After missing my quota Saturday, I picked BroPen back up and made a little progress. I made the questionable choice of watching the third through fifth entries in the Hellraiser series last night. In retrospect, it would’ve been better to have devoted the entire time to writing. I imagine I’m in for much worse when I watch 6-8. I wonder if I should do movie reviews as a side gig. Maybe it’d be a source of some amusement. Stay tuned.

Mixing things up a bit, I did some work on The Brothers Pendragon. I may play around in this story a while to get myself caught up on that nagging quota shortfall. Stay tuned.

I did a little bit of work on TBP, making some addition to the map, axing a few extraneous characters, etc. I’d be quite content to keep on playing with the story, but my lead time isn’t going to hold out forever and at the rate I’ve been going, I’m going to stall out before too long on TTWC1 unless I get to working on it. If I can at least get one of Gamaliel’s chapters finished before the week’s out, I’ll be doing good. If I can go farther than that, even better. Stay tuned.

I made a little progress on TBP. It was a nice bit of serendipity writing this one scene where two characters were clashing and I just couldn’t see a middle way between them, so I had to insert another character to play the mediator and I thought, “I guess I need to actually come up with a new character to take this role.” Then I thought a bit and realized, “Hey, I already have a character who would act like this and it would totally further his agenda.” One of my big challenges in replotting this story is trying to fit in all the charas and give them sufficient screentime and this was certainly helping toward that end.

Ultimately, I’m probably going to be cutting back the cast. You see, TBP was one of the stories I originally envisioned back in high school and at that time I added characters to the cast based more off of “This sounds like a cool idea” rather than critically thinking about function in the context of the story. When I rework my old ideas like this, I try to preserve as much of the original vision as possible, but also I don’t hesitate to make major changes if it means a better story. It’s a challenge, but that’s part of it. Stay tuned for more.

Well, it’s taken long enough, but I think I finally have the outline of TBP in a serviceable condition. It should be enough to go forward, even if full production won’t start until after TTWC3 is done. I might as well finish out the week in TBP and then start working on TTWC1. Stay tuned.

More futzing around with TBP. I really more time than I usually have to really sort through all the threads, but so it goes. Adding in little scraps of dialog here and there have to count for something. Stay tuned.

What little time I had to write yesterday was spent working on dialog for a scene in TBP. I know I was supposed to be focusing on just sorting out the general outline, but I felt like working on a scene. I may well end up spending the week on TBP. We’ll see. Stay tuned.

I decided to poke around a bit with The Brothers Pendragon and realized I haven’t updated my outline since the rough sketch I made over ten years ago, My vision for the story’s changed considerably since then, so I’ve made it my pet project at the moment to get things sorted out.

I also did a little fiddling around with the few scenes I have already written. On in particular has artifacts from the days before I was as strict as I am about POV, so I made some adjustments there. I’ll probably be jotting down some dialog and such while I sort out the overall chronology of events, which is likely to only whet my appetite to write more on the story rather than sate it. Stay tuned.

Arthur Mania just won’t quit. In fact, this update comes so late because I was up till 0530 working on it, woke up around 1300 and picked things right back up. It’s been a while since I’ve been this consumed by my work. I’m mildly concerned about the potential consequences, but I suppose the only solution is to just keep pushing and get to a place I feel I can leave it.

I’ve been a lover of myth, fable and legend ever since I was a child. This should come as no surprise given that I’m an SFF author, but I’m also big into history. In fact, my minor was in history. I could easily have made it my second major, but I was getting a little weary of school by that point and was eager to begin my adventures in the Orient. One of the great things about the Arthurian mythos is that it blends the historical, pseudo-historical and the fantastic all into a single bundle, much as I’ve tried to do with my own story canon.

I was still in high school when I sketched out the first ideas for what would become The Brothers Pendragon. I wanted to use Excalibur, so it naturally followed that I would adopt the Pendragon name. I had the patriarch call himself Adam in the pretension that he was starting a new humanity. Of course, naming your two sons Cain and Abel is just asking for trouble. Going back to Excalibur, though, I envisioned this Adam Pendragon as a forgotten castoff of Uther Pendragon’s excessive womanizing who fancied himself as Uther’s true heir, seizing the opportunity he had long been seeking at the Battle of Camlann. When Bedivere goes to cast Excalibur back into the Lake, Adam (who I’ve recently decided to call Lother prior to his arrival on Tellus) intercepts and kills him, but he and his followers are transported from our world. Ever the pragmatist, he conquers the new land just as he intended to do with Britannia.

I won’t deny being rather strongly influenced by the ’98 Merlin mini series. (No, I haven’t really watched the more recent series, just caught some glimpses as my roommate was watching it.) The inclusion of Mab in the mini series had a bit of a domino effect for me. Mab happens to be involved in The Trident War Chronicles. She’s bound by Rowland in TTWC3 and forced to serve the Promethean Alliance. You remember that barrier around Maximilion that drove out the Third Legion back in Cronos’ section? Her work. Anyway, certain things are going to happen with her that I’m not going to spoil. If you’ll recall, I did a big shift of the timeline of the Tellus Arc not that long ago to resolve an issue relating to this very spoiler item. I will reveal that it’s related to the Arthurian mythos. Because the Earth and Tellus timelines are synched up (though time flows more slowly on Tellus, similar to how time flows faster in the Fairy Realm, a.k.a. Avalon), there were fixed events I couldn’t wiggle around. I originally resolved the problem with chronomancy, sending the character in question 20 years into the past to make things work. Much like Old Joe in Looper, I don’t like messing around with time travel too much, so this bit of juryrigging never did set right with me. (Speaking of time travel, there were two projects in pre-production I scrapped because of my decision to adopt a “no time travel” rule. Maybe I’ll tell you about them one day.)

