Liridan Trilogy
So, in the case that you might want to read the whole, nasty thing, here it is. I'm afriad that LJ cut out all the formating, so imagine that all of the book titles are in italics.
The Effect of the Liridan Rebellion Trilogy
The Liridan Rebellion was a trilogy of books I wanted to write. The three books are Ratharen, Katara, and Aelaris. They are set in Mechania, a kingdom-city with machines powered by energy crystals, and where magic-users are hunted down by the government, and feared by the population that occasionally births them.
Enter Ratharen, a young man with dreams of being an elite soldier in the military, and a deep trust in the government. When his friend, Mern, accidentally insults the government, he is forced to protect his friend… and in the process, finds he is a magic-user, one of the madmen who would slaughter the city, invade the privacy of innocent minds, who could destroy with a thought. With his family dead, he flees to the run down Industrial District, unwilling to find the government he respects so much, but wanting to know the true about himself, about the lightning that is his at thought’s command, at instinct’s call. He knows he’s not a madman, right?
Enter Katara, a young magic-user who hides from the government with her younger, mentally challenged sister. Having grown up on the street, she lacks the morals or the knowledge of Ratharen, yet is highly intelligent and driven to do all she can to survive. Between her ability to twist thoughts and memories, or even outright control normal people, and the illusions he sister can create, she’s survived for years. But this new, powerful, young man is an opportunity, not just for survival, but perhaps even revenge. She may not trust him, but she is willing to use him for whatever ends.
Enter Aelaris, a government prototype biologically and magically engineered to concrete the Council’s grip on the population. Her voice is law, her wish the command of those who hear it, yet submissive and shy. Rescued from the lab by Ratharen and the resistance group he has formed, she is thrust into a world she doesn’t understand, pulled by forces whose aims she does not know. She trusts Ratharen, and wants to do what is best, what is right. But is it right to control peoples mind’s like Katara? Ratharen says it’s different, that people enjoy doing her bidding, but the result is the same.
Over the course of twenty years, the three books follow each character in turn, as they struggle with the Council, with themselves, and with each other.
I loved it. It was what I wanted to get published, the tale that I could not outdo. I started writing it in the spring of 2004, and spent the whole year writing nothing else. The result was eleven pages, the first chapter. As I moved on to the second chapter, I was horrified at my slow rate, and frightened that my portrayals were off. I knew that there was something to writing that I could not touch yet, and I wasn’t willing to mess up the story with bad writing. If I was to get it published, I wanted my first trilogy the best it could be.
Answers to my problems would present themselves. I became addicted to web-forums shortly before the end of the year, and my previously snail-paced typing improved tenfold. I still could not, and still can’t, hand-write very fast, but one barrier-the time it actually took to write-was lessened. Ten-times three words a minute was not fast, but it wasn’t slow, either.
The second answer, for how I could improve my writing, came about through that. With a decent typing speed, it was suddenly possible to practice writing, something that would have been unthinkable mere months. This dovetailed nicely with the web-forum addiction, as the forum I was at had a small, friendly writing section. I had gotten decent feedback on the first chapter, as well as a dream I had written out.
That spring, I took a number of ideas and scenes that had been floating around, and coalesced them into a story. I started writing The Tale of Kal’Essirin (tToKE), a story so long and wandering that even I knew it was unpublishable. I churned out one or two roughly three-paged scenes each week. Four scenes made an Episode, and several episodes made a chapter. The first three episodes were Chapter One, done over the course of half the spring. The next chapter had seven episodes planned, each longer than they had been, and was the average size for a chapter. There were about twenty chapters in each of the three Parts.
It felt good that I could practice forever.
The web forum grew too, and with it, the writing section. I aggressively attracted people to read and review my on-going story. I got feedback, and improved my writing considerably. One person went so far as to go through all I had written at that time, and grammatically edit the whole thing, an act that impressed me greatly. I decided at that point, that I would become a writer, not just a one-shot wonder, and further, that I would always be writing some stuff on the web, freely, for anyone to read and enjoy.
While I could technically write tToKE for the next… for the next four years, I became afraid that tToKE, which took place in proto-Drahkimar (Kal’s race got edited out of existence recently) was too fantasy, too medieval, that it would not be good practice for the steel and guns of Mechania.
So when I finished the first chapter, and struggled with how to start the next one, I wasn’t as driven as I might have been. So there was some time there.
And one night I wrote “It was a rainy evening in March.,” and just kept going from there. Soon I found myself writing what I termed Wander. I finished the prologue that night, and soon I wrote again. I wrote ten pages, single-spaced, that second night.
