prequels | Meredith Mansfield, Author

Posts Tagged ‘prequels’

Heroes Can Be TOO Good

Posted in Real Life, writing, tagged characters, covers, epublishing, first drafts, novellas, prequels, rewrites, series, writing on February 19, 2017| Leave a Comment »

I’m still working on that new chapter for the prequel to BECOME.

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Partly, that’s because I’m still working on overcoming those bad habits regarding my writing time I blogged about last time. And last week turned out to be a very bad time to try to work on that due to several real life show stoppers.

Partly it’s because I backed up a little bit to fix the current scene. I realized that I’d set up my protagonist to be just a little too pure of heart to be truly believable. Now, I still need him to do the thing I was setting up. I just needed to provide a better motivation.

Now, instead of being just a little too good to be true, I’ve set him up instead to internalize a lesson from an earlier episode. This works much better.

Motivation has been the bugaboo through this whole part of the story. The first version set up the brother to be too nasty–a bully. Which is not what I want. The second version set up the protagonist to be a saint. Again, not what I need, here. This version will work better. But it’s probably not the last time I’m going to need to do a little work on the motivations of these two before I get to the final version of “BECOME: Brothers” (working title).

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Writing Time and Bad Habits

Posted in writing, tagged epublishing, fantasy, first drafts, prequels, rewrites, series, Writer's Block, writing on February 14, 2017| 2 Comments »

I usually post on Sundays and Wednesdays, but tomorrow is going to be . . . well, shall we say, tightly scheduled. Which actually ties in with the theme of this post pretty well.

I have not been making the kind of progress on BECOME

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or its prequel that I think I should be making. Not the kind of progress I’ve made on previous books–even WAR OF MAGIC

which sometimes felt like I was trying to carve the text out of granite.

And, yes, part of that is due to my subconscious nudging me to realize that the brothers’ early story wasn’t the right place to start the main story. That part needs to be the prequel, which I am currently working on.

But, you know, that isn’t the only reason progress has been slow. Part of it is that I just haven’t been writing at all the same times that I used to since last September. In fact, right now, I’m mainly only writing on the weekends. And, sometimes, my time gets taken up for other things on the weekends.

My work location changed in September–which isn’t at all unusual. And, all right, the new post really kicked my *$$ the first couple of weeks. It’s also about twice as far from home–but, you know, the difference between two miles and four miles isn’t that big a deal. Except, that in this case, the route I was originally taking had some really rotten traffic at times. But, again, I solved that issue months ago by finding a better route.

So what is the problem now? I think it comes down to forming some bad habits during those first couple of months. And I’m definitely going to have to do something about that. Starting this week. Well, after tomorrow, which is going to be a hopeless case anyway.

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New Scene

Posted in writing, tagged epublishing, fantasy, first drafts, prequels, revisions on February 5, 2017| Leave a Comment »

So, I’ve started that new scene that I need to write for the prequel to BECOME.

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It replaces a scene that just wasn’t right but it also has to do the work of leading to the turning point at the middle of the story so I’m not rushing it.

Once this scene is written, things should go pretty quickly. While this is the first draft of the novella, most, if not all, of the remaining scenes had already been written for earlier drafts of BECOME, so they’ll mostly need to be tweaked, not rewritten.

Tentatively, the title of the prequel is “Become: Brothers.” I have cover art roughed out, but I won’t finalize it–or purchase the images–until I get some feedback on whether the novella works on its own.

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Figured it Out

Posted in writing, tagged characters, epublishing, fantasy, first drafts, novellas, prequels, writing on February 1, 2017| Leave a Comment »

Turns out that distractions weren’t the only thing keeping me from working on that next scene in the prequel novella to BECOME.

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It was wrong and somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew it.

This is a scene that was cut from an earlier version of the novel and resurrected for the novella. The results of this scene are important.

This is the story of the early relationship between the two brothers, based (loosely) on the Hercules and his near-twin Iphicles. Hercules was a demigod. Iphicles was not. Even though the Hercules figure is my main character, it had to be hard on the Iphicles character. And this is what the brothers had to initially overcome.

Now this scene is near the turning point (half-way through, just where it should be). The way the scene was originally written, the other brother came off as a bully. That’s wrong. Even though the main story is going to take these two down a sometimes difficult path, I don’t want him to be mean, just very, very frustrated.

So, now that I’ve figured out what was wrong, I can start drafting a new scene that will do a much better job.

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Sometimes the Only Thing to Do Is Try It

Posted in writing, tagged epublishing, fantasy, first drafts, novella, prequels, revisions, writing on January 22, 2017| Leave a Comment »

And this isn’t the first time I’ve said that about BECOME.

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So, since the last couple of ideas haven’t worked, I’m going to at least have a go at the latest one. I’m currently working on pulling together a novella about the early relationship between the two brothers. It actually shouldn’t take that long, since I’ve already written most of this story, in one version or another.

Then it’ll go to my beta readers and I’ll find out how well it worked this time–or didn’t. Either way, it’ll be worth the time to work this out. But, if it works, it could even be published as early as this spring.

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Prequels and Other Things

Posted in writing, tagged e-publishing, fantasy, marketing, prequels, revisions, sequels, series, world building, writing on November 2, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Other things first:

I’m two-thirds of the way through this round of revisions on THE VOICE OF PROPHECY.

And I’m starting to form plans for the launch. Actually, there’ll sort of be two launches–one for the pre-order and one for when it goes live. The pre-order price is going to be a good deal (probably $0.99 pre-order only). And I’ll likely plan a few other things around those same times, so stay tuned.

Prequels:

There’s quite a lot of backstory that’s never explicitly addressed in the DUAL MAGICS series, because it’s not needed there. But I know it. And it has the potential for a good story–or three (maybe four). So, there’s a pretty good chance that there might be a prequel series at some point when this series is complete that will explain things like:

Why are the Valson and the Fasallon so similar when they live on opposite sides of this world?
How did the Fasallon come to be the ruling class all along the coast (and up a couple of rivers)?
Why do the Dardani have such a strong distrust of magic?
Why do the Modgud, who are in all other ways like the Dardani (and for a reason), live in isolation on their plateau, barely interacting even with the Dardani?

In other words, what happened in the history of this world to cause all these things? Hint, it all started with one decision.

I don’t know at this point whether the prequels would be novels or shorter–novellas maybe. I’m not going to do anything more about them until this series is complete. But the possibility is out there.

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