The original plot for Thayzhul was designed to be played out as a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. When last November’s NaNoWriMo came around and I had no particularly inspired ideas pop up, I decided to try and adapt that D&D campaign and its original campaign setting to a format suitable for novel writing.

I did a decent job on that first pass, at least in the context of NaNoWriMo. The result lacked focus, went on wild tangents, and wasn’t planned out well enough to stay concise, coherent, and on-topic.  On the bright side, I wrote some really good individual story building, character development, and action scenes.  I knew the story and characters had potential, even if the world and mechanics had mostly been stolen from the D&D universe.

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Four months later, I had given up on salvaging that first draft and decided to take the novel seriously as a fully original intellectual property. That meant I had to eliminate elements of the story that had been borrowed from other creators. I started to outline and organize the plot and character arcs, editing out unoriginal content.  This opened a can of worms I wasn’t expecting.  The setting I had crafted for Thayzhul when it was a D&D campaign outline was suitable at all to the story I was writing.

I realized that I was in trouble if I wanted to keep the original map and story arc intact. Huge swaths of the continent and the nations on it had been laid out specifically to work with the Tolkien Archetypes.

For example, I had originally placed a race of master stonemasons in and under the mountains bordering the frozen north. This was an obvious ripoff of Dwarves as envisioned by Tolkien and Gygax. Further investigation actually reveals that even these creative geniuses both ultimately borrowed the idea from German folklore - but since Dwarves are now popular in contemporary fantasy writing, I still want to avoid using them. So I pulled the Dwarves, but they were the reason I had placed the mountains in the north to begin with.  This left me with a peculiar geographical area to either edit, or fill with another race or kingdom.

Luckily, one of the nations I invented for the new incarnation of Thayzhul - the Empire of the Sky - fit perfectly into that area of the map. But I had originally planned for the Empire to be one of the five kingdoms of the west. I had essentially moved the void in the mountains to the west coast instead.

Moving the Empire changed the logistics of the whole story. Empires are, after all, very concerned with borders, territory and expansion. A new kingdom with a new back story had to fill the Empire’s void on the west coast.  The plot outline had to be tweaked. Relationships and tensions in the region were shifted, and led to further map changes, and so on, and so forth.

This is just one example of several cascading, snowballing snags that I had to detangle in order to clean up not just the story, but the map itself.  In writing an epic fantasy, the story and the map are very tightly connected. The importance of distance on relationships between realms, travel and communication times, and access to resources can’t be overemphasized.

On the bright side, all that effort spent straightening up the map and the plot proved invaluable. It led to invaluable revelations in the outlining process and opened up opportunities to expand and elaborate on the story in ways that make it more believable, fun, and relatable.

Although most of this won’t necessarily become clear or even be delivered to the reader explicitly at all, it’s extremely useful to me in writing convincing characters, cultures, and governments.  Having a context on which to base these entities allows me to write them more consistently and believably, even if the reader doesn’t see what went into ensuring that consistency.

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Next time I want to get into the specifics of the nations I created, all of which are now inhabited by humans, and after that I might talk about the history of the world a little bit. This will all be spoiler-heavy, but I want to talk my way through it because it will help me smooth out any rough edges. Any other aspiring or established writers might also find some inspiration in the process I went through building this world, or have something of their own to share.

After wrestling for months with the book I had started, I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to start over again from scratch.  There are a few reasons for this.

For one thing, the book started as a NaNoWriMo project.  NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is an annual book writing event that encourages aspiring writers who’ve never gotten up the motivation to really sit down and bang out a book to finally get it done, and on a time limit.

Though I didn’t reach 50,000 words this year, my result wasn’t tantamount to a loss.  I worked hard, my time spent writing was limited only by my work schedule and family obligations, and I got as much done as I reasonably could, considering a very demanding regimen at work.

But the frantic nature of the event rendered my first attempt at writing even a very rough draft of Thayzhul seriously rushed, unplanned, and haphazard.  Admittedly, a surprisingly detailed outline of the story was already written, along with about a dozen supporting documents on the history of the world, its people, and the way magic, religion and politics worked and factored into the plot.  But when I originally put those documents together, the story was not intended to be written into the form of a novel.

The story of Thayzhul was originally plotted out as a Dungeons and Dragons campaign module.  It was a completely original story, taking place in a completely original setting, all crafted from scratch by myself.  The outline was built to foster game progression within a game setting, with multiple contingencies for player intervention.

