As I mentioned last week, I’ve put Planes Shifter on hold, and picked up Kindling instead.
Kindling (KFTF for acronym purposes, since K is a bit short) was my NaNoWriMo project last November; mostly because I wanted to write an urban fantasy. When seeking a story to tell in the urban environment I knew best (Brighton), I turned to the myths I’d grown up with.
My favourite books as a young reader followed tales of wolf-gods Tor and Fenris, and the stories surrounding Amazon tribes involvement in the Trojan War. Something about the characters of myth just have an ethereal quality that includes magic as part of their mundane.
So, I picked a few characters from Norse myth, and deliberately chose a ‘story’ I didn’t know very well. From my limited research, the entire basis of my information about Raganarok comes from ten stanzas of two sources (Poetic Edda and Prose Edda)– which leaves me a lot of lee-way to create a 100k story, melded to a modern-day setting, and my own (somewhat) mortal main character.
Considering this was a fairly unplanned NaNo project, I’ve jumped back into it and already proof-read the first chapter, which was surprisingly well-written. The world is a little shaky, but the characterisation of the two people currently introduced are fairly solid for a first draft.
The plan is to edit/expand on the 32k currently present, and to edit the plot-list out as I go through. This should give me a good basis of the overall story, which I can then use to identify subplots and understand what the magic system needs to cover. And while I go through it, I’ll be keeping an eye out for anything that needs be improved/changed, based on some of my ‘get-better-at-writing’ books.
The current aim is a minimum of 55 words a day, since this run-through is technically an edit; but I need to add another 50-60k, so fingers crossed I can reach a few hundred words most days.