Short post - epiphany!

I had an epiphany as I was walking home tonight and thinking about the UFPE re-write, which I decided I'm going to do without referencing what I've already written. Or at least, without having printed out pages beside me during the re-write. I realized it's been almost a year since the UFPE was born, and it's evolved so much during that time.

But that's not the epiphany that gave this post its subject line. I was thinking about the Book of Might Have Beens and the Vol. 1 re-write, and I realized that the prologue to the Book of Might Have Beens shows that Bad Guy's early life is a lot like MC's. In fact, Bad Guy is sorta MC's life gone wrong, or hers is his life gone right. They don't line up perfectly, but they have a lot in common.

They: ran away from home, were isolated from their communities and the world at large, found nice people early on, met up with a specific character (I may have mentioned this before), wanted to learn about their heritage and the larger world... I think there were others, but I've forgotten them for now.

However, MC wasn't able to share in her family's privilege in the community, while Bad Guy did share in his family's disgrace. MC ran into mean folks, in the form of Seaton, while Bad Guy had almost uniformly good experiences, or at least uniformly un-bad ones. MC doesn't know anything about her ancestry early on, while Bad Guy does; his quest is more to understand his people. MC is a charming young lady, though she doesn't know it, while Bad Guy is awkward and shy.

The parallels were very interesting to think about. I can't tell if I just wrote them that way because they're such fantasy tropes, or if I was subconsciously being clever. Perhaps it's some of both! I love that their lives followed such a similar path early on and led them ultimately to such different places - Good and Evil, that is.

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!