On the other hand, the minutia of major plot points surrounding individual characters were not defined in the least; just the overarching plot and some contingencies for ensuring that major world events could still transpire even if the players mucked everything up with unfortunate decisions or unlucky results at the mercy of the dice.  Details of character interaction and combat were meant to be filled in by the actions of the players.

In other words, though the overarching plot of the story was outlined, there were absolutely no details planned for when which hero would do what, or how or where it would happen.

I also knew that I wanted to write a novel in the so-called “fantasy epic” genre, but also that I wanted to stay as far away as possible from the Tolkien archetypes (elves, dwarves, halflings), the Dungeons and Dragons archetypes (resource-based magic, the planes, dark elves), and commonplace archetypal undead (skeletons, zombies, vampires) because these have all been done absolutely to death.  Though well written stories still commonly use these archetypes to entertaining effect, I wanted to come up with something new and entirely my own.

(To be honest, I don’t know if my idea has been done before, but I haven’t personally come across it yet, so at least if it has been done, I can still claim that I came to the idea independently.)

So I ultimately decided I needed to scrap the book and start over so that I could adapt the story to novel form and build up a unique world to escape the Tolkein/D&D/undead archetypes we take for granted in many fantasy stories.  I’ve revisioned all of my historical documents regarding the world, the kingdoms, and the important characters, and I’ll talk about them in my next post!

Chapter 1 of Thayzhul introduces two characters, one waking from sleep with no memory of who he is and how he came to be there, and the other, an old man, revealing that he is responsible for the waking man’s situation, at least in part.  Here is an excerpt from the chapter:

When consciousness lifted the veil of sleep from his mind, the first things he saw were stars dancing on the insides of his eyelids to a song that he did not know.  It was a chorus of many voices, and as he came into the waking world the music was falling from what must have been the climax of a grand anthem, tumbling down into a harmony of low tones that brought warmth to his heart.

He opened his eyes to see who he was listening to and realized that the song was in his mind only, not in his ears, and yet drowned out all other sounds.  The final verse came to a quiet conclusion and faded to silence, giving way to the chittering of birds and the gentle rustling of a curtain in a soft breeze that snuck in through an open window.

The man realized with a start that he felt strangely unfamiliar, and he looked at his hands and feet.  He did not recognize them.  They ran up into arms and legs that he didn’t know, and it all came together at a torso that was trim and quite flattering, but also didn’t figure anywhere in his recollection.  The pale, ashen skin that covered his body was alien, and the straight black locks of hair that fell across his eyes roused no memory.

His first thought was that he’d been struck on the head and lost his memory; perhaps been imprisoned, or maybe even taken to a healer after a terrible accident.  He began to grow uneasy as it set in that he had no idea of who or where he was.

I tried to make it obvious that the music itself, which I spend the first two paragraphs discussing, is important to the story later on.  Music is a central theme of the story, and part of the fundamental mechanic of magic in the world of Thayzhul.  (There’s more to this, but I don’t want to give away too many spoilers.)

The mystery man later learns that his name is Sintur when he meets an old fellow who, under the circumstances, is suspected by Sintur to be a wizard.  The wizard, Mir, implies that he has a part in Sintur’s resurrection, which in turn is the old man’s excuse for Sintur’s memory loss.  Dramatic finish to the chapter!

Obviously there is more going on in this chapter, but I’m hoping that with this revelation, the reader will have pieced together that the old man knows more than he is letting on, that Sintur knows nothing about himself or his past but that he wants to know more, and that the mysterious mind-music in the opening paragraphs is connected in some way to the resurrection.

Thoughts?  Suggestions?  Feelings?  Does it sound like I’m dropping enough plot cookies to keep you interested, and enough mysteries to capture your curiosity?  I’m debating whether I should post the full chapter so you can get a real feeling for it.  It might be useful for the first chapter, though I’m not sure I will want to post every chapter up here… I want to keep some of my secrets until the end.

Today was the day I decided to take myself seriously.  I have been working on a couple of novels (and a lot of smaller side projects) for a long time now.  Both started off as personal projects, but they have developed into stories and worlds that I’m eager to share with friends and family, and eventually with the world via some form of publication.

I haven’t decided what route to take toward publishing my stuff, but hopefully keeping up a blog as I go through the process of writing, editing and putting together revisions will help give me some direction.

I plan to post excerpts / chapter teasers up here, along with progress reports on my various projects.  I may post full chapters and other information about the characters, settings, and storylines that are part of the bigger picture(s).

As all of these are works in progress, I welcome any and all criticism (hopefully constructive criticism) that anyone may have that they want to share with me or other readers.

Hope you’ll enjoy following me as I take off on this crazy adventure!