.  Better find something else to do.  Like write.

Geez, I'm such a slacker.  My eyes, they are rolling.

I did some reading from Ashes of Silver earlier today.  Reading a book aloud is exhausting work, especially for someone who uses his voice sparingly in comparison to most people.  Unless you have something wet on hand for your whistle, talking through that much prose can get pretty dry in the glottal regions.  There's also the wincing I do when my sluggish mouth parts butcher my own painstaking syntax.  Plenty of that.  Or if I emote something wrong.  Or pause in the wrong place.  Nope, not a perfectionist.

Maybe part of my voice troubled was that I was also singing along to Emery before and after said book-reading took place.  When I sing along to good music, I commit a little.

It's a pitchy mess sometimes, to be honest.  I'm not the best singer.  Definitely not the worst.  Somewhere in the middle, where the amateur musicians reside.

And now I have nothing else to say.  It was that sort of day.

-shrugs-

Religion and World-building

When you're creating characters of a different religious philosophy than your own, my best advice is to avoid stereotypes like the Contagion.  And yes, you'll have to read Ashes of Silver to understand that reference.

Here are some examples to illustrate what I'm talking about.  The Believer Who Never Asks Questions.  The "Believer" Who Grasps for Power.  The Ultra-skeptical Non-believer.  The Non-believer Hero Because Heroes Aren't Stupid Enough to Believe.

You may notice that there are people in this life who absolutely fit into the schema presented by those stereotypes.  I don't care.  Reality holds more straw men than fiction is permitted.  I'm also not saying that you can't have a believer with a strong faith or a non-believer who feels strongly about his unbelief.  It's just that you need to be very careful when deciding what a character believes or you can end up with a flat, uninteresting character really fast.

Here's something I've observed.  You can call Boopy Shenanigans if you want, but here it is:  readers get bored really fast with characters who one-note on the opposite line of what they believe.  For atheists/agnostics, that means characters who grapple with real faith issues can get dull because they perceive these struggles as a meaningless facade, and vice versa for people who are (relatively) sure of what they believe.  It's even possible for people in the middle (not willing to discount the supernatural, but not willing to jump off the fence) to lose interest in anything not thoroughly steeped in gray.

Like I said, I could be wrong about this observation.  It also makes writing really difficult, because I would like for my audience to be a bit more general than "Christians interested in reading Christian fantasy fiction."  Because that means the only people who read my books will be the ones who specifically go looking for them, because the books sure as Tartarus won't be found in a secular book store like Barnes and Noble.  At least not in the same section as all the other fantasy.

Another reason I don't want to go down that road is because not everything I write is going to have overtly Christian subject matter.  For example, Ashes of Silver's universe doesn't necessarily have a God (at least not one that the people of Hearthstead are aware of) so the subject of service to Him is kind of a non-issue.  That could be an issue if I let it be, but the world of Hearthstead wasn't exactly set up to tackle those sorts of questions.  My cousin and I have always been a little too light-hearted about Hearthstead to delve into a theological mire in a world created originally as a stick-figure comic.

I want as many people as possible to read my work.  Honestly, the money that would come from that is secondary or tertiary for me.  What I want is the discussions.  The "that was awesome!" and "this made me sad."  I want to see people invested in the stories I tell.  So that may be why I hesitate to launch into heavily theological themes in my writing.  I want to be able to handle it in a way that keeps even staunch atheists invested in the story.

You may have noticed by now that I want to be able to have my cake and eat it too, then maybe have some pie afterwards.  I certainly don't make things easy on myself.

So you can ignore my advice about the religiosity of your characters if you want.  I think I originally intended it for a different purpose.  Namely, that if you are an atheist you shouldn't make believer-characters in such a way as to make them easy targets for an agenda, and the same goes for believers and characters who don't believe the same.  In my own writing life that means I tend to leave atheist characters less explored than I might, because I want to avoid characterizing them in a way that's inaccurate and two-dimensional.

When you're creating a world, it's also important to keep matters of theology in mind, even if that's to explicitly exclude an all-powerful deity from having created the universe.  It's fiction, and you can do that.  Especially if it's fantasy, because then you can explore what a world would really be like without God or followers of Him.  You can also leave the question as open-ended as it is in reality, with great debates going about it.  You can skip out on the wars.  That would be nice, but unlikely if your people are anything remotely like humans.  Then there will be war, whether it's over God or cheese.  Sorry, but that's the cold hard truth.