The trademark feature of Wander was its extreme over-description. If I over-described, I figured, it would be good practice for normal description. More pound for the page, in terms of description, anyway.
I wrote another ten pages the next week, and more than ten the week after that. It was going well. People were curious, though I doubted it was very good on the eyes. I worked on making the voluminous description flow well.
And then disaster struck. I was in the ill-fated Renaissance Academy at that time, and was under the instruction of a rather good teacher in an American Lit. Class. She had supported me in my writing, and we were good friends. That wasn’t the problem.
Some day during the spring semester, we started to read Huckleberry Finn.
It’s an unfortunate fact of my literary life that I wind up writing like whatever I have recently read.
It’s really unfortunate when those two get together.
Suddenly, I found that I could not write. My style had been mauled by Mark Twain’s young narrator, and I was spouting out his narrative’s style every time I put finger to key. Wander died. I couldn’t go back to tToKE either.
I was stuck.
Eventually I started again, writing “Broken,” a short horror story, and yet another piece for practice. “Broken” tested whether I could do without much description by generating mood and the existence of relevant objects, and letting the reader’s imagination do the rest.
I’m not sure if it worked. While I got positive reviews, as well as some people who got freaked out enough that they couldn’t finish (I considered those good reviews too), I found that it was impossible for me to write that way and tell what I needed to say. While it could work with a short story, where I could use feedback to find the missing parts and fix them, using it as a style for an entire novel, let alone a trilogy, would be impractical.
I continued to edit “Broken” though the summer and it became the piece I referred people to when they asked about my writing.
The next fall, I wrote a short story by the name of “Wishes,” where I had no particular aim for practicing some aspect of my writing. Other than that, my creative juices were dry. I wanted to write, but it was still too hard. I wanted to start The Liridan Rebellion again, but I wasn’t sure I was ready. I wanted to write tToKE or Wander for practice, but as I looked back at them, they looked like crap.
Beyond just the literary constipation, I lacked time. I was fully engaged in my classes at SMC, including an English class, and the rest of my time was eaten up by the bane called college applications.
So I mostly just hung around the writing forum, and helped out fledging writers like others had helped me.
This changed as 2006 started, as I finished, and sent off, the last of the applications. I had enrolled in a writer’s conference at one of the places I was considering, and it required me to bring a twenty page, double-spaced manuscript for my small group instruction with the best-selling author Michael T. Stackpole.
So I dredged up a plot chart I had made long ago, and started on what I decided would be the last practice before starting the Liridan Rebellion I started Phoenix Blood (working title), a story slightly short for a novel, but way too long for a short story. I swore to finish it, so I could at least prove to myself that I could finish a novelish length tale. I wrote more than twenty pages before the conference, and sent it by some friends for editing. trilogy.
The Small group instruction with Mr. Stackpole was a life-changing experience. In him, I found a writer who wrote like myself, and knew many, many tricks for making books addictive and good. Well, not tricks, quite. Tricks imply easy. His tricks concern things like making sure that every character, however minor, has a character arc in motion, has a motivation and objective in each scene; they concern things like the in-depth studying medieval warfare, or anything else you put into a book. The best summation would be the statement “Never go the easy way.”
The three days there were well spent, and I kept writing Phoenix Blood, using it as a testing ground to apply his tips. It grew from 20 double-spaced pages to 60 single spaced pages.
I wrote Phoenix for the spring of 2006, but my mind was elsewhere. The Liridan Rebellion trilogy was starting to look bad in my mind, and ideas were swarming from a Free-Form Role Playing Game (FFRPG) I had taken part of in the web forum. The character of Aren, and the setting I had helped develop, intrigued me, and a story soon took shape. When the FFRPG died, I asked all those involved if I could freely take the ideas from the game for use in a story. They agreed.
Since then, I have been writing Phoenix and planning the story called Dusk. Dusk takes place in a unique setting, with original characters, with a new perspective and themes. It has much more potential than the Liridan Rebellion trilogy, even though it still needs a great deal more development.
Now, I write Phoenix Blood for Dusk, and have another story, A Sheathe for All Swords, buzzing around my head. Fortunately, it can’t replace Dusk, as it is unpublishable (too long, no particular audience, long boring sections, too many characters… everything). I’ll be writing it for the web, fulfilling my promise to always post stuff there.
With Dusk as my debut, Ratharen, Katara, and Aelaris may never see the light of day. However, they will live on in their legacy, as without them being the motivation for my practice and improvement, I would have never taken the path I did, and become a writer.
No… I would have just become a well-paid engineer, well-paid mathematician, well-paid physicist, or some other area that I have talent in.
