Barbara Eberhard's Blog - Posts Tagged "fantasy"

I’m 120 pages into The Confluence of Jewels, Book 3 of the Jewels and Gods trilogy. To fulfill the prophecy, we need one Jewel Keeper from each country, for a total of seven. A big part of the trilogy has been trying to find the Jewel Keepers, because no one knows who they are, including the Jewel Keepers themselves. The prophecy announces who is the next Jewel Keeper when the questors meet him or her. The Jewel Keeper can be any mage, but each has a Jewel they’ve inherited, which becomes their power stone. The seven Jewels will form a prism of color, though the Jewel Keepers don’t know that yet.
Anyway, we just met the penultimate Jewel Keeper (side note: penultimate is one of my favorite words). She’s a teenager and has only been a mage for a few months. She comes from a country where magic was outlawed until a generation ago, so mages aren’t very common there. And there’s still a tinge of anathema to magic (another favorite word, along with interdiction, which is what the god of this country had put in place against magic, but I digress). The other Jewel Keepers have been frantically searching for this Jewel Keeper, the second to last they have to find. They are thrilled to have found her. Till her father says no, not my daughter.
And that’s where we are in the book.

One thing I do in my fantasy books is leverage prophecy, particularly if I need to explain a change in plans or make the questors go in a direction that doesn't seem logical.
In my first trilogy, Reunion, the prophecy was very active. There are routine announcements of prophecy from the powers-that-be throughout the quest, usually telling the questors - particularly Aidan and Sorcha who are the Keepers - what they need to know next. Prophecy being prophecy, however, the words are usually a bit of a riddle. It's up to the questors to figure them out. This proved to be a useful device, though I tried not to exploit it too often. Usually, I had the questors revisit the words of the prophecy as they went, with only occasional additions to the prophecy. The prophecy didn't just miraculously tell them what they needed to know when they needed to know it. The prophecies had a theme, as well, about needing to reunite the stones, hence the name of the trilogy. Though it took a while for the Keepers to figure that out.
In Reunion, I also had a character - eventually two - who served as a kind of prophet. Seritas first joins the quest as a teacher for Sorcha, who organic magic is rare. Most of the mage schools don't teach organic magic. But Seritas, we learn, is from Larchmont Academy, where they teach (in Reunion) exclusively organic mages. Seritas, as the prophet on the quest, "finds" prophecies in the grimoires - which are magical books of histories and spells. The prophecies aren't there just anyone who reads the grimoires; only for special people, usually Seritas. Others do find prophecies occasionally, but Seritas is the most consistent revealer of this kind of prophecy in the first two books of Reunion. In Book Three, The Prophecy Fulfilled, the role of prophet is taken over by Kristopher. Seritas leaves the quest, and Kris "inherits" the power to find hidden meanings in grimoires. There are still prophecies from the powers-that-be that all mages hear, too.
In Jewels and Gods, there is less prophecy revealed to all mages. Prophecies usually only announce when there is a new Jewel Keeper. Instead, I leverage a prophetess to share the word of the powers-that-be with the Jewel Keepers, who have to save the world in this trilogy. Lojon - whose name is a combination of my parents, Lois and John - conveys these messages. Where prophecy is heard by all mages, Lojon's prophetic words are only for the Jewel Keepers. Unlike Seritas and Kris, Lojon just "hears" the words of the powers-that-be and conveys them to the questors. In addition, Lojon almost always says everything twice. This was a device I decided on early on, so that the reader would remember these important points. Also, it makes for some comedic elements, which can be important when you're on a big, important quest.
It's been an interesting exercise to figure out how to use prophecy in these books. And I'm fascinated that prophecy behaves differently - because even though I plot out and write the books, usually things happen that weren't planned. Keeping the Jewel Keepers quest more intimate through the use of Lojon and the powers-that-be was one of those things that just came to me as I was writing.
But I liked it. So I kept it.

Today's writing was primarily about fixing a plot hole.
One of the biggest challenges of writing a trilogy is keeping all the plot points going. I have 3x5 cards for each character and another series with the basic plot outline. But, as I've written before, I don't write out my plot to the gnat's eyelash. I like to let things be more organic than that.
But since this is the last book, all the plots I've laid out in the other two books - not to mention the plot of the trilogy - need to wrap up in this book. So, recently, I laid out the chapters to come, including notes about the side plots that need to be wrapped up. The end of the trilogy should wrap up all those stories. Give the reader closure.
I also had written the last chapter months ago. Well, as it turns out, it's not going to be the last chapter, but the penultimate chapter when our heroes save the day. I re-read that chapter when I was adding the other notes to see what things I might need to make sure happen in those interim chapters before the Jewel Keepers quell the gods.
And when I read that last chapter, I realized that I had made a grave error. I had put one of my evil gods to sleep earlier in the trilogy. But he was supposed to be wreaking havoc. Now, the dark mage in charge was doing a fine job of being evil. But it wasn't the same as the evil god. So, I needed to wake him up!
That's what today's writing did. Awoken an evil god, and created the foreboding of what he will do next.

