Dust manderings
Jun. 29th, 2013 11:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardThe problem with traveling right in the middle of a chapter (or otherwise taking an extended break for one reason or another, but traveling usually gets me the worst because it's so exhausting all around) is that I end up not writing for a couple of days on either side of it and as a result completely lose the flow of what I was doing. If at all possible, I prefer to have a chapter done before I take off, so I can (a) start with a clean slate, (b) have beta comments or feedback (depending on whether it was a draft or a final) to come back to, or (c) all of the above. This time I was in the middle of a chapter -- 4.8K in, which means I'm sideeyeing it worriedly, tallying up the stuff that has to happen in this chapter arc, and calculating the likelihood it's actually going to turn into two chapters instead of one (right now, too close to call, but I have a bad feeling about this).
I was trying to orient myself in the narrative and came up with this (from Twitter, slightly tweaked, in brackets):
'So let's see, I had a ghost tiger, a king of thieves, a god [in the early stages of] apotheosis, and a dozen enslaved dwarves locked in a room together [on an insane sentient island amidst the ruins of a long-destroyed castle that's being cannibalized for the temple of a foreign god]...'
'Wow, when I put it like that, it kind of sounds like Dust may have skipped jumping the shark and jumped straight to jumping the kraken.'
'And that combo of things isn't the craziest thing that's supposed to happen in this chapter.'
This is an interesting chapter, or set of chapters including the preceding pieces of the murder island arc, because it's got the highest number of fantastical elements anywhere in Dust so far -- and I would actually argue that it has the highest number of fantastical elements anywhere in Dust period, including the half of the story that hasn't been written yet and including, yes, the climax and resolution of the overarching plot in Dust III, since a fair bit of that is going to spin off what happens in this set of chapters. But I can't say for sure because that hasn't been written yet and my writing constantly surprises me -- while the big, um, twist? I guess it kind of is, I don't know if it's predictable or not because no one has predicted it yet -- anyway, the big twist of this set of chapters was planned out from pretty early on (I can't remember how early, but at least a couple of years, though not back to the very beginning, and I don't think it was originally supposed to happen at this juncture), but one of the other things that's going to come out of this arc is a fairly recent development. But both of those are related to a plot arc that's been kicking around since the very first chapter and which resolution (the very end of Dust) I finally worked out in the past few months.
This is a really interesting series of chapters to write (am I overusing the word 'interesting' here, heh?) because it was, actually, supposed to only be one chapter, and it was supposed to be creepy, but not as horror-movie creepy as I've been trying to get it because it's been taking some weird, unexpected twists. And of course it's been going much further than I originally meant it to go -- part of that comes from introducing the dwarves in Dust 32, of course, but I don't see any of this as a bad thing. And the creeptastic stuff is necessary for the overarching plot. And some of it goes back to my pre-Dust stories, including The Bone's Prayer. Let me just say, of all my OCs (and I have fairly elaborate charts to keep track of them), I've missed writing the members of the Golden Age Narnian Royal Guard the most. It's been a while.
Wait, shit, damn, I was supposed to be writing, not writing about writing! Here, have a non-spoilery snippet:
“I can explain,” Elizar says, kneejerk, as soon as the tarkaan’s gaze settles on him. Then he pauses and considers. “Well, all right, actually I can’t."
I was trying to orient myself in the narrative and came up with this (from Twitter, slightly tweaked, in brackets):
'So let's see, I had a ghost tiger, a king of thieves, a god [in the early stages of] apotheosis, and a dozen enslaved dwarves locked in a room together [on an insane sentient island amidst the ruins of a long-destroyed castle that's being cannibalized for the temple of a foreign god]...'
'Wow, when I put it like that, it kind of sounds like Dust may have skipped jumping the shark and jumped straight to jumping the kraken.'
'And that combo of things isn't the craziest thing that's supposed to happen in this chapter.'
This is an interesting chapter, or set of chapters including the preceding pieces of the murder island arc, because it's got the highest number of fantastical elements anywhere in Dust so far -- and I would actually argue that it has the highest number of fantastical elements anywhere in Dust period, including the half of the story that hasn't been written yet and including, yes, the climax and resolution of the overarching plot in Dust III, since a fair bit of that is going to spin off what happens in this set of chapters. But I can't say for sure because that hasn't been written yet and my writing constantly surprises me -- while the big, um, twist? I guess it kind of is, I don't know if it's predictable or not because no one has predicted it yet -- anyway, the big twist of this set of chapters was planned out from pretty early on (I can't remember how early, but at least a couple of years, though not back to the very beginning, and I don't think it was originally supposed to happen at this juncture), but one of the other things that's going to come out of this arc is a fairly recent development. But both of those are related to a plot arc that's been kicking around since the very first chapter and which resolution (the very end of Dust) I finally worked out in the past few months.
This is a really interesting series of chapters to write (am I overusing the word 'interesting' here, heh?) because it was, actually, supposed to only be one chapter, and it was supposed to be creepy, but not as horror-movie creepy as I've been trying to get it because it's been taking some weird, unexpected twists. And of course it's been going much further than I originally meant it to go -- part of that comes from introducing the dwarves in Dust 32, of course, but I don't see any of this as a bad thing. And the creeptastic stuff is necessary for the overarching plot. And some of it goes back to my pre-Dust stories, including The Bone's Prayer. Let me just say, of all my OCs (and I have fairly elaborate charts to keep track of them), I've missed writing the members of the Golden Age Narnian Royal Guard the most. It's been a while.
Wait, shit, damn, I was supposed to be writing, not writing about writing! Here, have a non-spoilery snippet:
“I can explain,” Elizar says, kneejerk, as soon as the tarkaan’s gaze settles on him. Then he pauses and considers. “Well, all right, actually I can’t."