Returning to Ranea

[chipotle]

While I’ve been lax in updating again, I’m going to blame (with some justification, I’d argue) the flu of doom that I’ve been suffering. Truth to tell it’s not a very high level of doom, but in some ways that’s made it more irritating: instead of a few days of abject misery followed by recovery, it’s just been an ongoing lingering cough and low energy.

This has put the kibosh on a lot of “what I’d like to be doing” plans over the last couple of weeks; it kind of sucks to be inspired to finally get going on projects and then find yourself completely unable to work on any of them. Even so, one long-standing idea has been pulled out of mothballs, and has actually had a little progress made already.

About (glark) eighteen years ago I wrote a fantasy novella entitled “A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood,” which was—at least in certain circles—wildly popular and still has fans to this day. Since it technicaly remained in print up until just a few years ago, I’ve resisted the idea of putting it into a collection, but I’ve decided that YARF! is pretty much dead to the world. At the convention, I talked with a publisher about the idea of producing a new edition.

This of course leads to the question of whether to revise the story. While there’s something to be said for not mucking with success, the truth is that a lot of people either haven’t read the original version of the story—or haven’t read it in a long time—and together with its sequel story, “The Lighthouse,” there’s basically a novel-length narrative that could probably be strengthened by, well, treating it like a novel. (Looking back, there are things that were added to the story’s “mythology” in later bits that should really have been mentioned. Most obvious so far: one of the main characters belongs to a race which has a name—Derysi—in a later story, yet is never given in the fifty thousand words of the two novellas.)

So. I’ve actually already started. I have about three thousand words written on the new incarnation of “Gift of Fire,” which comprise the first two scenes—the first one a rewrite of the original first scene, an the second one a scene that was referenced but not shown before. (Funny how show, don’t tell actually works in practice.)

Deciding what to do with “Lighthouse” will be harder; while “Gift of Fire” is written in canonical third-person, past-tense from Mika’s point of view, “Lighthouse” is written in first-person present tense, virtually stream of consciousness, from Revar’s point of view. That seemed like a great idea at the time but I’m not sure whether to retool it—still from Revar’s point of view, but back to third-person, past-tense—this time through. The argument against doing that is that, well, it works in the current incarnation, mostly; the argument for doing it is that to make this all work as a novel, I’m going to have to give Mika more to do in the second half beyond just showing up at the end, and it may be easier to do that if I can switch between the two characters’ points of views. (If you’ve read the two, you know what I’m talking about; if you haven’t, I don’t think I’ve given much away.)

Even so, it’s already been fun to revisit the characters, and the world. This time I’m trying to assume that readers have no familiarity with the world the story’s set in—an assumption that wasn’t necessarily true back in 1990. (Yes, in the early days of the fandom, my stories were actually that well known. Scary, huh?) This actually adds to the fun; I get to re-examine the assumptions I made in the world in the first place, quietly disposing of things I no longer like, and seeing if I can bring out things that, if I’m honest, existed more in world-building notes than in the actual stories themselves. Something that should inform the whole world, for instance, is the idea that magicians are basically Ranea’s equivalent of engineers, fashioning devices that are used in everyday life by normal people—but we don’t see that in practice nearly enough.

I’ve been playing around with my working habits, too, for this project, and as I get energy back I’ll hopefully be able to put more of that into practice. But that’s for another post.

Comments

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

While it's been a long time since I've read my own writing (!), I believe "Derysi" was the name given by those who created them (which was presumed to be the faerie folk; in Ranea the fae are definitely of the "do not screw with" variety). At any rate, in the current new draft, "Derysi" appears in a book that Mika's reading; in the original story he learns something about bats from going to a library and looking up information, and I've kept that. But that's precisely the sort of thing that would have the correct name.

As I keep writing, I suppose I'll learn whether it makes sense to keep the name in there or not. I haven't played around much with the idea that I mentioned in my last response about the language used for the non-human races; there could well be a distinction drawn between those who'd want to know what to call Revar other than "bat," and those who either didn't think about it or just didn't care. There's a lot of play story-wise that could involve species relations in Ranea, and while I don't want to make any of the stories into allegories about racism, being mindful of this could add a bit of extra depth.

While I tend not to do much world-building ahead of time, I've always done some level of outlining, and that's actually increased over the years as I realized that I really didn't do enough. My outlining isn't a point-by-point description of everything that happens in a story, but rather pretty close to the idea of writing down scene ideas on index cards and shuffling them around. I know some writers, including some very successful ones, hate the idea of outlining, for much the reasons you described. For years I didn't actually outline as much as write notes about what needed to happen next in a story, so my muse was always running a few scenes ahead of where I was.

At least for me personally, though, the longer the story is, the less likely that approach--or the "don't outline anything, just let it flow" approach--is to work. There's a middle ground between outlining in such detail that I feel like I've already told the story, and doing so little planning that I end up with writer's block a third of the way through a long story because I have no idea how the hell to get from where I am to where I want to be. Some people may be able to manage without the index cards to push around, but I am not one of those people. And I wish I'd figured this out about fifteen years earlier than I did!

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

I agree that the proper name would turn up during research; though I think it would be amusing if Mika referred to Revar by that term, and she's like, "'Derysi?' What the hell is that?" :)

I also agree that it shouldn't turn into an overt parable, but racism is certainly a major element of the story; it's part of what drives the story's conflicts. I suppose having Revar's people thought of as frightening monsters rather than a despised but 'human' minority is more Gothic and in keeping with a fantasy setting, but it seems unlikely that you could maintain mindless fear when the object of that fear consists of people you see on the street with a certain regularity, who have ordinary jobs and stuff. You know what I mean? But maybe the derysi rarely cross paths with the average person.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I agree that the proper name would turn up during research; though I think it would be amusing if Mika referred to Revar by that term, and she's like, "'Derysi?' What the hell is that?" :)

I've actually finished the first chapter draft now, and an exchange that isn't too far off from that happens.

The Derysi are supposed to be pretty rare; Revar and Jemara only knew of one another in the city "Gift" takes place in. I envision that Raneadhros has a moderate large population, even though that's not mentioned in either story, but I also suspect they could all be in one or two neighborhood blocks. In many parts of Ranea, it'd be pretty easy to go through your whole life without seeing one. (And of course, the whole "we have to take blood from living, sapient prey" thing does play into the fear in a way that doesn't have a direct parallel to real life.)

One thing that's a bit interesting -- well, maybe -- as I went back over the story is observing that while class was always present in "Gift," there was an obvious point that I missed. The existing version mostly treats Dahlu and Mika as being from the same social/economic milieu, but they're not. Consciously or not, Dahlu is trying to lift Mika up. (Dahlu was kind of cardboard through most of "Gift," which has always bothered me; the reader shouldn't really be left wondering just what Mika saw in her in the first place.)