The more time you invest into the metaphysical makeup of your fictional world, the better-sorted those issues are likely to be.  That's a prediction, not a fact, by the way.  But it stands to reason that since preparation rules in the rest of world-building, it should here too.

Well, that's all I've got this morning.  I've been typing without contacts in long enough, and there's only so much of that to be stomached before I start punching faces that aren't my own.

Ciao.

Don't Try Too Hard to Change Your Fate, You Might Pull Something

I just got back from watching Brave.  I didn't enjoy it as much as I did the Avengers, but I thought it was quite a good movie.  I won't spoil it for people who haven't seen it because, well, it's been in theaters for a day.  You should see it, because it's a Pixar movie and it's beautiful.  There were parts in the beginning that almost set the waterworks flowing just because of how beautiful the world was.  Ugh.

Last night I stayed up till after one in the morning, mostly writing something I won't talk about yet because it's fun to be mysterious sometimes.  If I start talking about it now you won't be able to get your hands on it for at least six months, and I don't wanna cause that kind of itching.

Instead, I'll report my increasing difficulty with creating the space required to finish Talas Ke.  I gotta get in the zone, and getting in the zone is difficult when I allow myself to be distractible.  The solution, of course, is to not be distractible.  We'll see how that goes.

The copies of Ashes of Silver I ordered a couple days ago have arrived, which means that I can start shipping them out to those special cases.  Once again, if you haven't ordered a copy and you want one—further, if you want it signed—get in contact with me and we'll work it out.

I think soon I might set up a new e-mail account exclusively for business related to book stuff.  Again, we'll see how that goes.  If I do that, I will definitely post it up here on the blog.

That's really all there is to say about today.  At least for now.  Have a good night, and go see Brave soon.

Ciao.

Impromptu Holiday

Today was a party day.  Family friends arrived, my brother and his family came over, and my newlywed cousin and his wife came over.  We had good food and good times hanging out, and I enjoyed it a lot.  I am a bit tired, now, though, being introverted and all.  Hopefully tomorrow I'll have some time to spend alone and work on writing or some such.

Also, I have a third reference, so I can start doing a lot more applications!  That's really exciting.

About Ashes of Silver, by the way, if you don't have a credit card and you want the book, just message me on Facebook or Twitter me or something similar and let me know, because sometime soon I am probably going to be ordering a good number of books to sell in person around the Allegan area.  Also, there's the bonus that you can get it signed (if you want).

Like I said, I'm pretty tired, and I can't think of much to talk about with writing today.  I think that's the way things are gonna go when I'm busy, at least until I can get into that routine I said I should get into.  I set my alarm this morning!

But I slept through it.

Maybe if I got to bed before midnight I can do that better.  But I still have that college-kid compulsion to squeeze as much of the day as possible from the end of the day instead of the beginning.  Silly me.  I'm more focused in the morning anyway, I think.  I repeat, I think.  I don't know.  I do know that I tend to do my more involved blogs in the morning.

I also know that I've done my most prolific writing between midnight and five in the morning.

-shrugs-

Music and Silence

So my direction falters yet again as to what I want to say in this blog.  Sometimes time passes too slowly, and sometimes it passes too quickly, but it is always passing.  The stillness of time is only a poetic image to contemplate.

Not to say stillness is nonexistent.  It is.  There is silence and stillness.  In my most chronologically recent novel (the one I wrote this last semester of college), there is a silence so tangible it permeates throughout the entire book almost as a character itself.

I guess there is something to say of that in world-building.  Pacing.  The passing of time.  It's one I have to admit I struggle with.  How many words should I spend to pass the time of the narrative?  Should I spring you forward with a word or fill the space of a moment with half a dozen chapters?  Well, the first is a totally legitimate thing if nothing happens in that time that is important to the telling of the story, but if you're going to stretch time so thin as to make a breath last several chapters, you should probably be writing poetry, or a novel just about that breath.

I can see it being done fantastically, to be honest, but it would take a brilliance you shouldn't just assume you have.

Silence is a motif I find myself writing into a lot of my writing.  One way I could look at this is by noting that my wife has at times compared me to a sea, which sometimes roils and sometimes rocks with waves, and sometimes it is very still, down to the core.

Since writing is among many things a reflection of the writer, I think it honest that I often write the silences into my work.  And who knows, maybe it's leftovers from my musical training.  Sure, you don't play on the rests, but their presence in a piece is as essential as the placement of the notes.

