Story idea - revelation!

As I am writing the next scene of the much neglected UFPE vol. 1, I had a revelation. The fellow leading the troupe of performers FMC is about to join is going to be the same guy who inspired MMC all those years ago at the carnival. This is just too delightful. I'll have to write that guy younger than I had originally intended, but that's okay. Or maybe he's one of those fantasy old men who is born at age sixty and never ages from there.

Story element - free cities

I'm writing with friends right now, and of course I decided to work on the UFPE. There are other things, like the as-yet untitled story of Jemma, that are begging for some attention, but sadly, they seem unlikely to get it anytime soon. Today I'm working on an outline of the rest of UFPE Vol. 1. The second-to-last setting of the novel, I've decided, is going to be a place with the working name "Shore City." Simple, but accurate.

As I was outlining, I thought to myself that perhaps Shore City should be a city-state. It would be a nice change of pace from the kingdom that covers the rest of the continent, and for various reasons they are very popular in fantasy. They're often written as a sort of pre-modern Las Vegas-meets-New York City, where exotic people and fashions and foods come together to create a riotous clash of international color where laws tend to be lax in the extreme. And next to the picturesque little villages where much of UFPE Vol. 1 takes place, I'm anticipating that these cities will be a lot of fun to write.

I'm envisioning that the entire west coast of the continent is a string of city states, all loosely allied in case the king tries to annex them again. Oooh, and this works especially well since I've been imagining the Mage Towers on the west coat. Maybe they lend some of their mojo to the defense of the city states - the only interference they permit themselves (and that they are permitted) in the political realm.

The major city states of history range from ancient Greece to Renaissance Italy to modern-day Singapore, all of which conjure up exciting imagery in their different ways. It might be really fun to base the different cities on these different eras - maybe the northern ones are more Greece-like, the middle ones more Italy-like, and the southern ones more Singapore-like. The Mage Towers particularly would blend in well with the Greece-like atmosphere, I think.

So I should get back to the writing, but this struck me as such a fun idea that I had to post it here. This league of cities needs a name. Ahh, maybe a constellation. Let's see... the continent is shaped vaguely like South America, which means that the the west coat curves outward for a ways and then descends in a more-or-less straight line down to a point. So it's sort of a backward question mark. A scythe! So the cities need a dramatic, fearsome name to warn the king (well, duocracy) not to mess with them. I think collectively they call themselves the Ten Notches of the Glittering Scythe. Very nice - and very useful for word count.

I should think about how this affects the Book of Might Have Beens. Surely the Glittering Scythe will have something to say about L! Or not? They might like the idea of a weakened kingdom, after all.

Progress - Book of Might Have Beens

UFPE continues on, this time in an entirely new medium. Yes, I have officially begun the comic. Right now, I'm writing the script for it and drawing a stick-person version so I have a vague idea of what it should look like, one day. I don't think it would be terribly interesting to copy it wholesale here, but I know - I'll give the captions for the first page (which is all I have completed so far). There are eight panels, and the captions say:

#1: Carnivala Floriena. They say Lady Fortune and the Lord of Love descend from the stars to dance with the farmers on this night.

#2: If they did attend, I hope they did not notice how badly I fouled my steps.

#3: After I was spun through three jigs, I begged my leave. My head continued to whirl as I looked out over the unending crowd, spilling out into the village green like a flurry of starfliers.

#4: I had never seen such activity, nor such crowds. People jostled me with every step, and my ears rang ceaselessly with the raucous cries they raised.

#5: I saw a man swallow his saber, and I waited with mounting horror for the silver blade to pierce his throat from the inside, to release a crimson fountain. Everyone else just laughed.

#6: Of course, he was perfectly fine.

#7: I spoke to him, after. He smelled vile, and I could see weeks of dirt caked into his flesh.

#8: All my life I had been told I was one of them, yet never before had I felt so utterly lost.

The MMC is quite the sympathetic character here - no trace of the villain he is to become. Even though my drawings are just stick figures, I'm very much enjoying glancing down at the page and seeing what I've created. I don't have the words drawn in, but I can follow what's happening without them. All in all, this is very exciting.

Short Post - character idea

Now that school is winding down for the semester, I'm hoping to get back into this blog more regularly. I'll especially try to keep updates coming about the status of my UFPE "Book of Might Have Beens" scheme; I've never tried to write in the comic script form before, so it's more than a little daunting. But it'll be a long time before I have three months of evenings free again, so I'm determined to make the most of it!

Briefly, I just finished reading a wonderful book, The Remains of the Day, about an English butler reminiscing about his career and things. It made so much of an impression on me that I'd like to include a character like that in the Book of Might Have Beens. He (or she, I suppose) would appear in the MHB where FMC lives in Prince Seaton's palace as part of his harem. Of course, for the purposes of the UFPE, the butler character's stiff-upper-lipness has to be exaggerated for comic effect, and I feel almost guilty about transforming such a well-done, touching character into a parody. Not too guilty, though; it really is a testament to how marvelously the author developed the character in a pretty short book.

So, the butler! This person will appear at first as a very stiff, almost heartless sort of person, but s/he will probably end up perfoming some very valuable service for FMC along the way, rather like the innkeeper (whose name I've forgotten) in UFPE Volume I. As I think about it, this could be another theme of the UFPE - love is already an important theme, so why not expand it to include charity toward our fellow human beings? It's the kind of thing the Secret Society would never count on, certainly not something as toweringly monumental as Destiny.

This has been a more productive post than I had imagined when I started. I have a new character and a new theme!