I crossed the 200-page mark last weekend, getting closer each weekend to my goal of 350 pages. Today, I thought I'd talk about continuity. While continuity is something every author needs to be sure of in every book, regardless of topic, dealing with continuity across a trilogy is a level of madness I wasn't sure I could handle.
This is my second trilogy, so I knew more going into this one than I did for the first one, obviously. For example, in the first trilogy, I had broad brushstrokes of a plan for the plot, knowing where it was going to start and stop, and a few milestones along the way. But ultimately, for the Reunion trilogy, it wasn't until I was halfway through that I knew they would end up going to every country and there would be a shadow set of dark mages who thought they could be the next Keepers.
For the Jewels and Gods trilogy, however, part of the premise of the whole trilogy is that there is a Jewel Keeper for each of the seven countries, and that, to find him or her, the quest has to go to that country. The Jewel Keepers don't show up, in other words, until the questors come to them. It's a good plot device to give the quest a reason to take a while, and to give the readers a sense of the whole world, not just part of it.
Along with the trek going to every country, I - of course - had a plan for who each Jewel Keeper was and some biographical information about him or her. That included what kind of familiar they would have and what their magic specialty would be. The prophecy announces their gift with each new Jewel Keeper, though the prophecy never names the Jewel Keepers so as not to put them at risk, for all mages - light and dark - hear prophecies.
So, I started this trilogy with a plan for the quest in terms of going from country to country, city to city, and which Jewel Keeper would join the quest in which city of which country. In doing so, I also came up with some obstacles along the way, including both dark mages - as I had had in Reunion - and the gods themselves playing more of a role in this trilogy, particularly the evil gods. The idea there was to explain why the gods would need to be quelled, and the ambiguity of whether the quest would quell all the gods, or only the evil ones.
Keeping all those plans in mind - or on 3x5 cards, as I do, and outlined at a high level in the drafts of each book, as well - I allow myself the freedom to create scenarios and bring new ideas to fruition as I'm writing. As long as those ideas don't change the overall continuity.
Too much.

This weekend, I started the beginning of the end.
Because The Confluence of Jewels is the last book in the series, it's important to me to make sure that the loose ends that have been straggling along are tied up. By this, I mean the side stories - not the Jewel Keepers' quest.
It's important in writing a complex story, to have side stories of the people around your main characters. Sometimes they interact with the main characters. Sometimes they have their own story arcs.
In my case, I have several side stories to wrap up. First, the former Keepers - parents to one of the Jewel Keepers in the current quest - have been away from home, helping to keep one of the evil gods at bay, while the Jewel Keepers do what they need to do. In today's writing, the six mages who had traveled to Marjiba to keep an eye on Zyr made it home to Glenfall, in Comhar, where they lived quietly since their own quest in Reunion.
Second, there are mage academies in Comhar, in Glenfall, and in Sodales, in Larchmont. These two mage academies have had a profound role in training many of the mages in both Reunion and in Jewels and Gods. Now, it's time for the older generation - Kircha's grandfather among them - to turn over the leadership of the academies to a younger generation, to train the next generation of mages.
Third, there are other mages we've met along the way. As this will be the last book in this world - as far as I know right now - we need to revisit all the mages whose stories we've been following - some over all six books - to make sure they end up in a finished place. Though some will have small plot tentacles that may or may not ever be resolved.
Finally, Lovro is a healer mage from Larchmont Academy. He's the one who figured out how to heal Adrienne of god's magic, which allows Greysen - her mate and the Skenorite Jewel Keeper - to rejoin the quest. Doing so introduce a new concept in magic - joint magic. In joint magic, several mages come together to work a single spell. In this case, the magic was to heal Adrienne, led by Cara, a young mage from Glenfall Academy. The story of Lovro needs to be wrapped up. He's going to be the one to codify joint magic, by writing a grimoire on the subject - grimoires are how mages learn, along with practice and training. As I wrap up that story, which I haven't done yet, I'll name two other forms of magic - different from everyday magic. One of those is familiar magic, which is magic done by familiars. We haven't seen a lot of this in the trilogies. But it's happened a few times. The third is bonded magic. This the magic Sorcha and Aidan used to defeat evil in Reunion. It's also the magic that Ava and Nolfa, in Jewels and Gods, use. It is important to show these more spectacular forms of magic because they play a role in the final magics of the Jewels and Gods trilogy.
So, today's writing started to complete some of these side stories. Once finished, the tying up of these side stories will signal to the readers that the trilogy is coming to an end.
And allow the final chapters of The Confluence of Jewels to focus solely on the Jewel Keepers' quest to quell the evil gods once and for all.