Music is something I don't often address in my writing.  It can be a daunting task to approach the sundry world of music, especially in today's age when so many people have vastly different opinions as to what constitutes music, let alone good music.  But it's also a very strange thing that I don't often broach music, because it's such an integral part of my life.

In Hearthstead (yes, I will keep coming back to this world) the primary people group of the story have little to no music.  Other groups, ancient groups before the dragonwaste, have music ingrained deeply into their culture, but the stubborn survivors in the blasted lands don't sing or play music.

However, there's a character who might introduce these back into their lives.

My wife would love for me to get started on a sequel to Ashes of Silver as soon as possible, but as I said a while ago I've got Talas Ke to be concerned with.  Maybe once that's done (whenever that is) I'll get back to prosaic forms of Hearthstead.  For now, though, I'm going to continue to encourage people to get and read my book, and tell their friends.  Also, job searching.

And I managed to get myself standing in another wedding.  I like weddings.  Especially friends' weddings.  So I'm excited.

All right, I don't have anything else to say.  Good night!

Excerpts From Ashes of Silver

As I said in my update to the previous post, I'm going to release some excerpts from my book to give a taste of the sorts of things contained in Ashes of Silver.  Don't worry, none of these are particularly spoilery (they're from early on in the book).  Enjoy!

Excerpt 1:

‘They call this place Hearthstead.  I was once a stranger to these lands.  

I came during one of the worse summers of dragonwaste,  when  the  dragons  prey  on  the  people because the beasts’ only threats are too few and too disinterested  in  human  troubles  to  bother  cleaning  up their mess.'

--

Excerpt 2:

Someone rapped the door and pushed it open before Xlynx could finish painting the Rune.  The intruder stepped in while taking a deep draw at a pint of beer, one hand pocketed in his waistcoat.  He grinned the whole while, eyes glittering.  Virol.

“Is there something you need,” Xlynx droned, “or are you pestering?”

Virol’s grin smoldered into a smirk.  “Pestering, as always.”

Xlynx narrowed his eyes.  “As that is the case, get out.  I am occupied.”

The layabout didn’t leave.  “I’d love to play historian,” he said.  “Whenever I try it, though, I just end up rambling.”

“I shall be amused later.  Leave.”

In a flash, Virol’s smile faded.  Sometimes it would leave his mouth, but Xlynx had never seen it leave his eyes.  Despite himself, Xlynx set his brush aside.

“I’ve come,” Virol said, “to tell you I’ve bought you some time.”

“Time?” Xlynx said.

Virol said, “Time to untangle snags and gather lost sheep.”

Xlynx smacked his desk.  “You come in here while I am working, telling me you’ve bought me time to count SHEEP!”

Virol chuckled, and just like that the smile was back.  He pulled at his beer.  “I thought you liked cryptic, green-eyes.”

Xlynx stood, casting a small spell which rolled his stone chair back to become part of the wall again.  He started to step around his desk, contemplating how to repay the insult.

“Oh good, you are listening,” Virol said, unmoved.  “But, since I have to spell it out for you.”

He took his hand out of his pocket and held it palm up.  An image of a man in black wielding a pair of knives appeared.  Xlynx stifled his surprise at the spell.  It was a devilishly complicated syntax.  None of the mages in Hearthstead should know of this spell, let alone be capable of it, and never say this perpetually-drinking jester.  But then, Virol always had a surprise up his sleeve.  That was how he’d gotten into the guild in the first place.

The man was familiar to Xlynx.  Marlom.  The Shade.  The Smith.  The inner war of Dark Fire and Blank magic.  

The image flickered, and suddenly it was Hinder.  Xlynx had not seen that man since the Terrus hunt.  A suit of armor walked beside him.  Another flicker.  Aera.  One more—Sahl.

“You’ve only got one of them beside you,” Virol said.  “They have united before, however briefly, and they need to again.  But now you’re all after the same thing.  Rest.

“You cannot rest, Xlynx.  The world outside Hearthstead still moves.  It’s time to stop treating your guild like a desk job.”

Xlynx glared at Virol, but Virol just glared right back.  “Who do you think you are?”

Virol stuffed his hand back into his pocket.  “Far too old, and not nearly old enough.”

--

Excerpt 3:

'For lifetimes, the Empire battered at our gates in the Umbral Valley.  The Ebon sat in safety, laughing at the Endless while our warriors frustrated their might.  We were reviled for this.  

