A few weeks ago I posted the beginning of a thing — this post a continuation of a thing, tentatively titled Oaths. The title will change if I ever publish this because Oaths just doesn’t roll off the tongue very well, but it’s apt for now. I’ve decided to post excerpts of what I already have written, in the hopes of soliciting some feedback. I’ve already done some heavy edits on what I’ll be posting, but it’s far from a finished product. I, personally, benefit greatly from people giving me their thoughts on what I’m working on, even if they ultimately tell me that it’s shit. Knowing the specifics of why someone thinks it’s shit is a big help. “Why didn’t this work for them? Is it something I should fix, or is it just not clicking with this particular person?”

I think it also might be fun to provide a little information on my mindset when I was writing a particular piece. Maybe useful to all of you, definitely useful to me — I can look back down the road and see where I was coming from. So here is that for this part!

Forethoughts

This excerpt comes immediately after what I posted here previously. What I posted before is what I now consider the prologue. Originally the story kicked off right from there and we saw a child’s journey away from home to find her place amongst strangers in a place she’s never seen before, a place so massively different from her home that she needs to relearn how to live, essentially. Ultimately I ended up not being happy with that. That’s not the sort of person I am, writer or reader. One of my criticisms of The Farseer Trilogy was that the first half of the first book was completely dedicated to setting up the world Fitz lives in, and that wasn’t terribly exciting. Informative, yes. Exciting, no. I realized that I was repeating exactly what I didn’t like about those massive fantasy tomes: too much exposition for too long.

I scrapped all of that, kept the initial scene as a prologue, and restarted the story with the child already a young adult, living in this new world and accustomed to its ways. Essentially: she’s the same brave little girl, but she’s grown up, been through boot, and been exposed to What Lurks Below(tm).

Enjoy!

Read the rest of this entry »