(end) (fixed at home)
So yeah. Teh suxxor, no?
The Effect of the Liridan Rebellion Trilogy
The Liridan Rebellion was a trilogy of books I wanted to write. The three books are Ratharen, Katara, and Aelaris. They are set in Mechania, a kingdom-city with machines powered by energy crystals, and where magic-users are hunted down by the government, and feared by the population that occasionally births them.
Enter Ratharen, a young man with dreams of being an elite soldier in the military, and a deep trust in the government. When his friend, Mern, accidentally insults the government, he is forced to protect his friend… and in the process, finds he is a magic-user, one of the madmen who would slaughter the city, invade the privacy of innocent minds, who could destroy with a thought. With his family dead, he flees to the run down Industrial District, unwilling to find the government he respects so much, but wanting to know the true about himself, about the lightning that is his at thought’s command, at instinct’s call. He knows he’s not a madman, right?
Enter Katara, a young magic-user who hides from the government with her younger, mentally challenged sister. Having grown up on the street, she lacks the morals or the knowledge of Ratharen, yet is highly intelligent and driven to do all she can to survive. Between her ability to twist thoughts and memories, or even outright control normal people, and the illusions he sister can create, she’s survived for years. But this new, powerful, young man is an opportunity, not just for survival, but perhaps even revenge. She may not trust him, but she is willing to use him for whatever ends.
Enter Aelaris, a government prototype biologically and magically engineered to concrete the Council’s grip on the population. Her voice is law, her wish the command of those who hear it, yet submissive and shy. Rescued from the lab by Ratharen and the resistance group he has formed, she is thrust into a world she doesn’t understand, pulled by forces whose aims she does not know. She trusts Ratharen, and wants to do what is best, what is right. But is it right to control peoples mind’s like Katara? Ratharen says it’s different, that people enjoy doing her bidding, but the result is the same.
Over the course of twenty years, the three books follow each character in turn, as they struggle with the Council, with themselves, and with each other.
I loved it. It was what I wanted to get published, the tale that I could not outdo. I started writing it in the spring of 2004, and spent the whole year writing nothing else. The result was eleven pages, the first chapter. As I moved on to the second chapter, I was horrified at my slow rate, and frightened that my portrayals were off. I knew that there was something to writing that I could not touch yet, and I wasn’t willing to mess up the story with bad writing. If I was to get it published, I wanted my first trilogy the best it could be.
Answers to my problems would present themselves. I became addicted to web-forums shortly before the end of the year, and my previously snail-paced typing improved tenfold. I still could not, and still can’t, hand-write very fast, but one barrier-the time it actually took to write-was lessened. Ten-times three words a minute was not fast, but it wasn’t slow, either.
The second answer, for how I could improve my writing, came about through that. With a decent typing speed, it was suddenly possible to practice writing, something that would have been unthinkable mere months. This dovetailed nicely with the web-forum addiction, as the forum I was at had a small, friendly writing section. I had gotten decent feedback on the first chapter, as well as a dream I had written out.
That spring, I took a number of ideas and scenes that had been floating around, and coalesced them into a story. I started writing The Tale of Kal’Essirin (tToKE), a story so long and wandering that even I knew it was unpublishable. I churned out one or two roughly three-paged scenes each week. Four scenes made an Episode, and several episodes made a chapter. The first three episodes were Chapter One, done over the course of half the spring. The next chapter had seven episodes planned, each longer than they had been, and was the average size for a chapter. There were about twenty chapters in each of the three Parts.
It felt good that I could practice forever.
The web forum grew too, and with it, the writing section. I aggressively attracted people to read and review my on-going story. I got feedback, and improved my writing considerably. One person went so far as to go through all I had written at that time, and grammatically edit the whole thing, an act that impressed me greatly. I decided at that point, that I would become a writer, not just a one-shot wonder, and further, that I would always be writing some stuff on the web, freely, for anyone to read and enjoy.
While I could technically write tToKE for the next… for the next four years, I became afraid that tToKE, which took place in proto-Drahkimar (Kal’s race got edited out of existence recently) was too fantasy, too medieval, that it would not be good practice for the steel and guns of Mechania.
So when I finished the first chapter, and struggled with how to start the next one, I wasn’t as driven as I might have been. So there was some time there.
And one night I wrote “It was a rainy evening in March.,” and just kept going from there. Soon I found myself writing what I termed Wander. I finished the prologue that night, and soon I wrote again. I wrote ten pages, single-spaced, that second night.
The trademark feature of Wander was its extreme over-description. If I over-described, I figured, it would be good practice for normal description. More pound for the page, in terms of description, anyway.