Last time I looked at the clock, it was noon. Now, it's after 2 pm.
That's what happens when I write. I lose hours. I get engrossed in the world I'm creating, and the rest of the world - the actual world - disappears for a while.
I have several thoughts about those hours lost.
First, it's kind of amazing to me. I have always lost hours in books, but up until I was 50, they were by reading. I can spend a whole day with a good book, sitting on the couch or in a chair. If the book is good enough, it will be hard for me to pull away from it, to resist turning the page one more time to find out what's going to happen next.
In some ways, the time lost to writing is the same, in that, I'm always interested in what's going to happen next. Sometimes I know; sometimes I don't know all of it. If I know what's coming, I get a great deal of pleasure in watching my ideas and plans come to fruition. If I have a vague notion of the end goal, but not a set plan, then writing becomes a fun exercise in trying to find the path between where I am and where I want to be. Some of the best magic happens in those times - and not just when I'm writing fantasy novels!
Second, it's a little scary. For example, today. I literally "lost" two hours. I looked at the clock, and it was 12 pm. I looked again, and it was 2 pm. I wrote seven pages in that time. And I was so absorbed in what I wrote that the hours went by without notice. That's kind of scary.
Third, this absorption is part of the reason I don't know that I'll ever been a full-time author. I love writing, and I'm so blessed to have ideas keep coming (I have ideas for at least four more books already written down). But the total submersion into writing - and the strength it takes to come back from it - is so powerful, and as I said, a little scary. I worry that, if I did write full time, every day, several hours of the day, I'd have even more trouble coming out of my reveries.
But, in the end, I love the process of writing. I've been very lucky in that it's rare that the ideas don't come. And more often than not, probably once every weekend I write, some nugget finds its way out of my brain and onto the page that just astounds me with its beauty or cleverness or fixing of a problem I'd been struggling with.
And that makes the hours lost - well, in some ways, they are also hours found.

I sat down to write about 10 am. I'd gotten up an hour earlier, had something to eat, done several word games (what can I say? I'm all about words), and then prepared to write.
I opened the previous week's file and did my usual Save As with the current date.
And then got distracted by another game that I play with other people. Someone played, and now it was my turn.
And then I got the hiccups.
And then there were plans to be made for dinner with my sister-in-law and brother-in-law in a couple of weeks to celebrate birthdays for two of the four of us.
And then there another ping on my phone about Ukraine.
And so on and so forth.
By the time I actually started to really think about writing, it was noon.
Since it had been a week, and since last week's writing was about wrapping up some tangential stories, I had to read an earlier chapter to remind myself where the questors were. I had the outline, of course, of what was to happen next. But it's important to get reframed. To orient myself from one set of characters to the next.
Because, like the authors whose work I appreciate, I do try to have some distinct voices for my characters. And those on the quest have different goals than the characters I had written about last week.
So, I had to focus again on the Jewel Keepers and their companions. About their goals. And how to get them from where they were to the next part of their journey.
I didn't think it would take a whole chapter.
But it did.
Once I refocused on the quest, and the obstacles to the quest, I wrote as I have had the pleasure of writing for most of the last ten years - freely and with ideas flowing. In this case, the Jewel Keepers had just arrived in Amboria, the last of the countries they need to visit. To find the last of the Jewel Keepers needed to fulfill their quest. They had had some hints about where to find the Amborian Jewel Keeper. They believed they needed to go to Batca on the northern coast. They were currently on the southern coast. It was going to take a couple of weeks to get from one end of Amboria to the other.
But the god of Amboria has other plans. I knew this when I started to write. I knew the Jewel Keepers were not going directly to Batca - they will get there eventually, of course. I knew the god was going to interfere.
But how exactly? What did that conversation look like? Did she meet them immediately when they landed? Was the Amborian ship captain involved? He had already disrupted the Jewel Keepers' plans at the request of his goddess by taking them to a different port than they had planned for. Would he be part of this new disruption?
So, fingers on the keyboard, I thought about this turn of events. And watched it happen in my mind's eye. And recorded the conversations and events. Finally focused.

