Around this time three years ago, I
wrote the first chapter of Scepter.
Now when I say the first, I mean the
first WRITTEN chapter. This chapter would later be dubbed number
fourteen, and now, as it sits here open on my desktop, waiting in the
queue to be edited and then updated to my fanfiction account, it
bears its final number, twenty-three. There are twenty-two chapters
before it, and possibly that many again after it. My chapters
average around 3000 words each, so thus far I have amassed over 75k
words in chronological order in those three years. That in itself
is the size of a respectable novel, and we're a little over half-way
through the story now. I really do expect this thing to hit over
125k words in its entirety.
The story has been through many changes
in that amount of time. When I wrote that first chapter, I was a
different person than I am now. My family, and myself individually,
were going through a very difficult and dark time, and when I first
jotted those notes down in a folder and thought I might do something
with it, the plot line was depressing and vague. There was a hunter,
and her name was Zarabethe. She was a loner by choice. She embarked
on this quest, and became obsessed with finishing it. Even though
she found love, and possible meaning for her life, she threw it all
away in search of this quest. This quest was so old and defunct
that it was obsolete, and would mean nothing to anyone except her if
she finished it. So really it was meaningless to everyone except her. The personality of Zarabethe was patterned off what
I felt I would be if left to my own devices and never felt love or
acceptance. She was cold. She was violent but precise. She ignored
her own needs until it became an emergency situation. The rest of
the world and even her own kind were alien to her. She did not seek
out companionship and did not desire it. She obsessed to the point
of neglecting herself and the people around her. She was never happy
but always sought after the next quest, never realizing what she
needed or wanted. She was like a robot with one dial that turned in
the direction of what she was seeking, and it never wavered. She was
emotionless. I feel like even though I've wasted nine sentences
describing her in the exact same way, I can't stress enough how
extremely unlikeable I made this character. She did nothing but
destroy her entire life over this quest, and then she died alone.
For a long time this was the end of it.
She achieved what she wanted: to be by herself. To find what she
was questing for. And it consumed and destroyed her. The end.
After all, that's a realistic ending, right? We hear stories about
that all time: addicts who go on unchecked and are found overdosed
in the alleyway, penniless and emaciated. Sure, a lot of addicts
reform, and some even ride that line between power and ruin, but a
lot just pass into the next world without even an ounce of regret.
I wanted her to be a mother in the
story, possibly to heighten the similarities between the two of us.
But I didn't want her to be a good mother. In the very darkest
corners of my mind, just a shadow really, not even a fully formed
idea, the child did not survive. She would never out-right kill a
child, not even I could write that atrocity. But maybe she just
didn't care about her own personal safety, and fell too many times,
and caused a miscarriage. Maybe she took such poor care of herself
that when the baby was born it was too frail and died. The most
likely scenario though, was that she was so obsessed with the quest
that even after carrying a baby to fruition, then giving birth, she
would simply strap the child on and keep going. Maybe she would
successfully care for the child and they would both make it. Maybe
she wouldn't, and it would die alone in the wilds somewhere. Maybe
she would become self-aware enough to realize how poor of a job she
was doing, and give the child up to someone who could care for it.
There were a range of possibilities, and none of them happy.
I wrote the first chapter of Scepter in
early spring of 2011. Then I set it aside, and did nothing for at least twelve months. My home life was busy. During that time, I got
pregnant with my seventh child, and things in my marriage were
getting wrung out and then fixed. I looked deep into myself and came
to a lot of realizations about the kind of person I was. Some of it
was downright scary, but they were not the only parts, and definitely
not the ones I intended to let lead my decisions. I gave birth to
our seventh and last child at home in our bathroom. My husband went
back to school to pursue something he loved. We joined and then left
a church. The rest of the kids grew and lived. Sometime in 2012,
around June I think, I sat down and wrote another chapter. By this
time I'd decided that no matter what, the child would live.
Zarabethe would realize at the last moment that she was responsible
for this life, and she would step up to it. I started to think
seriously about actually plotting this story out and completing it.
I wrote three or four chapters during this time, and I really began
to get into the joy of writing. Around this time, I started to talk
to my husband about the story, as I wanted to incorporate his
character into it. It was stop and start, and I was a little
reluctant to involve him creatively. This was my BABY, after all.
