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| 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.
