This scene continued with Cirellio reaching the city of Shiira. It allowed me to describe what he saw as he approached the east gate.

Then it cut to Lord Gazic attaching a message to his avian courier, Matar, who he instructed to fly to Shiira.

Quite a short scene! It came out to 533 words.

2496
+533
=====
3029

I suppose I should get to updating the characters and locations pages. Oh, and it looks like ‘Nick Enlowe’ won the poll for best pen name by a landslide. There must be something special about the extra ‘e’ at the end, hm? :)

Onto the next!

Prev: Checklist | Next: Through the gates

Once upon a time, I was feeling down. But I tried to turn a negative into something positive by making a goal-oriented checklist that day.

Now, I’m feeling much better. So let’s see how I did:

X – Challenge 1: Argue with that little voice inside my head that keeps telling me I’ve no business writing a novel.

I haven’t been feeling insecure about my writing at all. In fact, I keep surprising myself with what’s pouring from my fingertips.

X – Challenge 2: Find time for my book. My free time just isn’t cutting it. Not even close. Whenever I get geared up for writing, something always seems to come up that demands my immediate attention. So I suppose I have to make time by sacrificing something, somehow.

While I still don’t have much time for my book, it’s true that I tend to squander my time if I have a lot of it, whereas I make the most of my time when I don’t have much. Chris Baty’s No Plot? No Problem! probably says it best. Read the rest of this entry »

Scene 04 starts out with Cirellio riding through the desert. His horse is named ‘Twice’, a brown palfrey with patches of white fur around his eyes. After days of travelling they are finally seeing signs they’re nearing the desert city Shiira, and the river that runs along it.

The scene shifts gears and goes into a prior event. In Aydomar, in the high office, Lord Gazic (leader of the largest guild of theives in the world) has been keeping tabs on Cirellio and two other men who had left Aydomar days earlier without permission. Gazic is doing some information gathering and has summoned Redmond, the leader of a faction in Brennan, (‘the underground city’ which is on unclaimed land—therefore one of the lost cities which swears allegience to no one) to recant everything that had happened, despite having already read the dossier sent earlier.

He tells of how Cirellio had gotten seized by a blacksmith named Taglaraun, who had publicly accused him of being a thief. This brought much unwanted attention. Taglaraun, ever the showman, insists they duel, hoping it would draw in more business before he turns him in for the ransom. Cirellio came out of it the victor, but the mob of people rushed him and the valuables within the tent. Read the rest of this entry »

Larimosa and her daughter were interesting characters to write. I actually modelled their relationship after how I imagine Marie Antoinette’s relationship would’ve been like with her daughter.

Also, the temple was named after Le Marais in Paris, France.

Scene three’s weigh-in:

798 words.
So the grand total comes to 1881.

And with that, the prologue comes to a close.

And I’m not going back to it until the revision. I’m. Not. Touching. A. Word. Read the rest of this entry »

What a beast scene three has turned out to be! (I’ll explain why in a bit.)

It involves three characters: Asyria, Larimosa, and Dahjal. (And the temple servants)

The backdrop is the Temple of Marais … actually, the rune-covered central chamber of the temple, known as ‘the convergence’, built over where the ley lines of Kassara intersect.

Asyria is a young child who also happens to be the Meiallin, the most powerful mystic in the world. She is practicing the art of projecting herself to the fourth ring from within the convergence.

Larimosa is Asyria’s mother, a giver who has shown her child the less fortunate people of the world (in hopes of showing her how to be virtuous before her title and power has a chance to go to her head), letting her play regularly with underprivileged children and giving Asyria many chances to be generous—something the troubled world of Lura has eagerly taken notice of.

Larimosa recognizes Dahjal as ‘Giver Greggor’, a famous living saint who has travelled the world performing miracles. Read the rest of this entry »

Prologue-

1. a preliminary discourse; a preface or introductory part of a discourse, poem, or novel.
2. an introductory speech, often in verse, calling attention to the theme of a play.
3. the actor or actress who delivers this.
4. an introductory scene, preceding the first act of a play, opera, etc.
5. any introductory proceeding, event, etc.: Appetizing delicacies were the prologue to a long dinner.
–verb (used with object) 6. to introduce with or as if with a prologue. Read the rest of this entry »

The WC on the first scene weighed in at 323 words. Which is good. I predicted the first scene would be much shorter than the targeted 1,000 words per scene.

As I started on the second scene, I found some of my notes were missing! So I did a search and found no less than SIX (!) more data files that managed to elude me. This is a major bummer because I totally thought I was completely done arranging my data into the scene files. Sigh…
Read the rest of this entry »