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!

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I’ve been working hard to reinvigorate my writing outside of World of Warcraft. As much as I love my work at WoW Insider, I can’t limit myself to that. Starting Nitpixels with a few friends was part of that renewal of my writing, but I’m working on another project as well, which I mentioned very briefly in my last post. It’s a fiction project. I’ve been building this world bit by bit for years now, and every time I take the project up I put a little bit more into it and spend some energy bringing it up to my current standards. What I expect out of my writing now is far above and beyond what I expected out of it four, five years ago. I’ve finally decided I’ve reached the point where I can try to tackle this seriously.

I’m still not completely happy with my writing, especially when it comes to fiction, but there comes a point where you just have to roll with it. I’ve decided to put a snippet of the story here for anybody to read. It’s the very beginning of this first story — the initial few chapters will cover this girl’s childhood, very briefly, to set the stage for who she is from that point forward. Who she is, where she’s from, and why she is where she is.

Enjoy! Or don’t.

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