Yzabel / March 5, 2007

Separating the Siamese twins

I’m not talking about cats or a piece of news, but about a process initiated some time ago, grown in my little mind by what’s left of my brains, fed with the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack, and finally blossomed in full. This is to say that I separated in two distinct entities (in brief, two novels) the first volume of my trilogy set in the world of Eien.

Complicated? Yes and no. I had been hesitating for a long time, fearing that by doing so, I would only pursue new chimeras, but the facts dawned on me rather than I imposed them as a law. Either I’d get rid of a secondary plot that deserved something better than background importance (and I’d then find myself with characters without any reason of travelling any more, and with the need of modifying a general plot that otherwise suited my tastes well), or I’d develop that secondary plot, with the risk of overshadowing the main one. In the end, none of these seemed good in my book.Read More

Yzabel / February 1, 2006

The Future Before The Present

Today’s the first day of the month, and as planned, I’ve started writing down the plan for The Wall of Silence (first volume in the trilogy). While doing so, and while referring to previous writings I had done for this project–which I’ll keep, but only if they fit the new plan–I came to wonder about the way I had been introducing the story and the universe. I think I’ve in fact started by a technique that may be better in movies. However, I’m not sure about that; perhaps it can work in this novel all the same.

The technique I have in mind may be close to the flashback one, except that it’s not a character remembering an element of the past, but an element of the future placed before the present. Back when I started writing this, I intended my first chapter to be an action scene introducing the place my characters are from, but only briefly–they’re running away, and the end of the chapter would see them thrown into the other main setting of the world (there are two main geographic settings, but let’s not enter into this too much). Later on, I came to wonder if I shouldn’t add some more to this, a few other scenes happening before this one.Read More