I actually had a really difficult time deciding what kind of character to play when I started up Dragon Age: Inquisition. I knew I didn’t want to be a Human, since I’d played a human in both the previous games, and I knew I wanted to be a mage which meant I wasn’t going to play a Dwarf, but I couldn’t decide between playing a Qunari or an Elf. I’d been having a lot of fun learning more and more about the Qunari in my replays of the first two Dragon Age games and, since I’ve apparently never spent much time or energy trying to learn about them in previous play-throughs, thought it might be fun to play through this (currently) final game with a Qunari lens over the whole experience. I was interested to see how the general residents of Thedas responded to my character, to be a giant woman, and to see how those who knew about the Qun responded to my character, a mage who had grown up outside the Qun and absolutely not let herself be collared and leashed in the way that most other Qunari mages were. On the other hand, knowing what I know now about how Inquisition can end and how Veilguard starts, I thought it might be fun to play an Elf and finally go through the romance sequence for Solas. I’d started a playthrough as an Elf, once, and thought it was pretty interesting to see how everyone reacted to an Elven Inquisitor, but I’d never actually romanced Solas before. I tried to flirt with him a bunch once, but I was playing a Human woman and he was not interested. Plus, Elven women are pretty fun! They’ve got the most flirt options and, personally, I’m interested in flirting with as many companions as possible! That said, since I’d be playing an Elven woman and absolutely won’t be playing through Dragon Age: Inquisition again any time soon, I knew that this was my one shot to actually romance Solas and see what its all about before Veilguard made it clear to me.
Continue readingRomance
Saturday Afternoon Musing
National Novel Writing Month is coming up. That’s a bit of big deal for me because I’ve at least participated every year since 2013 and won every year but 2016 when I was applying and interviewing for a new job. I also created a challenge for myself, to raise the stakes, every year since 2014 when I found myself a little bored with just writing 50,000 words again. The year after that, I wrote an entire story in a month (which is big deal for me since I am anything but concise). Last year, I wrote 50,000 words of a new story that wound up being more foresight than fiction, ran a support group for my friends who were trying National Novel Writing Month, and updated my blog every day of the month (which was a part of the support since it was stuff about writing, about what inspires me, and some prompts to help them push through when they feel stuck). This year, though, I’m struggling with what my extra challenge should be.
The support group could be fun to do again, but the only people I know who are doing National Novel Writing Month are people who have been doing it as long as I have been, or longer, and who don’t really need support to write. A space for us to connect and talk about writing is always good, but I won’t really need to actively support them. I still plan to do the blog posts, but that’s just the same thing as last year. There’s nothing new to this challenge, which means it isn’t challenge. It’s just the same thing all over again and that means I’m not actually going to try my best.
I could make the argument that I’ve never been this burned out, worn down, and just all-around-exhausted when starting a National Novel Writing Month before, so it’ll be difficult enough for me to get anything done on time or according to whatever plan I come up with (as evidenced by the fact that half my blog posts are “late” these days, showing up in the afternoon instead of their typical nine or eleven in the morning time). That feels like a cop-out. I dislike cop-outs. It gets to easy to let them slide in the future if you start using them now and I am all about staying firm and focused on my goals. I didn’t get to almost a year of writing every day and posting on my blog every day by letting myself compromise, so doing that literally the day after I hit 365 consecutive posts would feel like I was spitting in the face of my own accomplishment.
One of my friends suggested I write a humorous romance novel and, upon hearing that, the rest of them took up the call. Suggestions from something involving characters from a D&D campaign that ended a while ago to a romance novel about a modern male protagonist trying to live his normal 20-something modern life while his girlfriend is someone out of a highly-sexual romance novel that pokes fun at the sort of contrived situations involved in a lot of cornier (and absolutely amazing sounding) romance novels. Seriously, there’s a whole series about some vampire/angel/insert-monster-template-here brothers who kill vampire demons and are actually immortal vikings who sometimes time travel. How is that not a story you gotta hear? I can’t find the link my friends provided while trying to convince me to write a romance novel, but it was a riot. It would definitely be a challenge since I’ve read only a handful of romance novels and it isn’t something I’m normally interesting in writing. Being able to stay focused and working on a project that isn’t something I’m terribly interested in would be a good skill to have, though, since a lot of good writers wind up writing what the publisher wants rather than strictly what they want. Being able to do “made to order” fiction would be a good skill to work on.
All of my other ideas have something to do with my blog. For instance, I could keep up with daily posts with National Novel Writing Month support and encouragement posts, but also include my serial science fiction story and reviews. Maybe even throw in my flash fiction updates, too. Basically just keep up the popular part of my blog, the fun part of my blog, and the only story I’ll have ever finished if I keep at it. If I keep that up, I’ll probably finish Coldheart and Iron on Christmas Day and post the epilogue on New Years Day, which feels like a damn fine way to start 2019.
Of course, I could also do this regardless of my National Novel Writing Month. If I work my ass off over during the rest of October, I could have all my blog posts written. That’s only 50,000 words in addition to the 14,000 I have to do for this month’s blog posts. Totally possible to do all that in eleven days. I mean, that’s only six thousand words a day! Easy-peasy! No sweat! I could do that in my sleep! I mean, I’ve basically signed up for 50,000 plus 30,000 plus whatever my extra challenge is for next month unless I find a way to work ahead this month. All on top of my normal work hours, my usual obligations, and the fact that I’m going to need to work out or at least go on a long walk every day so I don’t turn into a pile of pudding. I really suck at taking it easy, don’t I?
