New Worlds

Summer didn't quite last a week but at least we got a few days of sunshine to help prevent a country-wide epidemic of rickets come winter.  With this Monday being decidedly chillier than the last, there was no sitting outside for me today.  Yep, it was back to fluffy socks and hooded jumpers.  Probably a bit excessive for some people but I have been reliably informed that I am in fact a corpse.

The cooler weather did give me the opportunity to type up all of the long-hand work I'd done during the sunnier days.  This managed to perfectly illustrate one of my main problems with long-hand, though: an inability to track my word count.  As is my habit, I appear to have waffled, to the extent that I now need to do some major cutting on chapters two and four as well as the previously-mentioned chapter one.  *sigh*  I hate cutting.

I've also recently starting doing some research for elements I only touched on in book one - namely, witchcraft.  I'm not going full-on Harry Potter, wands and broomsticks.  Although my novel is obviously still fantasy, I want to have the story grounded in the idea of history.  It's easy to do, really - to simply imagine that all that talk about witches and magic hundreds of years ago wasn't down to ignorance and superstition.  To think what if it was true, in some form, and the stories simply got distorted over time.  I love that idea.  There are just so many possibilities.

Building up my own mythology is something I'm really trying to work hard on.  It was easy enough in the first book to gloss over the details because the reader was discovering as much as Rhonda was - that is to say, very little.  Now, my characters need to gain knowledge.  They need to start learning how to gain the upper hand.  And in order for that to happen I need to make my world strong.

It's something I've always admired about the great fantasy works - how those authors (Rowling, Tolkien, Lewis) are able to create such vivid, complete worlds.  We never see it all in the novels, but you can still feel that the details are known, that they're there, just beneath the surface.  I want to do that, to create a world so rich and so solid that it feels real.

Not a difficult goal at all...

I feel exhausted already.