NaNoWriMo pt 4: The Story So Far

Tags

Mirror Hunters, NaNoWriMo, plot building

I really should have seen this coming. A week and a bit of logical, step-by-step world construction abruptly spiraled out of control, and lead to a week of hectic, chaotic, wonderful creative mess where a half dozen little fragments of idea took root and began to twine together to form something almost approaching a decent narrative.

There are still pieces missing. Huge pieces. Critical pieces. But where two weeks ago I had a premise and a religion, I’ve now got the basic outlines of a plot! It’s exciting, and a little bit scary, because while the original point of this NaNo was to start a completely new novel without baggage and preconceptions, I’ve still managed to form some biases about where I thought it was going to go. There are two more weeks to go, and it may all change again between now and November first.

But in the meanwhile, here’s what seems to be happening.

The main action begins when the primary antagonist, at least temporarily named Tharron, calls for the assassination of one Shadra Frey Madrine, a diplomat’s daughter who’s recently arrived in town. The assassins have certain requirements that have to be met in order for someone to be a legitimate target, and Miss Frey doesn’t qualify. Tharron doesn’t take refusal well, and ends up orchestrating the death of the assassin who refused him.

Our Main Character, Brenn, was her chief protege. On the one hand, the murder of his mentor is a personal blow. Arguably more importantly, the fact that a citizen was able to arrange the assassination of a high priest sort of speaks of high-level corruption within the priesthood. So he is going to have to find a way to avenge his master and figure out what’s going on behind the scenes. This will, of course, be complicated when Lord Tharron learns that he’s meddling, and adds “get rid of that pesky interfering young assassin” to his daily to-do list.

This raises two questions: Who is Tharron and what does he want (which is in and of itself two questions, but not if you don’t look closely enough) and, who is Shadra, and why did a nobleman from one country want her assassinated two days after she gets off of the boat? She seems sweet, innocent, she has no obvious dark past (which is part of why she wasn’t eligible for assassination in the first place).

I’ve always loved novels that tell more than one story, and I think I’ve just stumbled upon my deuteragonist. By the time she’s being hunted by an evil noble bastard, Shadra’s options are going to be a bit limited. I found I was more interested in what got her into this situation in the first place.

It turns out that Tharron’s financial empire is actually rooted in a stranglehold on the obsidian trade. Obsidian has intriguing properties and can be used as a focus for the magic practiced in another land. The power was generally considered not a great threat, in part because it’s only practiced several large bodies of water away, and in part because it only really works at dusk and dawn unless a caster has obsidian to focus through and most people don’t know about the obsidian loophole. So not only is Tharron smuggling precious materials, he’s helping a foreign invader set up a foothold.

And this is where the girl comes in at least on his side of the story.

Her home city is a major port, and while she’s off having an adventure she ends up down at the docs while Tharron is there negotiating something with his partners. She doesn’t know who he is or what he’s doing, but he sees her face and remembers it. When she flees the results of her own little adventure (her friend’s father is the harbormaster, and the casters from across the sea who have a rather vested interest in turning his town into a smuggling hub abducted him when an attempt to get him addicted to something to keep him pliable didn’t work out) she ends up waltzing right into his home town. What’s he to assume, other than that the gig is up?

I’ll have to work out the fine details on both Shadra’s quest to save her friend’s father (which I’m sure will involve capers and romance), and on Brenn’s revenge retaliation uncovering of conspiracy (which will probably be a little bit less caper-y and a bit more mass-murder). At some point, their stories will intertwine, and they’ll take down Lord Tharron and cripple the casters’ invasion strategy. Hopefully the next two weeks will include me figuring how!

NaNoWriMo pt 2: The Beginnings of Plot

Tags

assassins, Brent Weeks, fantasy, Jacqueline Carey, Mirror Hunters, NaNoWriMo, October Prep, plot, plot building, prompts, sff, worldbuilding, writing challenges

It is October 1st!

The NaNoWriMo official website is (hopefully) only minutes or hours away from unveiling itself for the new year, and that means I can officially begin the prep I totally haven’t been working on for a week and a half! I’ve never kept track of the October part of the process before, so I’m actually kind of excited to see what will evolve and grow in the 30 days before the 30 days, as it were.

For now, I have The Mirror Hunters.

This title, like everything else I come up with before the beginning of November, may or may not be subject to change.

I started this novel with four prompts: assassins, the seven deadly sins, mirrors, and mazes. Having just finished Brent Weeks’ Night Angel trilogy not too long ago, the idea of writing about assassins seems immediately appealing. I’ve just seen one way the concept can go, why not have fun looking at it from a different angle?

I don’t place much value on being original for the sake of being original, but it’s also not very interesting to keep rewalking the same paths. Weeks’ assassins felt very archetypal to me – they’re contract killers, respected in the underworld but hardly the sort of people ordinary folk would want to invite for dinner. Other people have shone other lights on their assassins; the Assassin’s Creed assassins aren’t so much hired killers are they are idealistic vigilantes who don’t mind slitting throats to make the world a better place. I’ve also seen assassins portrayed as little more than mercenaries who prefer quick fights over bodyguard duty, or assassins who work as the clandestine arm of some government agency or other …

As I was mulling it over in the shower, I realized that the one thing I’d never seen before was a story where being an assassin was something you could proudly say on the street, and have people look at you with nods of approval.

So that’s what I’m going to write.

Of course, there are plenty of good reasons why ‘dude who gets paid to kill other people’ isn’t normally the kind of career a person can boast about. For one thing, that basically means it would have to be legal to put hits out or accept contracts to kill people. Legalized murder isn’t exactly the sort of thing that encourages stable, moral societies – and I really don’t want to write about a cracked dystopia where the mob rules and life and death are chips in the middle of someone else’s poker game.

There have to be rules, there have to be morals, and they have to be the kind of rules and morals the average reader can understand or I’m going to lose everybody (including myself).

One author came to mind when I was contemplating how to navigate these murky waters. Jacqueline Carey did an interesting job of turning prostitution into a noble and sacred art, as well as crafting some political tangles I thoroughly enjoyed the unravelling of.  Obviously, I can’t treat the killing of random civilians the same way that she dealt with the offering of sexual acts for compensation – orgasms and death, slightly different end results there.

Still, it’s a stepping stone.

What I needed more than anything else was a way to make my assassins more helpful to society than they were harmful – a fairly tough requirement, given that their main function involves killing society for fun and profit.

Well, what if they were also arbiters of justice? Not just the hand of the law, the way I’ve seen before, but if somehow the assassins themselves were a means by which social order was preserved? Not even social order, that’s too tenuous; taking a page from Carey’s book, I think my assassins will be the weapon in the hand of a higher power. Assassin-priests, who do god’s will even as they take your bag of gold to slit the throat of that guy who looked at you funny the other day.

I think I like where this is going, and the religious angle gives me something I think I can use to hook onto prompt number two, the Seven Deadly Sins.

Next up: religion!