I wrote another ten pages the next week, and more than ten the week after that. It was going well. People were curious, though I doubted it was very good on the eyes. I worked on making the voluminous description flow well.
And then disaster struck. I was in the ill-fated Renaissance Academy at that time, and was under the instruction of a rather good teacher in an American Lit. Class. She had supported me in my writing, and we were good friends. That wasn’t the problem.
Some day during the spring semester, we started to read Huckleberry Finn.
It’s an unfortunate fact of my literary life that I wind up writing like whatever I have recently read.
It’s really unfortunate when those two get together.
Suddenly, I found that I could not write. My style had been mauled by Mark Twain’s young narrator, and I was spouting out his narrative’s style every time I put finger to key. Wander died. I couldn’t go back to tToKE either.
I was stuck.
Eventually I started again, writing “Broken,” a short horror story, and yet another piece for practice. “Broken” tested whether I could do without much description by generating mood and the existence of relevant objects, and letting the reader’s imagination do the rest.
I’m not sure if it worked. While I got positive reviews, as well as some people who got freaked out enough that they couldn’t finish (I considered those good reviews too), I found that it was impossible for me to write that way and tell what I needed to say. While it could work with a short story, where I could use feedback to find the missing parts and fix them, using it as a style for an entire novel, let alone a trilogy, would be impractical.
I continued to edit “Broken” though the summer and it became the piece I referred people to when they asked about my writing.
The next fall, I wrote a short story by the name of “Wishes,” where I had no particular aim for practicing some aspect of my writing. Other than that, my creative juices were dry. I wanted to write, but it was still too hard. I wanted to start The Liridan Rebellion again, but I wasn’t sure I was ready. I wanted to write tToKE or Wander for practice, but as I looked back at them, they looked like crap.
Beyond just the literary constipation, I lacked time. I was fully engaged in my classes at SMC, including an English class, and the rest of my time was eaten up by the bane called college applications.
So I mostly just hung around the writing forum, and helped out fledging writers like others had helped me.
This changed as 2006 started, as I finished, and sent off, the last of the applications. I had enrolled in a writer’s conference at one of the places I was considering, and it required me to bring a twenty page, double-spaced manuscript for my small group instruction with the best-selling author Michael T. Stackpole.
So I dredged up a plot chart I had made long ago, and started on what I decided would be the last practice before starting the Liridan Rebellion I started Phoenix Blood (working title), a story slightly short for a novel, but way too long for a short story. I swore to finish it, so I could at least prove to myself that I could finish a novelish length tale. I wrote more than twenty pages before the conference, and sent it by some friends for editing. trilogy.
The Small group instruction with Mr. Stackpole was a life-changing experience. In him, I found a writer who wrote like myself, and knew many, many tricks for making books addictive and good. Well, not tricks, quite. Tricks imply easy. His tricks concern things like making sure that every character, however minor, has a character arc in motion, has a motivation and objective in each scene; they concern things like the in-depth studying medieval warfare, or anything else you put into a book. The best summation would be the statement “Never go the easy way.”
The three days there were well spent, and I kept writing Phoenix Blood, using it as a testing ground to apply his tips. It grew from 20 double-spaced pages to 60 single spaced pages.
I wrote Phoenix for the spring of 2006, but my mind was elsewhere. The Liridan Rebellion trilogy was starting to look bad in my mind, and ideas were swarming from a Free-Form Role Playing Game (FFRPG) I had taken part of in the web forum. The character of Aren, and the setting I had helped develop, intrigued me, and a story soon took shape. When the FFRPG died, I asked all those involved if I could freely take the ideas from the game for use in a story. They agreed.
Since then, I have been writing Phoenix and planning the story called Dusk. Dusk takes place in a unique setting, with original characters, with a new perspective and themes. It has much more potential than the Liridan Rebellion trilogy, even though it still needs a great deal more development.
Now, I write Phoenix Blood for Dusk, and have another story, A Sheathe for All Swords, buzzing around my head. Fortunately, it can’t replace Dusk, as it is unpublishable (too long, no particular audience, long boring sections, too many characters… everything). I’ll be writing it for the web, fulfilling my promise to always post stuff there.
With Dusk as my debut, Ratharen, Katara, and Aelaris may never see the light of day. However, they will live on in their legacy, as without them being the motivation for my practice and improvement, I would have never taken the path I did, and become a writer.
No… I would have just become a well-paid engineer, well-paid mathematician, well-paid physicist, or some other area that I have talent in.
(end) (fixed at home)
So yeah. Teh suxxor, no?