Getting back on the Horse

So it is time to dive back into the writing I have been putting off for such a long time. Nearly a decade ago, I self published a novelette on Amazon and Smashwords called The Stolen Throne. A few people even bought it. I thought it was pretty good.

I wrote this as the first part of a four part fantasy story that tells of the overthrow of the heartless monarch of Avalon and the events and allies that are recruited to redeem the throne and restore his line with a more just successor. It was conceived as foundational to a series of present day urban fantasy novels. I saw this as my Silmarillion. Yeah, grandiose and arrogant, I know.  I managed to get the first one written and it clocked in at around 10,000 words. I started by creating a history where the Elves from Hy Brasil considered the indigenous populations of what would eventually become the British Isles as their subjects. I conceived of a war of conquest lead by a grieving young Elven king bent of avenging his parents deaths by putting all of the isles under his boot.

When I started this over a decade ago, I was convinced that I could not tell the modern story without knowing where our legends of magical creatures; Elves, Dwarves, Selkies, and all other manner of Faerie kind came from. I felt I needed to define how magic used to work so I could then explain why it is so uncommon in this dirty and modern urban setting. I made a timeline that spanned nearly 100,000 years. It included no less than 20 Elven kings and their offspring, and half a dozen internal wars on Hy Brasil. 

I conceived of a specific magic system that dealt with manipulation of the invisible Aether that permeates all of creation to manifest new realities. This felt way too powerful to be in the hands of all my magic wielders so I created a second system that dealt with a sort of lesser hedge magic that focused on more of a quantum physics, multiverse theory and the manipulation of probability to shift effects into the users reality rather than actually create them. It all seemed perfectly logical. I needed this stuff. If I was going to refer to some ancient battle or put some arcane principle in the mouth of a modern sorcerer, I needed to know it.

So I built it. The stories did not come. I had written what I thought was a good opening for the second novelette Pact with the Wood Witch and included it as a preview in the original release of The Stolen Throne. It was a flashback to those days of yore and established the motivation for the conquest. But it was boring and detracted from the current, higher tension plot of the coupe to overthrow that same king four centuries later. It was so removed from the current narrative that there was no tension. No urgency. It was, in a word, dull. 

Back to the drawing board. So I decided to continue the plot that was more contemporary to the first story. I chose to expand on how the actions of the rebels affected the rest of the realm and the King's children and brother. This necessitated that I expose more of the breadth of the uprising and add new locations and allies as well as foes. I even created a unique Elven racial trait that allowed me to introduce a subplot of marital infidelity. This all fit into about 8,000 words. That was too short. From the start I had committed to approximately 10,000 words per novelette so when I had told the whole story it would be almost a short novel. 

In the back of my head, I still wanted to tell more of the story of the conquest, and maybe that would be two more novelettes and let me deal with the Dwarves and the fantasy trope of animosity between their race and Elves. Maybe I will get to that some day. But I still had the problem of how to end the second story, but not tie everything up. I still had two more novelettes to write. Then it hit me, I still hadn't completely gathered my "fellowship". My elder statesman and his sidekick were still several days journey away from the imperiled princes and their companions. They needed to be together early in Part Three. This necessitated an even greater magic. One as old as the world itself. So I finally finished the second story.  My next task is to do another edit and get it formatted for e-book and release it next year on the tenth anniversary of the original story. I will also release an authors preferred edition of The Stolen Throne at that time that removes that boring pre-conquest flashback.

So what is this rambling post all about, what is the lesson? Avoid the trap I fell into, create only when necessity dictates a need for a solution in your writing. Spending months or even years fleshing out every aspect of your world can even make the writing of the actual story less enjoyable for you as an author. You can lose the excitement of discovery if your entire world is already laid out before you like a text book written by the sages of old. Creating just to create may be fun at times, but it can certainly distract from telling your story. Ultimately, that is what the muse demands. You're here to tell stories. Get on with it!