Those of you following my Twitter feed (and I know I haven’t done much posting there of late besides notifications of site updates) are aware that I downloaded the trial version of Smash for the 3DS yesterday. (Very barebones, by the way, but I guess it’s good that they’re whetting the appetite instead of sating it.) Well, that was a grand three-hour ordeal at McDonald’s, so during that time I did a fair bit of writing on TTWC2 is a bit of a switch-up for the week. I pretty well finished Orguz’s prologue, did some revisions on Chapter 1 and made some headway on Chapter 2. Also did a little more work on his family tree and updated some entries in the encyclopedia to reflect the developing changes to the scenario. We’ll see if I can’t wrap up Chapter 2 before I switch back over to Tico4. Stay tuned.

Have I mentioned that I patterned the leads of The Trident War Chronicles after chess pieces? I only bring it up because it seems that, originally at least, the characterization of my “king” and “queen” characters were among the weakest. Just as I didn’t have much to work with in the case of Solon, so too was Xanthe a fairly shallow and incidental sort of character until the more recent version. However, because she had more to do anyway, I didn’t seem to have to work quite as hard to expand her role.

During production, I did some shuffling of the overall Tellus Arc timeline to make certain events fit in better with the overall chronology. In doing so, I made Xanthe a few hundred years younger than she once was. Being over 400 years old may sound like a lot, but for a Light Elf like Xanthe, that’s about the equivalent of being around 25. The fact that she became Queen of Goldleaf before she even turned 200 was quite unprecedented. Her relative youth made for a good combination with Solon’s idealism.

Just as Solon had to deal with significant opposition to his vision, so too did Xanthe and I play this up more with the Law-speaker Sidarazel emerging as her chief adversary. I don’t delve too deeply into Elven society, though, as a large part of Xanthe’s character is that she’s spent most of her time trying to integrate into human society, returning to El-Alar chiefly for important festivals and ceremonies and having little day-to-day involvement with her own domain. Even if Xanthe wasn’t a telepath of decent ability, she’d be all too aware of how she was regarded by the humans around her. Indeed, even the closest human to her besides Solon, Lord Aristides, serves her almost entirely out of his loyalty to her husband and doesn’t have any particularly warm sentiment for her. She loses touch with her identity as an Elf but can’t become human either. It’s a sad, lonely existence. Her one refuge was her children, but Carpos became distant in the years leading up to his betrayal, leaving Daphne alone as her only other support.

Xanthe at least has the strength to suffer for her part in making Solon’s dream a reality, even though she becomes more disillusioned as time goes on. Perhaps her being a touch more on the cynical side is how she developed the savvy to do pretty much whatever it took to give the Darklands campaign the fighting chance it needed. Using the illusionist Gulmengoel to impersonate Solon after his death was a new addition, as I realized there was no way they could just pretend to have him tucked away for two years. Underhanded, yes, but the venture would’ve broken apart otherwise.

It might’ve been interesting to see what would’ve happened if Xanthe survived the Darklands campaign. I don’t think she would’ve abdicated the throne as easily as Daphne, but she probably wouldn’t have been able to rally enough loyalty to put up much of a fight. Hard to say. Maybe there’s an If Arc story to be had.

Next up is Daphne. Stay tuned.

I worked on Orguz’s prologue, Chapter 2 and epilogue. I also had to do some rather extensive reworking of the dynastic history and genealogy of the Goblin Kings of Shade’s Forest. Loads of fun. Daggone Goblins have so many bloody kids. The Labor Day weekend festivities are making it a bit of a challenge getting far past my minimum quota and even that much is done on stolen time. Let’s see if I can at least finish one of those chapters before we switch back to working on Tico4. Stay tuned.

I pretty well finished up Caligo’s Chapter 3 of TTWC2, wrapping up his section, and then did some writing throughout Orguz’s section. Chapters 1 and 3 are already pretty well finished and I was just doing some light editing. The prologue, Chapter 2 and the epilogue got a little a work done on them.

I also did some work on The Knight’s Twilight. For some reason, a bit of inspiration struck me and I jotted down some dialog. I’ve decided to completely rewrite the story from the ground up rather than struggle to rework the previous version into the current plan. It feels really nostalgic going back to the Gladius Cycle after spending so much time on The Trident War Chronicles. Maybe instead of moving directly on to TTWC3 after I finish TTWC2, I’ll work on some of the Gladius stories. That or I may start mixing it up more. I have plenty of lead time as far as serialization is concerned. We’ll see. Stay tuned.

I finished up Caligo’s Chapter 4 of TTWC1 and also made some progress on his Chapter 3, getting about halfway through thereabouts. He’ll be done soon and that’ll be three sections down. Stay tuned.

I’m on the mighty job hunt and that caused me to forget to post yesterday. Thankfully, it didn’t cause me to forget to write and I’m almost done with Caligo’s Chapters 4 and 5 of TTWC2. I believe I have something like one paragraph to go on Chapter 4 and then I just need to write Chapter 3 to finish out his section. That’d be nice. Orguz would be next after that. He’ll make for quite the change of pace. Anyway, that’s it for now. More to come. Stay tuned.

During last week’s retrospective on Archbishop Gamaliel, I said I would consider going back and giving the other leads of TTWC1 a second look. I’ve decided to make this a semi-regular feature, hence the new “Character Spotlight” title. We kick things off with the first lead of TTWC1, King Solon.

When I was designing the prototype for what would become The Trident Chronicles, I didn’t have much of an idea for the character beyond “wise old king”, hence his original name of Solomon. (I used to have impeccable subtlety, you see.) Honestly, he didn’t really have much development beyond that original concept until the current version of the story.