Our darker skin colors, our ever-green eyes, and our bone-white hair were all demonized.  

Every new generation of Ebon saw a more ferocious generation of Endless pounding at our door.  It only made us mock them more.  For their short-sightedness.  For their apish rage.  

The siege of our homeland ended when the drakes came.  In this time of war no drakes, Elemental or otherwise, resided on Hearthstead.  They had their own land across the sea.  According to some accounts, the Elemental Drakes fled their lands because they were hounded by the other drakes of that homeland—drakes that made the Elementals seem unimposing.  Regardless, many Elemental Drakes migrated to Hearthstead and took up residence in the Endless Empire.  It was enough of a distraction for the Endless to lessen their assault on our border.  The Elemental Drakes began to work out a partnership with the Empire that may have proved mutually beneficial.

The  partnership  was  short-lived.   The  Elemental Drakes   were   followed   by   their   cousins   the   dragons.   The  Hydra  dragged  dragons  into  the  sea, the   Dracon   summoned   terrible   storms,   and   the Salamanders  wrestled  them  to  the  ground,  but  there were   too   many.    I   do   not   know   how   many   is   too  many,  but  the  accounts  I  have  read  indicate  the sky was darkened by their numbers, and part of the scarcity of Elemental Drakes today is because of those lost trying to prevent the dragons from reaching the Endless Empire.

You may begin to detect a pattern here.  I made a point of the might of the Endless to give the arrival of the dragons proper context.  The Elemental Drakes fought their desperate battle because the Empire had no hope for survival.

One dragon in particular, Anbraax, led the swarm.  They call him the Demon.  He bested several Grand Drakes in combat to reach the Prolonged capital Vahalla.  While fending off Alacrit the Grand Dracon and Vulcan the Grand Salamander, Anbraax unleashed his fiery breath on the city.  It melted to the ground with most of the Prolonged in existence trapped inside.  They died.

Whenever you hear the curse, “Anbraax’s breath,” be sure to remember that.

By then the Empire was already shattered.  Half of it was gone.  Those Prolonged who survived the pyroclast of Vahalla were scattered to the winds.  Anbraax did not settle with Vahalla.  He flew to Magmell and would have repeated his catastrophe there at the Persistent capital if Atlas had not emerged from beneath the earth at just theright moment.  The Grand Wyrm sheltered Magmell from the blast.  His hide was burned into the earth, but the Persistent capital survived, albeit buried beneath the drake who became a living mountain.

Anbraax was brought down then, by the spells of a mage named Marduk and the earth-shattering rage of Atlas’ mate, Tempus.  Tempus ate Anbraax’s carcass, and the dragons scattered without their leader.  

The damage was done, though.  Atlas was irrevocably crippled.  Tempus curled up beside him and has not moved since.  They are a mountain range now.  Vulcan’s mate was killed in the fighting, and the Grand Wyverns were also grievously injured.  The empire that besieged my people for centuries was crushed in two days’ time.

And where were the Ebon when this occurred?  We used our vast arcane knowledge to hide ourselves.  Not a single Ebon warrior lost his life to dragons.  You should know, too, that my people felt vindicated in this.

There is a reason I no longer live in the Umbral Valley.

If there is a day the name Hearthstead took on its bitter irony, it was that day, when one great city was melted into scrap and another was buried beneath its savior.’

PUBLISHED

Today is the day.  I have published my book.  Also, the GW2 BWE2 starts today, but that's not nearly as exciting.  Because, you know, I have published my book!  I don't want to ask you to buy it, but... please buy it!  Also, tell your friends about it.  Since I'm self-publishing this sucker, the best method for success is word of mouth.  So yeah, tell people about it.  Also, if you purchase my book and you want it signed, e-mail me at braveshield19@yahoo.com or Facebook message me to coordinate that.  God bless you, everyone, and I hope you have as awesome a day as I'm having!

This link will take you to where you can buy my book:
https://www.createspace.com/3894289

In the coming week I'll probably put the link up on this blog, and I'll probably post links to Amazon (and especially the Kindle page for e-reading folks) both here and on my Facebook wall.  For now, though, peace out!

Update:  I figured I might give my blog readers a taste of what you'll find in Ashes of Silver, so in another post I will give a few excerpts of the book.

More Notes on Diction and a Bit of Pontificating

Here I am at the inn, having a little downtime between rehearsal and the bachelor's party tonight.  To be honest I'm a little distracted.  There's stuff happening and it's been a busy and chaotic day so far.

