Making my way through the world, one word at a time.
Unfortunately I did not quite finish my book. I was able to make an huge amount of progress. I went from serially adding chapters to elongate the story putting myself further and further behind to knocking out close to seven chapters. The rest of the book should move quickly as I have the ideas ready and some of the chapters already written.
I may not have been able to get the book done in November due to my procrastinating nature but my hopes are that it is done before 2018.
Against all odds I have stopped adding chapters and I can finally get to finishing up the story. I am down to 12 chapters left to write plus and epilogue that I have already written to set up further for the next book.
This significant only on the grounds that for a moment I felt like I would never stop adding chapters because I never wanted to be done. Until I remembered this is the first book in the series and I won’t be done with these characters for quite some time. I am ecstatic that you will all be able to read it soon.
As a student of history and a fantasy author this question has plagued me with every sentence that I have written down. Can I make my world fantastic and still make it believable in a sense of historical and real world function?
I believe so but it requires being present while writing. It doesn’t require a medicine degree to know that a sword slash across a body is close to fatal or that if one person is fighting an army they probably are not going to survive that fight. It has been historically done but only in desperate times as a last ditch effort to help other people out. Not as a method of combat.
I have to remind myself of tactics a lot since my main characters are quite outnumbered even with an army. So they use terrain and surprise to their advantage. It’s a bit of a challenge because I play barbarian in D&D mostly so I enjoy the run in and smash type of fighting, but I’ve been good so far with making it more methodical and thought out so that it doesn’t seem that my characters are magically surviving because of plot armor instead of combat prowess and intelligence.
I am curious as to how other authors do this. I know George R R Martin does similar things (with the exception of Battle of the Bastards). Do you as an author keep conflicts more one on one? Or do you go with the amazingly powerful lead character? Please tell me as I am very curious.
Alright, so here it goes. Public commitment to actually finish my book by the end of this month for NaNoWriMo. Wish me luck, and I hopefully won’t let y’all down.
Grayson C. Beane 