Perhaps it’s that recent edit to the timeline that got me thinking about what little I’d already put down for an Arthurian story I was considering. Whatever the case, I’ve pulled out all the stops and this obsession is going to continue until I pretty well have the peripheral materials settled. Sorting through the fragmentary and often contradictory stories can be a pain, but it’s like solving a puzzle. The link to my own canon restricts my freedom of movement a little, but I’m coming up with some innovative solutions. I believe I’ve mentioned before how the already tangled genealogies of the major characters have been tangled further thanks to my love of interconnectedness. I honestly think I’ll have a hard time finding someone who isn’t related to one degree or another. Royalty!

I’m trying to find a balance among all the English, Welsh, French and Latin and it’s a little tricky to say the least. I want it to be accessible but not too anachronistic. I still have time to settle things but it’s a bit of a pain. I’ve actually taken to drawing up my own map of the British Isles rather than sifting through a couple dozen at a time to find this or than ancient and/or mythical border or feature. Learning a fair bit of British geography this way. ^_^; It’s a wonder just how much is packed into so little space. The world really was a bigger place back then.

Speaking of back then, I’ve got to curtail how far I venture into the timeline in either direction after the timeframe of the stories. I really don’t have any business going further back than the 4th Century or further forward than the 7th, but the urge to fill out the chronology is strong.

Okay, that’s enough rambling for now. There’s plenty more work to be done. Away!

My relationship with The Trident War Chronicles has been a complicated one. Its origins lie in a PnP strategy game I attempted to design back in high school. It was loosely based on Ogre Battle (or rather, what I could gather from articles on the game in Nintendo Power, as I wouldn’t actually play a game in the series until Ogre Battle 64, which came later). However, back in those days I wasn’t as meticulous an archivist as I am now and I wound up destroying the original materials in a fit of pique. (I’m glad I was so attached to the KoG and Tico series or I might have lost their original documentation as well. The rocky road of my canon formation will be the subject of a future entry.) Even with the materials having been destroyed, the premise of the scenario and most of the characters remained in my head and I later resurrected the concept, though without the strategy game mechanics. (I have, however, drawn up a prototype game design document for a turn-based strategy game based on the TTWC series, though I don’t plan on developing it further at this time.) I believe its relation to The Brothers Pendragon developed later on in the process, as I seem to recall adjusting some dates in the timeline to fit everything together more snugly.

A lot has changed in the course of revisions (though TTWC is only in Version 3, as compared to KoG being in Version 7), but almost as soon as I revived the series, I developed the core conceit of telling the story through short segments devoted to major characters from each of the three factions. In Version 2, I was going to have everything together in a single massive tome, but by Version 3 I realized each faction had more than enough material for their own book. This decision forced me to make further changes to standardize things. You see, originally I had as many characters as I found interesting with as many chapters as I deemed necessary to tell that character’s story. When I made the decision to break TTWC up into three books, I realized how unbalanced everything was.

From the beginning, I had this chess conceit, but I wasn’t as thorough as I should’ve been back in V2. I had too many characters on the Alliance side and too few for the Zephyrians. This had to change (and led to some interesting story developments as I rebalanced the cast). Then there was the matter of the number of chapters devoted to each character. The Dominion fared the worst with comparatively few chapters devoted to their characters. To be honest, they didn’t really interest me that much (except for Sir Caligo). I then reminded myself, “You’re the author. If these characters aren’t interesting, make them interesting.” And so I’ve been working toward that end and the Dominion’s charas are making significant progress toward being compelling enough to carry their own book.

Another part of the standardization process was to give every character an equal share. As I mentioned before, a lot of the Dominion charas had very few chapters for their segments while some others had quite a lot. I decided to average it out with five chapters in the main storyline, plus a prologue to establish their background and an epilogue for their final fate (or a closing note if they’re lucky enough to survive). This streamlining also prompted me to cut back on redundancy. There were a number of events I told from two or three different perspectives. Besides letting you glimpse into that particular character’s head, it didn’t add much if the two charas in question were on the stage together most of the time. Now you really have to take in all the characters’ accounts to absorb the whole story.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m particularly fond of TBP (and the fact that the first thing I put out was the TBP prequel short “The Stranger” should tell you something) and this kinda makes me feel some resentment toward TTWC because I feel it has to be told before I can get to TBP. (Of course, if I’d just buckle down and commit to, say, 1000 or even 500 words a day, I’d be where I need to be sooner than I’d think.) It might actually be a good thing, though, because it seems like I’m pushing myself to make TTWC worth my while and if I’m working that hard to make it worth my while, I’m sure it’ll be worth your while too.

Well, I think that’ll do for now. Just thought I’d share some perspective on this somewhat maddening series of mine. I really get into this sort of commentary, so I need to make it more of a habit. On a good week it can complement story progress and on a bad week it can offset the lack thereof. Stay tuned.