(no subject)

[shadesofmauve]

It's lunch, but while I just stopped working on a listing of all the youth programs at the Chehalis and Centralia libraries, my head has been all about fantasy epics and authoring all morning.

I'm inclined to say that this is required reading for madalchemist, westrider, and fenmere, because they're good sounding boards and I throw things at them mercilessly to see what bounces off. But Derryck is the only one I'm sure I could take in a fight*, so for everyone else it's just normal lj-cut blather.

Brought to you in part by the three-hundred words or so of prose that NEEDED TO BE WRITTEN after I went to bed last night, which meant crawling out of the coziness and searching for pencils (which artists never ever have to hand). TWICE.


I'm really fond of highly character-focused third-person central. GRRMartin (GRrrrrRR Martin! Heh!) uses 3p omniscient and can't be too one-character-centric, because they're all going to die, but is still gripping and has excellent characters. Now I think I prefer single-character based writing unless the author is damn good (Tolkien wrote 3rd-p-omniscient, but the distance you felt from the characters was all part of the mythos-feel).

I was wondering what Elyvyr(or Elyvaer or Elyvar)'s story would sound like told from Marick's PoV. Might be more dramatic. There would be more mystery (Why the heck'd she do that?). There are things I can't tell from her viewpoint and there's NO way I'm writing what has essentialy become a love story from both viewpoints at once. THAT is far too middleschool--"do you think she like, like likes me?" The reader would feel like the friend passing notes in the middle.

So I asked myself why I was writing a love story anyway, and the answer is that
A. The larger adventure plot couldn't carry it's own weight and was left behind, and
B. I'm lonely and fantasising.
This does not make for fruitful creativity. I can't really get anywhere with Ely and Marrick until I know how they prove his innocence anyway (did I mention it's a love story/murder mystery?).

So where do I direct the narrative creativity?

The man-wolf bestiality epic! Hey, if Martin can have his incest, I can write bestiality. The trick is making it neither disgusting, nor worse, ridiculous. Writing this story has a lot to recomend it--it has a PLOT, the characters are fresh to me, and it takes place far enough in the past that I don't have to have made firm decisions about any of the other stories to write it. I'm not sure quite how to write it though, because it wants to be a graphic novel and I don't get the juicy-posessed-inspiration thing when writing scripts.

I do have an idea how the PoV will work. One of the main protagonists is Brevan, a wolf-warriors. When his actions (or any current actions) are described, it will be standard comic--dialogue and demonstration, but no internal monologue. When there are bits of exposition (like describing the process that makes the wolf-warriors), Brevan will be narrating and the images will follow the story he's telling, not the one he's living. The images might be him if he's explaining the process/event in general and in memory he's remembering himself. Currently I don't think the two styles would be mixed up much. I probably have to throw in other central characters to give it the scope I need, but the retrospective, soul-searching exposition and/or history bits would all come from one guy. The story-telling part might tie into Fenmere's idea of a history/mystery seeker story-within-a-story thing, but only if I think it ads something.

Any thoughts?

Disclaimer - this is all nicely theoretical because I never get shit done for writing anyway.


*I'm afraid of hurting Fenmere, because it might make his fuzzy-cuddly stuffings fall out.