The Basics

All novels start with a premise, a "What if?" In this case, my premise is "A young man becomes a ruler of a country in peril from within and without and must use his skills to not only hang onto his own life, but his country."

 

Here’s what I do know: This novel is the first of several under the umbrella of what I am currently calling the Death Throne Saga (Like everything else in this project, that is subject to change) and is tentatively called The Thief King. I don’t know how many books, or what occurs in them at this point in time.
Now, what genre of novel?
　
I’ve decided its going to be a fantasy novel. Not high fantasy, per say, more like mid-level fantasy.
Now, a few thoughts:

 

• Magic: While there is magic, but it isn’t going to be the central theme of the novel. But I will have to figure out how magic does work in this world, so even if there aren’t a lot of magic spells being thrown around, when they are, they are consistent every time. Maybe there’s one form of magic. We’ll see.
• Fantasy creatures and races: There will be fantasy creatures, like trolls and other things like that, but at this time, there won’t be dwarves, elves, orcs, or other Tolkin-inspired races in this novel. For one thing, they are common, fallback races that need little development but frankly are overused by fantasy authors. As of right now, I see three human-based countries central to this novel’s conflicts. That doesn’t mean this world doesn’t have any fantasy races, but I want the basics of this world built and solid before I start adding new races to it.
• Technology: The Middle Ages-based fantasy era have been done so many times, I decided to raise the technology level to 17^th -18^th Century levels. It means researching the that time period and seeing what was the norm for that era and tweaking it a bit. For example, I have an idea for a flintlock that can shoot more than once before it needs to be reloaded. That means taking a look at how a flintlock is made to see if my idea could work.

I can’t limit myself to one period in time or area when it comes to technology. If I find a good idea from 16th century Asia, I will use it somehow.

But there are many questions I need to find the answers for, as part of the creative process:

• What sort of world is it, climate-wise and location-wise?
• What religions are they and how much impact do they have on the characters?
• What form of government are there, and how strong are the rulers?
• What are these countries histories, and what effect do they have on the people, places and events from the book?
• What military does each country have and how large and useful is it?
• What sort of culture do these countries have, and how much of an effect does it have on some of the questions above?

As you can see, it isn’t going to be easy to come up with this, but it’s hopefully going to pay off in the end.

More later!

Craig

Purpose of this blog

My name is Craig Reed and I am a writer.

Well, I like to think of myself as a writer. Whether or not anyone else thinks I am is up in the air.

I have been an avid reader for about the time I was four, more years ago then I care to remember. Over the years I wrote fanfiction, mostly in anime and Battletech. But I’ve finally decided to take the big plunge and write stories set in my own universe. I have had some success writing stories for the Battlecorps site (Sixteen E-published stories as of this blog), but until things get straightened out with the Battletech novels, there’s no way I’m even going to get a shot at writing one.

I have a couple of partially completed urban fantasy novels done, one I wrote for the NoWriNoMo event in November (I managed 42,000 words before a looming deadline with a Battlecorps story forced me to chose, and I chose the short story). But this isn’t one of those. I expect I will take what I learn from this novel and apply it to both of them to get them back on track.

So, it’s time to branch out and see if I can write that novel, for real. That’s the purpose of this blog, to chronicle my efforts, from start to (hopefully) the end of of the project. I expect that it will be part progress journal, part bitch and moan session, part kick in the ass, and part cry for help....

I have never sat down and planned out a novel before. I tend to write my fanfiction "off-the-cuff", with frequent consultations of source material. But there is no "source material" for me to support me, but what comes from my brain. To do that, I have to plan this out before I can put one word down of the story.
I expect this to be a journey. Maybe not a quick one, but a lot of what I do for this first novel is going to be trial and error. If you read this, maybe you can learn for my mistakes, or offer help when I hit my head against a wall.

Willing to come along?

Craig

Test blog

Testing things out....