You may recall that in the previous version of the story, I didn’t give each lead an equal number of chapters. Their sections were as long as the stories I had to tell and Solon’s was one of the shortest because, frankly, there wasn’t much there and seeing as how he dies before the fleet even reaches Notos, he only served to kick off the plot. By forcing myself to give each of the leads equal screentime (at least in terms of the number of chapters), I had no choice but to shore up shallow characterization and so Solon developed into the person he is now.

When I thought of his inauspicious birth, I realized that isn’t something that you can just walk away from. (I realize that the details haven’t been revealed yet, but you already should know from Xanthe’s epilogue that Solon and the Monarch Lich are “twins” of a sort.) Solon grew up surrounded by whispers and rumors and was completely despised by his father. When the King remarried (to a woman just five years Solon’s senior) and had a second son, Solon ceded his birthright and entered into the seminary. There he studied with future Archbishop Ieremias (the “reformer” so despised by Gamaliel in his prologue). Solon would have entered the priesthood were it not for his brother Carpos’ untimely death. While it was possible for Solon’s nephew by his half-sister Antigone to claim the throne with his father acting as regent until he reached the age of majority, Solon instead chose to reclaim his birthright with the intention of reforming Zephyr (with Ieremias’ encouragement as the two idealists sought to work both inside and outside the Church to achieve change).

While there had been relatively few all-out wars between Zephyr and her non-human neighbors, there was certainly no love between them and the Church’s teachings about them certainly didn’t help matters any. Solon took a chance by extending an olive branch and at least in the Elves’ case, he was lucky to find a young (by Elven standards) queen just as idealistic as he was. In the Dwarves’ case, their natural suspicions of the humans erupted into the disastrous Nanoi Campaigns, which ultimately resulted in the forced removal from Zephyr of the surviving Dwarven community. This seems rather cruel in light of the picture I’ve been painting of Solon, but it was the lesser of two evils as prevailing opinion was that the Dwarves should have been exterminated completely.

I would say Solon’s greatest weakness was that he was so committed to his ideals and his principles that he was blind to the world around him. Not completely blind, mind you, but he never truly appreciated how great the opposition to his policies was, leaving a situation where no one but a cunning and brutal tyrant could have held on to the kingdom in his wake. Daphne grew into her role as a leader rather well, but she could never be ruthless enough to fight tooth and nail to hold on to the throne (but that’s a subject of a future entry).

In the end, I find him to be a rather tragic figure who dreamed a dream too big for his world to contain. To call him too good for this sinful earth would be an exaggeration, but his high-minded principles were a two-edged sword that I fear cut him more deeply.

Next time, we’ll take a look at Queen Xanthe. Stay tuned.

I pretty well finished Caligo’s Chapter 2 and epilogue in TTWC2 and did a bit of writing on his Chapters 4 and 5. What happened to Chapter 3, you ask? I’ll be getting to that.

I also did some more work on the peripheral materials for Student of Gladius. Adapting the Gladius Cycle to a Japanese high school AU is an interesting challenge to say the least. Some of the re-aging I’ve done to characters to make it all fit really wreaks havoc on the chronology.

In other news, I’m going to try to start having at least one commentary post per week in addition to the WIP updates. Later I may decide to increase the frequency to as many as three commentary posts per week, but we can take it slow for starters. Stay tuned.

When I finished Cronos’ section, I felt compelled to spend a little extra time discussing his character development, both on the page and behind the scenes. I feel like doing the same for Gamaliel. If I recall correctly, a prototypical version of Gamaliel existed from the earliest version of the story, but it wasn’t until TTWC came into its current form that he took up the role of antagonist to Solon and Xanthe, a role I expanded on significantly when the story was brought into production.

There was a time when portraying a corrupt cleric in fiction was edgy, but now the opposite is more of a surprise. There are basically two ways of characterizing the antagonistic cleric: the cynic and the zealot. The cynic has little if any real faith and merely uses religion as a tool to serve temporal ends. The zealot is a true believer whose fanaticism precludes whatever charity exists in the tenets of his religion. I was vacillating between these two options when I finally asked myself ¿Porqué no los dos? *cue trumpet rendition of “La Bamba”*

You see, Gamaliel is not simply a pious fraud leveraging the blind faith of the masses to gain worldly power. He sincerely believes that he’s working God’s will but is also coldly calculating when it comes to manipulating people and situations to achieve his goals. Related to this, I’d considered making him a coward who always shrank from any real danger, but instead his mad zeal very nearly compels him to be on the front line against all the horrors of the Darklands. (He’s not quite that far out there, but this is still the guy who was eager to set his men against Dragons.) The average reader may not be drawn in, but he certainly gets the job done in universe.

In Cronos’ case, I felt he was a character who didn’t live up to his reputation but then turned it into a plot point. For Gamaliel, I had very different directions I was wanting to take him and wound up with a fusion that’s better than the sum of its parts (in my opinion, at least). Now that I’m on the topic, though, I may go back and do similar reviews of the previous leads and continue to do so for the leads to come. These aren’t meant to be especially deep; just some musings on where these characters came from and the course of their development. Perhaps you’ll find it interesting. Stay tuned.

I went through Arachne’s Chapters 2, 3, 5 and her epilogue of TTWC2, pretty well wrapping up her section and also went on to do some minor revisions to Caligo’s prologue and Chapter 1. You know, it’s entirely possible that I may be done writing TTWC2 before it even debuts on the site. Wouldn’t that be something?

I was also stricken by a bit of inspiration and did a little writing on Student of Gladius and adding to the peripheral materials. Speaking of peripheral materials, I went into the Earth Arc encyclopedia and added the kanji and hanzi renderings of Japanese and Chinese characters respectively. All in all, a fairly productive day. We’ll see what else I can get accomplished before switching back over to Tico4. Stay tuned.