It was sometime during that period that I decided that the story
needed to change again.
With the way I had written Zarabethe,
no one would like her. Most importantly, the romantic lead, a man of
normal emotional depth, would have no interest in her at all, and
even if he did initially, she would very quickly put him off and he
would not pursue her. And I realized I did not want that kind of
ending. Inadvertently, my life had changed for the better so much
that I believed in a happy ending again. I didn't want her to
destroy her life for this quest anymore. Which meant I had to make a
decision: happiness and family, or finish the quest. With it boiled
down to that, I added one small but crucial personality detail to
Zarabethe. She was still all of the above, but she knew that she was
not normal, and she desired to change.
The details of the story are still
going through alterations, but since I made Zarabethe want to grow
and change, everything finally clicked into place. I set all my
chapters aside, opened up a new document, and started chapter one.
By the time I got to chapter four, I made a fanfiction account and
admitted to myself that I was dedicated to seeing this through.
There have been a few deviations. With
the success I was finally having at writing out the story of
Zarabethe and Elforen (who now had equal billing, and wasn't just a
side character), I began talking with the husband about how our other
Warcraft characters interacted. They didn't all have to pair off
into romantic couples, but maybe they were siblings, or just worked
together. My husband can be quite creative himself, and he spun me a
tale of his death knight, and what kind of person she had been before
she had been turned, the details of her capture, and what kind of
person she was now. We tended to pair his death knight with my
priest, and I had always thought of my priest as this innocent,
compassionate person who just wanted to help people, and with the
knowledge of his death knight's past, the story just seemed to fall
into place. I wrote the first chapter of Mercy in two days, and I
was really proud of it. I had started out writing one thing, ended
up with something else, but it did exactly what I wanted it to
without really trying. My husband loved it. He had been a little
interested in Scepter, especially since his character was involved,
but Mercy he would not stop talking about. Other people who read it
kept talking about it. I felt the first strings of the idea that
maybe I could write something good enough that other people would
want to purchase it and read it.
I wrote the four long chapters of Mercy
in between writing parts of Scepter. I still tended to write things
out of order in Scepter: the story was so long and winding and had
so many good potential emotional turns, that I wanted to write the
good stuff first. I stopped publishing out of order around chapter
nine, and took down all the chapters I had written a long time ago
until I could publish them chronologically. I was getting serious now.
During this time I also started writing other things: I realized
that if I really did want to publish something that I wrote,
obviously fanfiction was not where I needed to spend all my time. It
was surprisingly hard to create my own world though. Fantasy is my
favorite genre to read and write, but making a working and believable
environment for your story to exist in is exhausting. There are so
many details that you have to either research or completely make up,
and even then you have to research enough to know if what you made up
makes sense. I decided I wanted to create a nomadic race that was
similar to the gypsies, or the Romany. I very quickly realized that
I knew NOTHING about eastern European history, and all the little
ideas I had like putting in bits and pieces of other languages, and
making different customs, down to even naming commonalities and
religious quirks, required hours and hours of research and reading
and by the end I was more confused than enlightened.
At this point in the timeline of
Scepter, we are kind of at a difficult place. Our romantic leads are
separated. Zarabethe is continuing to ignore her growing symptoms,
and Elforen is in a state of denial about what's going on in his
heart. It's gotten a little stagnant, and although there will be
some resolution soon, it's all very angst-ridden. Although I've been
really good at staying in order for awhile, I find I've been
wandering in my mind to happier times, to a point where things are
coming together, where the plot really picks up and MOVES. If I were
reading this story, I'd be getting bored, but plugging along, knowing
that better times are coming. The anticipation of writing those
parts and then giving them to YOU, giving them to my teeny tiny army
of readers, and then sitting back and watching as you gasp and awe
and get excited for what's happening next right along with me, is
incredible. I am SO EXCITED you guys. I've been sailing this ship
for three years, and we're no longer in uncharted territory, we are
smooth sailing now, as fast as I can get my fingers to type it.
There will still be delays. Life
continues on apace, so to say. I have house to keep, kids to raise
and teach, amazing costumes to create, and unlike three years ago, I
have friends and community now that I look forward to interacting
with. Things may slow down and pick up in waves, but I will not
leave you hanging one moment longer than I have to. We will pilot
this course together and land safely on the other shore.
Onward and upward!
