I am writing my second novel now, tentatively titled The Shattered Spire until I can come up with something more inspired. It is set around eight centuries prior to my story in The Shard. My
last blog post detailed the high level concept for this next book, and I think this idea gives me a lot of room for adding a lot more tension and conflict from the very start than my first book did.
I haven't completely decided on how many point-of-view (POV) characters I will use in this story, but I do know two of them so far, so I figured I could tell you a bit about them here.
The first (and primary character) is Imric Kaldarion, the 13-year-old youngest son of the king. Now hold on with the eye rolling. I know loads of fantasy protagonists are royalty, but this is a bit different than usual. Poor Imric has never been acknowledged by his father, who so loved the queen that when she died giving birth he was inconsolable. He blamed the wizard Xax, who had understood the queen was beyond saving and cut her open to try to save the baby, and he blamed the baby as well. The baby was so sickly that no one expected him to live, so the king abandoned Imric to his fate. With the help of his eldest sister Liva, Imric did survive, though he purposely pretends to remain sickly so that he will remain unnoticed by his father and not have to join his brothers in being raised as a knight but can instead study (he loves to read histories of the Known Lands) under Liva's tutelage. His older brothers call him 'Rat' since he always seems to be scuttling about the back halls of the castle 'spying' on everything that goes on.
Imric has two brothers. The apparent heir is feebleminded. Everyone expects that the king will pass him over in favor of the younger son, only the king has never gotten around to actually announcing this. The younger son is off leading the army at distant East Gate because he is one of those who cannot stomach living within the influence of the spire, since he has grown up bitter and jealous about being clearly better than his older brother but not being the heir. Nearly the entire army is made up of men who could not live within the realm due to the negative influence of the magic upon those who have too much of some bad trait within their hearts. When the spire is destroyed by a dragon and the king later slain (when the dragon attacks the capital), this younger son will be the most obvious antagonist as he leads the army from East Gate against his older brother (who is being championed by his uncle since the king never truly renounced his eldest as heir).
Since this post is already getting too long, I'll talk about the second POV character in my next post.
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You've really worked on the backstory for this one!
ReplyDeleteAlex, you have no idea! I have tons of it that I could bore everyone with. I did the same with The Shard. There is so much that I never used in the book that I could do a whole Silmarillion type book about the history of the lands (though not as elequently as Tolkien, of course).
ReplyDeleteGood luck with your writing. Sounds like a video game could be made from this.
ReplyDeleteI'm loving the idea so far. Keep it coming!
ReplyDeleteThis sounds fantastic Ted. I'm loving all the dysfunction in the family.
ReplyDeleteAnd I know how you feel about not using what you've written. I do that all the time. Whole chapters sitting in a word doc. never to see the light of day.
Awesome. So far I LOVE the idea that you can have the same setting (East Gate and such) with completely different characters (except Xax) 800 years earlier. This sounds amazing.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the encouragement, everyone!
ReplyDeletethis TOTALLY sounds like something i'd like to read!! :)
ReplyDeleteI think you have to delve into the backstory like that in order to completely flesh out the characters. Sounds interesting though.
ReplyDeleteI just love the sound of this more and more as you develop it, Ted. I think it sounds incredible. Might be interesting to do the PoV of all three brothers--there is a continuity to it and I think it woul be nice to SHOW the feeble-mindedness in one and the resentment in the other. You could call it the Tale of Three Brothers! DOH! Okay... been used... *shifty* Seriously though--that gives a really nice cohesive reason for the PoV choices.
ReplyDeleteThis already has my attention and these days I'm rather biased about the way fantasy has been written. So I'm very interested in seeing where you're going to go with this and reading the story when you're done.
ReplyDeleteAnd I love the hints about the backstory. I've got tons of backstory as well for my novels. The question is, for me at least, how much do I utilize in the regular writing of the story and how much do I leave out because it's not necessary.
It's great to hear such positive comments. Hart, I expect I will change my mind a few times about POV characters, as each choice leads to new possibilities. I have only selected two so far, but I don't know if it will remain with just those two. I am going to post about the second one soon, and I wonder what you will think.
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