Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Wildmage: Insert war here



Characters from K-drama 'Dae Joyoung'


I'm from the 'no plot, no problem' school of writing which means I often have to do a little re-imagining of my story, or write a chapter that comes before my original chapter one.

In Wildmage I've come to the conclusion that a war that was a vague part of the backstory needs to come onstage for the first chapter. I did a little clustering on this idea and came up with loads of cool stuff.

The story now starts with the Battle of Kumori. Kumori is a border county of the Northern kingdom and the original home of the Wildmage Hana. The traditional enemy of the Northern kingdom and its three allies is the Zmaray empire, home of the part-reptile Zmaray people. The Zmaray empire is in the center of a large, pangaia-ish continent, is landlocked, and always wanted to conquer its way to a coastline, any coastline. So this time they invade the Northern kingdom at Kumori which is at the border between the Northern and Eastern kingdoms.

I'm also working with a new character, Geon, a wildmage who is part of an army hwacha crew and who discovers Hana, a five-year-old orphan girl who in the midst of war's chaos has ended up with some refugee fox-people (fox shapeshifters, gumiho/kitsune). Geon discovers Hana has an unprecedented mage-talent even at her tender age and sends her off to his old teacher.

It's kind of odd having to insert a war into an already started story but it's really helping to develop the core idea. Geon is going to serve a purpose later in the story as an intermediary between Hana and the Oraha (king)--- Geon meets the Oraha during the story and is later given a position at the Court.


Hwacha is a Korean weapon that fires exploding arrows. They tested one on Mythbusters.
Kumori was inspired by a Korean place name Gomori/Komori, and by the hill Cumorah which is a part of LDS (Mormon) history.

6 comments:

  1. Hi Inae,

    I'm just popping over to say hi, I ran into some of your comments on the LDS writer blog fest and thought I'd check out your blog. Sounds like you have some cool ideas kicking around in your head--I am particularly intrigued by the exploding arrow. Best of luck on your WIP! :)

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  2. Thanks for stopping in at the LDS Writers Blogfest. It's always nice to meet another Christian writer.

    I love the Korean theme going on here. I am a big fan of Asian inspired stuff. I'm excited to follow your journey!

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  4. Thanks, Annie and Kayeleen!

    I'm glad some one else likes Asian-inspired stuff. The English/Celtic thing has been done so much in fantasy, so I wanted to create a fantasy world that had some cultures inspired by the rest of the world as well.

    Mind you, my only knowledge about Korean comes from watching far too many Korean dramas (subtitled) on the KBS channel on DishNetwork...

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  5. It sounds like a very active way to start the story though. Just with the little you've written here, I want to get to know the characters and explore the world. :)

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  6. Thanks, Nisa. It seems like the chaos of the war scene is a useful way to introduce some of the conflict and concepts that are going to be needed later in the book.

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