But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? This isn’t supposed to be easy. I’m supposed to be working on stuff in order to grow as a writer. I want to widen my horizons, improve my skills, and try things I wouldn’t normally try. Fifty thousand words is all well and good, but I’ve done that five times so far. I want to do something new, try to push myself in a new direction, and maybe lose myself in something bigger than my own problems. I’m going to struggle with my mental health, but I always do. I may need to find better ways to cope with what’s going on in my head, but that also means I won’t be able to let it have as much sway as it does on days like today since I won’t be able to spend four hours writing a blog post that’s just over one thousand words.
As I’ve learned throughout my live, and during the past year especially, I work best when I don’t have room for error. Pass or fail scenarios are my jam, even if the chances of passing are small. I’m going to pick some dumb, ridiculously huge goal, try to cram a month’s of writing into eleven days so all my blog posts are written ahead of time, and then I’m going to create a made-to-order romance novel in order to force myself to improve my ability to write things that aren’t necessarily something that thrills me.
To that end, here are my three ideas:
- Something based on some D&D characters from a really old game (that happens in a D&D world, with quantifiable numbers and stuff, rather than a “typical” fantasy world).
- Aggressive Romance Novel Woman meets normal 20-something dude and worlds collide. Hilarity Ensues.
- Astronaut/Werewolf/Demon/Mole-Person man meets Basic “Becky” and falls madly in love, but only during Pumpkin Spice season.
- Air-Force Pilot/Old-School Vampire/Faerie/Lizard-woman falls in love with a hipster trying to French press his coffee in his yurt in the woods.
Comment your preferred option(s)! You can pick as many as you like.
Song in the Silence: A Loud Endorsement
“Song in the Silence” is the debut novel of Elizabeth Kerner, published in 1997, and the first novel in what eventually became a trilogy. There is a wonderful story captured in the pages, just waiting to be explored once you’ve managed to make your way past the stereotypically nineties cover art. I don’t know if I can say it was a unique story because my knowledge of female writers of fantasy from the nineties is sorely lacking (something I’m trying to change), but I can definitely say it had a much different tone from most other fantasy novels I’d read.
While the world doesn’t have the same kind of almost-human characterization some other fantasy novels go for, it still conveys a sense of breadth and depth to the readers. The bits of historical information Kerner provides to make the world feel real are worked into the flow of the story and they never feel like exposition or an information dump aside from one or two moments where a major historical event is shared with the protagonist so she understands the enormity of what’s going on. Even those moments feel a lot more natural than they otherwise might because they’re almost always delivered in the form of smaller stories told by one character to another. Though only a small portion of the world is shown through the course of the story, the introductory narration and the traveling the protagonist does firmly establishes a much larger world that you can feel hovering around the edges of the story as you read through it.
The mythology, which sets the stage for the main conflict of the novel and of the trilogy, is not entirely new though Kerner does a great job of breathing new life into it. The mythology plays into the trope of Dragons as beings of order and demons as beings of chaos, informing the ways the two groups interact with not only each other, but with the neutral humans who can, of course, pick either chaos or order. Which, in this story, means that humans can be good or evil, relying heavily on the cliché of order being good and chaos being evil. There is no way to avoid clichés entirely, nor is it necessary to do so, but this particular one has always felt like too much of an oversimplification to me. That being said, I would call this particular cliche more of a pet-peeve than an actual issue in this case. Kerner’s story may lean heavily on the “human ability to be good or evil” idea, but the idea is used as less of a crutch and as more of a support beam. It is incorporated into the story as an important aspect of the story itself rather than used to prop up a weak philosophical concept a character is espousing. It turns from “chaos is evil and order is good” into “this person is evil and uses the power of chaos to act against order and good separately, in pursuit of their selfish goals.”
One of my favorite parts of the book is that every character in the novel could be you, your friends, or someone you’d meet at work. Unlike most fantasy characters, who I would not want to meet because they’d be insufferable, I would actually love to hang out with the people from this book. Maybe get a drink or a late brunch. They all have their flaws and they all tend to keep running into trouble as a result of them, but never in the same way. Some characters learn of others’ flaws and exploit them, young people are inexperienced and rather stupid, and the powerful are somewhat impulsive as a result of overconfidence. The protagonist, a young woman, falls into a few traps over the course of the novel because she is naive. She struggles with how to relate to some of the other characters because she learns of these huge gaps between her experience and theirs. The villain almost cackles over a steaming cauldron, but it is strongly implied that he’s gone insane at that point, as a result of all of the demon magic he uses. It feels a lot more natural because you can also imagine him cackling over a bowl of oatmeal or as he goes for a pleasant afternoon hike.
In direct opposition to the humanity of the characters (including the non-human ones), there was a rather heavy-handed romance subplot in this book. The protagonist and her love interest wind up in a relationship and loving each other not because they’ve gotten to know each other well and developed a relationship, but because they lay eyes on each other and begin to fall in love. There are prophecies mentioned here and there, as a part of the prophecies driving the major plot points of the trilogy, that make it seem like they were destined to love each other. After they’ve confessed their love for each other and had a soul-bonding moment, the relationship gets significantly more normal if you pretend they actually took their time getting to that point. I like the later depictions of the romance and their relationship better because it more closely matches the more human way most relationships in our world work.
I would recommend reading “Song in the Silence” if you want a book with interesting and real characters, a well-developed world that fits nicely into the “high fantasy” genre, an entire race of intelligent and rather “human” dragons, and don’t mind one of the major plot points being a Disney princess style romance that feels a bit shoehorned into the rest of the story. It is a rather quick read, though I recommend taking the time to pace yourself rather than attempting to devour it in one day. Though quick, it is still a bit too meaty for a single sitting.