Wednesday, June 06, 2012

The terrible silence

And so, on Day 5, the Author scowled and tossed 7,700 words aside to the waste bin of his mind and looked anew at the story of a Boy and a Fox and thought: this will be more fun. I will do this. And on day 6, approaching 5000 words, he knew his choice to be Right and Just .

Or: Bird & Jester died. Redoing/fixing the first chapter was a Hint. Getting rid of all the back-story chapters was a bigger hint. The final one was that I just wasn't getting a proper voice for the MC: she just didn't feel distinct enough, and Wren wasn't working at all. In retrospect, some of the built-in parts of the setting too away more narrative tension than they should have; I should have left healing magic in, for one thing. Ah well. We live. We learn. 

As for Boy & Fox, it no longer bears the 'Falling Toward Sky' moniker at all, as the real world main plot/goal no longer exists at all. When the story first began, it was about a Boy from our world entering another, and trying to follow his dead grandmother into the land of the dead: he doesn't find her, loses his memory, and tries to find out who and what he was with the help of a fox and a werewolf. 

Both Boy, Reynard Fox and Bess remain. Nothing else of that plot does. The story has altered itself, plots have shifted and it's less directly a fairy tale and not an allegory for this world at all now. In some ways it's a pity, in other ways I'm looking forward to finding out where this story takes me and if Boy can finally meet the King. 

2 comments:

  1. 5K words in 2 days, which isn't bad. Stealing a few lines and such from the previous version but otherwise everything is gone. Which unfortunately DOES include the 60+ handwritten pages I never did type up. And, sadly, also the ogres cooking and eating the fox, but I do have some plans for a scene like that anyway.

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