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Reply Subj: At 02:00 I am not even going to try coming up with a pun here... Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2008 at 09:00:02 pm EDT | |||||||
It occurred to me rather belatedly that I actually had some comments on this series as a whole. As I understand it you're intending the series of works you're doing to join up as a single novel or novella, and intend to adapt the short-form stories you've published here so far into one single narrative, intended to be read as one single entity. Clearly that means some change to the structure (as well as writing the rest of the story), and some serious planning of framework. The basic, but not the only, framework for a book - especially a first book - is the three act play. Part one establishes the characters and situations and ends with either the definition or resolution of a problem. In your case I'd say that's probably the end of the quest for the Belt of Thevros, the conclusion of your original story. But that first portion will now need to unpack a lot of backstory about the characters, and set up some themes you develop later (loyalty, truth, honour, perceptions etc). Because that was the first part you wrote it's the most compressed, and it'll need some serious additional material. From a constructional point of view you'll need to work your antagonists in early on, even if its only a mention. The Thevros swerve is clever, but we still need to know who the real baddies are up front even if we don't know they're the baddies; otherwise it's like a whodunnit that only introduces the real murderer on page 360. The third act certainly ends with a bang, with the revelations and battles of Remaking the Seal. The missing section before that will need to bring all the various character plot points to a boil - and probably a summary - to drag the reader into the resolutions in the part you've already done. But the hardest bit of any three-act story is actually the middle bit (well, once you've actually thought of an ending). This is the part where lots of authors start to wander all over the place, suddenly throwing in new characters and new subplots as they think of them or because they need to pad out a word count. It's certainly a weakness in my early writing, for example in the Atlantis novels. In your case there are a number of things you want to include, including some questing such as the story with the dragon. But for the middle act to have coherence and some internal themes of its own, as the first and last sections will, and therefore to pull its weight, a series of fun encounters won't serve on their own. I suggest that the strongest emotional strand you have in the whole story is the relationship between hero and heroine, and the strongest reader reaction may well be at Orion's brutal ejection from his Order. This is evidenced by the title you've chosen for the story as a whole. This has therefore got to be the centrepiece of your middle act, and could variously appear as the big bang opening with the rest of this section being about the knock on consequences, or literally at the mid-point bringing the Orion/Shadowfire relationship to abrupt relief. In any case it needs to be woven very throughly as the thematic mainstay of your middle section to overcome the problems I've described above. Another issue to cover will be to ensure that Aunt Lavinia, Thevros, and the Other are appropriately defined. In your original writing for a PV audience you had a reasonable expectation that most people would recognise the characters in their different guises (although as I recall not everyone did at first). For a wider audience, and with you needing to seperate the characters from their original derivations, you'll need to find a mechanism to adequately inform the readership of their nature. After all, a lot of the reader's fun comes from knowing who, or at least what, they are, although the cast remains baffled. There's also an opportunity to play up the way you already use Lavinia and Thevros as a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the protagonists' actions. This allows for a break from linear adventuring, keeps the characters involved although they're not "on stage" with our heroes for long portions of the story, and it offers the kind of perspective shift that you write well, letting you play to your strengths. Lastly, the story will stand or fall on the way the Orion/Shadow romance is shown. If we believe it and are made to pull for those two crazy kids then the rest of the story follows on. If we're left with a standard boy-meets-girl-and-of-course-there's-a-romance-becauase-that's-what-always-happens-in-these-kinds-of-stories then the emotional core of the tale won't be there. I therefore urge you to put a lot of energy into making sure that there's real, believable, and evolving chemistry between the two of them. You may recall Wimsey's advice to Harriet Vane about her book's key character in Gaudy Night. Good luck with the ambitious endeavour. | |||||||
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