I gave a lesson about diction/word choice, but I should clarify that the two things are not equal.  Diction is all about "how" you say things (a difficult conveyance for writing) and so overlaps with word choice.  That's why I used them fairly interchangeably in my last blog post.

I mentioned that I don't write much contemporary fiction.  That's because I'm not comfortable with my knowledge of how real-world people actually talk.  I don't think I quite have my finger on the pulse of the down-to-earth and the down-and-out, nor can I spin out realistically elitist phrases like I think I should if I'm going to portray the melting pot (or garden salad, if you prefer that metaphor) of diversity that is the modern world.  I'm not spot on with rhetoric and jargon used by different political camps or even the nuances of dialect differences between a popular jock and a band geek in high school.

Some of this is just me selling myself short.  I'm afraid to try, to be honest.  There's higher stakes in writing contemporary fiction, because if you paint an inaccurate picture, people get offended (for the wrong reasons) or confused, or both.  There's also my lacking sense of tact, in that if I get talking too much about what's going on in the real world all my innate prejudices and beliefs all get born out pretty quickly, and I don't even tend to believe in all the things I have guttural reactions to.

For these reasons I've largely relegated myself to the abstracted spaces of fantasy and poetry, where I can create the whole universe and the reader has to learn from me what the words mean—what the world means.  In some ways it's lazy, and it's for that reason that I hope to do more contemporary fiction writing, but so far my fear of research and mistakes has kept me from accomplishing that.

I'm also much more versed in what makes good fantasy good than the ethereal, academia-defined notions (hey look, prejudices!) of what makes good "literary" fiction.  So what I strive for is literary fantasy, which leads me to harken back towards Tolkien, Lewis, White, Graham, LeGuin, and others rather than try to pull the popular (and perhaps less substantive) work of Salvatore, Jordan, Brooks, and Martin.  Yes, I included A Song of Ice and Fire and The Wheel of Time under "less substantive" despite their being epics long enough to kill their writers before they're finished. Arguably, these extensive come from the very fact that these works are popular, but just realize I'm not knocking these guys.  I just want to do something a little different.

I aspire to write fantasy that gets put in the mainstream literary canon.  Yeah, that's a big order to fill.  To do that, I have to be twice as good as someone writing ordinary literary work, because I have to catch the eye of the mainstream audience (incidentally not the majority of readers) from my spot out in left field.  People used to do this all the time.  In my estimation some of the best writers in the last century wrote speculative fiction (fantasy or sci-fi).  Now, some of my fellow recent batch of degree-ified writers may strongly disagree with me.  But they can continue to call fantasy useless and crap and I'll continue to call Hemingway a twit who offed himself because he was too arrogant to age and die with dignity.

So yeah, there's stuff.  By the way, phrases like that one I just used are an instance of diction.  I do it because I want to relate to people, and because I like irony.  I'm a writer, and some say a rather eloquent one, but I know when you just need to relate on a vague level and not get into the boring details with people.  Sometimes I let myself go (like this blog post for example) but that's because I feel comfortable and appreciated.  And yes, I miscalculate.  My own sister checks out on me when I start talking about the fascinating etymologies of words.

I'm a language nerd.  I realize this.  No, I don't need help.  Thanks for trying.

Hearthstead, by the way, isn't one of my more "literary" attempts at fantasy fiction.  It's a bit of a superhero story wrapped in a fantasy shell, which I think makes it super awesome.  Of course, it's also not going to be intentionally subpar writing because of that.  But its themes are a little less esoteric, maybe, than "The Fairies' Game" that I wrote this spring.  Honestly I like it better.  It goes places.  To find out where it goes, of course, you'll have to read it.

Patience, young grasshopper.  Come with time, it will.  Yes, I'm aware that may have been excruciating.  Just move on with me.

By the way, the novel that I hope will be available by the end of this month is called "Ashes of Silver."  I put it in quotes because it's not published yet.  As always, I'll talk more about the book when the time is right.  Yes, I can't shut up about it.  It's my first freaking book ever that's going to come out, and I have a blog where I say whatever I want.  Of course I'm going to gush.  A little bit.  Around the finger I've got plugged in the dam for your sake.

I think that's all I have to say today.  As I said yesterday, circumstances may prevent me from blogging tomorrow, but we'll see how it goes.  Hope your weekend's chugging along nicely.

For now, though?  -shrugs-

(seriously need to think of a better ending thing)