I’ve surpassed my wordcount from last year. That’s not saying much, and seeing as it’s the 10th day, I should have double what I have now. But I’m continuing to learn new things as I go.
Characters have changed, people are more interesting, there’s an actual villain instead of a mysterious monster attacking people. So far, so good.
Trying to write Fantasy is interesting. You have to sometimes explain things instead of just diving in and going “Well, he used a Scrifflenob on that pack of Gorthinlags” and then have every character react accordingly. Sure, the characters may know what ‘Scrifflenobs’ and ‘Gorthinlags’ are, but readers don’t. I always feel this urge to explain things, but I don’t say you have to. Anyone who has read classic science-fiction has run into the whole “Well, the author isn’t going to explain what the hell this is so I’ll just have to pretend I know what’s happening.” Basically, you get to act like me when I have to hear my friends discuss fantasy football or baseball. I just chime in with “SPORTS” and “The rest of the world calls American Football ‘soccer.’”
Ahem.
So yeah. It’s not like writing modern fiction where you don’t have to go into detail about an airplane or explain the laws of aerodynamics. People already grasp a knowledge of things that exist. But when you make things up? Well, I don’t want to be that guy who says “oh, this happens because MAGIC!!!”
Tonight, I had to explain a type of magic spell. And then I had to explain why it didn’t work on one person. I think I accomplished it rather well, considering I did almost 0 world-building since all of my notes are character history and monster descriptions. But so far, my magic seems to not be a direct ripoff of anything specific. We’ll see when it gets there.
By the end of this, I hope to god I don’t realize that I just rewrote jedi into wizards.