I’m not off to a great start, honestly. Two days of nothing and then I don’t even manage 100 words. The final three chapters of Akasame’s section aren’t going to get finished at this rate, but I’m hoping to turn things around. By the by, those 100 words were in his Chapter 4. I really don’t have that far to go, but I’ve got to actually push on if anything’s going to happen. I’d like to blame the mascot for insisting on my bedtime lately, but even discounting her, there’s several hours that I could be writing instead of playing games. Anyway, I’ll get it done. Stay tuned.

The problem with writing Dwarves, at least for me, is that it seems very easy–far more so than with Elves–to fall into the stock character tropes and never really write the characters as individuals. I tried to avert this somewhat with Garm. In many ways, he is the stereotypical Dwarf warrior, but I made some effort to play with the formula a bit. Garm realizes that being nothing more than dumb muscle brimming with valor and bloodlust isn’t enough to win wars, at least not against an opponent that not only has numerical superiority but also uses its dang head to win battles.

One of the key elements of Garm’s character is his struggle with his upbringing with all its focus on pride and personal honor versus the necessarily underhanded approach he needs to take if he wants his people to actually succeed. I drew a lot of inspiration from Viking culture, where victory by craft is supposedly as valued as victory by might. How true this was in practice is up for grabs, but I used it as a starting point for Garm. The Dwarves lack the might to beat the humans outright, so he had to start using his noodle.

His arrangement with the Church of Holy Light is a relatively recent development. I started thinking about how the Army of Light could actually beat Xorgoth’s flight and I knew that just throwing meat into the grinder wasn’t going to do it. As I’d developed the repeating ballista to neutralize the advantage Corona provided at Kalonis, I had my answer. And by making this arrangement, I also gave a justification for why the notoriously anti-nonhuman Church would allow the Dwarves to return to their mountains. After all, even diminished from the Darklands campaign and dealing with an insurgency by loyalists to Daphne, the Army of Light would’ve had no problem mopping the floor with Garm’s forces.

I’m sure the attentive readers are left to wonder what the Dwarves’ reaction will be when they find that their cities have been plundered in their absence. That does take some of the joy out of their homecoming. There will be consequences, naturally.

It wasn’t until the latest version of the story that I developed any supporting characters for him. I particularly like contrasting the younger, more idealistic Burkur with Garm just to show how bitter and jaded he has become. He’s a man (or Dwerkh, I suppose) who’s lost everything and the only thing that keeps him going is the drive to get his people home and see them flourish once more. Anything that doesn’t directly contribute to this goal goes to the wayside, as seen with his callous treatment of the Dwerkhar who fell during the purge of Urgill’s forces.

Well, I guess that does it for him. We’ll be back in several weeks to tackle Scipio (not literally, mind, as he’s an old man and terribly fragile). Stay tuned.

After a day of getting absolutely nothing accomplished, I focused almost entirely on research and fleshing out the peripheral materials, but did at least make a token effort and wrote some dialog for Chapter 18 of TSoA1. Now, I realize that’s a big jump from where I was at, but I just happened to be doing some research work around that point in the story at the time. Anyway, I’m going to switch over to TTWC3 and hopefully wrap it up this time. I’d really like to move on to TBP, so here’s to making things happen. Stay tuned.

I managed to make up for the previous day’s shortfall with the dialog I wrote for Chapters 4 and 5 of TSoA1. Yes, I know I’m going all over the place, but I can only write isolated chunks at work, so I just pick a scene and work on that. Did some changing up of the storyline. I figured it was a little too much of a stretch for both Constantine III and Constans to survive their historical deaths, so I left Constantine to his fate and pushed back the birth of Ambrosius and Uther by ten years. Now they’re not so young when Vortigern takes over, but maybe I’ll make some changes there too. After all, he doesn’t seem the type to wait 13 years before playing his hand. I’ll figure it out. Stay tuned.