It hasn't been deliberate, but most of the chapters I write end up being 7 pages. Some are longer, of course. And some shorter. But the average is 7.
Most weekend days, when I write, I write one chapter on Saturday and one chapter on Sunday. So, two chapters. Or about 14 pages.
Most books I write are between 300-350 pages. That's about 25 weekends' worth of writing, at about 14 pages apiece.
Some weekends, we have plans for one of the days. Rarely, we have plans for both days. But it's not unheard of - in a given month - that I won't be able to write at all for one weekend's worth of time.
So, if you assume writing three weekends a month, 25 weekends is a little over 8 months.
8 months to complete a book, 7 pages at a time.
What a remarkable thing!

In my trilogies, there is a god for each country, for a total of seven.
When I first started the Reunion trilogy, I wanted to somehow make the speech of the gods look different than normal conversation. I have used italics for communications between mages via familiar communications, and among familiars as needed. So, that wasn't an option.
Complicating this decision-making, I also have the announcements from the prophecy. I had already determined that these, too, would be in italics. But they are indented more than normal text, and indented on both sides, unlike normal paragraphs. There is also space before and after the prophecies. This formatting helps them stand out as unique, though I usually have a character also explain that a prophecy was just announced.
I tried a couple of different versions for how to make the words of the gods look different. I tried underlining. That looked odd. I tried all caps. But that looks like yelling.
Finally, I settled on a different font, one that's script-like in style. The other thing I did was put a colon at the beginning and end of these quotes, rather than quotation marks. I guess I could have not used any punctuation at all, as I do for prophecies. But that's what I did.
Now six books in, I like this decision, except for one thing.
Normally, as someone is speaking, you say their name and perhaps use a verb to explain how the quote should be interpreted. So for example, '"I think we should do this," Kircha offered.'
But because the quotes of the gods are in a different style and font, I can't put this kind of attribution with their quote. I can't say, 'Miska said, :Everyone should be happy.:' Because the "Miska said" part of that would also be in the different font. And that just looks odd.
As a result of this style decision (in both senses of style - Word and otherwise), I either have to explain who is going to be speaking before the quote in the God Quote style. Or I have to explain it afterward. Assuming, of course, there's more than one god around or there's a need to explain the tone and tenor of the quote.
It's somewhat constraining to the writing. But it's also an interesting challenge.

I've read a lot of fantasy in my life; it's possibly my favorite genre. Many fantasies are essentially a retelling of a hero myth. Someone - or sometimes several someones - has to save the world from evil. Frodo in LOTR. Garion in The Belgariad (David Eddings, if you don't know the series). Reluctantly, usually. But the hero or heroes are the only ones who can do what needs doing.
In today's writing, my heroes - the Jewel Keepers - are confronted by a bunch of the gods, the so-called good gods who are worried about the Jewel Keepers quest's purpose, which is to "quell the gods". There is ambiguity about whether the prophecy intends for that to mean only the evil gods, or all the gods. Hence, the gods' concern about what the Jewel Keepers are trying to do. Because none of them really want to be quelled.
One of the ideas I borrowed from Eddings' epic Belgariad is the idea of gods who are far from perfect. The Greeks, Romans, and Norse had these kinds of gods, as well. But I will say that having imperfect gods makes for some fun interactions.
One of the gods is a bit spoiled. She doesn't like not knowing what is going on at all times. Since the Jewel Keepers - all mages - can communicate telepathically, they can talk without her hearing what they are saying. She HATES that.
Another one of the gods loves her people so much that she had made them insular, thinking they were the only people/country that mattered. In truth, they were the only people that mattered to their god. But there were other gods and other peoples, and one of the things this goddess has to confront is that the other gods and the other peoples have value, as well. She's done that - reluctantly.
But the focus of today's god reformation is the god who used to think all magic was evil. In the old days, he had put a curse over his country, so that any mages would feel his disdain and all magic used would set off alarms. Because magic was illegal - the result of the god's curse. But...there were people in this country born with magic - the mages - just as there were in every other country. These mages either had to hide who they were or they fled the oppression. At the end of my first trilogy, the Keepers (the heroes of that trilogy) and the other gods convince this god that outlawing and condemning magic is actually stupid; it weakens his country relative to the other countries - who have magic and all the benefits of magic - and drives people to leave his country. So, this imperfect god agrees to remove the curse.
But he doesn't quite do all he intends. Magic is legal, yes. But mages still feel a weight being in this country. Many still leave. Others still practice in secret.
Confronted by the Jewel Keepers again, this god recognizes that he didn't quite wipe the slate as clean as he had intended.
When he does, magic blooms. Mages breathe freely. The stigma of the generations gone by is finally eased. And lo and behold, there are dozens and dozens of mages in this country, who had hid who they were. For fear of rejection. Because of the weight of oppression that had been partially, but not completely, removed. Free to be themselves, the mages flourish finally. And the country is the better for it.
Fantasy as morality play? You bet.