| Project: | Moon, Sun, Dragons |
| Total To Date: | 5,411 |
| Objective: | 120,000 ± 10,000 |
... is that eventually you run out of fuel. As you can see, I made some good progress through lunch, the problem is that I have a whole bunch of conflicts and no real story.
Like usual, I'm confronted with the complexity I want to build and no real idea of how to build it. I want to whiplash the reader with the expectation that Adelynn is the (or at least "a") villain, that she isn't, that she is, that she's just doing what she thinks is right.
I want to build up a historically accurate notion of the 'romantic friendship' between Cheillène and Sarre, only to have it go overboard exactly because Adelynn and the French Court were on the lookout for that sort of thing around the turn of that (it's set in 1595) century, and exactly because Cheillène wants it to go overboard, only she doesn't, it's not right, she quotes Paul (Romans 26) to herself and spends all night in the town's ruined church. Meanwhile, I'm four thousand words into the story and the Dragons have yet to make an appearance.
This is obviously a really different "France" from history, in this one, Savoy is already a French province, and the peerage relationship is much stronger than history shows, but one of the things I've learned from reading historicals versus fantasy is that fantasy tends to be bland precisely because, in real life, everything has a name. Every rock in a valley is personalized in some way, every mountain has more than one name, every route has a label. Fantasy writers get away with "that pass" or "the church," but in real life, it's the "Chapel du St. Bernard," laid in 1090 by a Benedictine troupe from Sicily, and has been manned by an Italian since then by tradition, has burned down twice already, and is so well-insulated that on summer Sundays ladies would faint, even if all the windows were open.
Eventually, this is going to be a quest novel, but I'm not sure if that's the theme or if it's just the framework on which themes of love, forbidden love, sacrifice, and just plain maturation are hung.
Amusing anecdote: the valley where the opening third of the novel is set is mentioned in one other book. Apparently, Chamonix is where Victor Frankenstein last meant The Monster. I wonder if I should read that chapter and see if it has any relevance to my story. I read it a long time ago; there were Victorian themes about the enervations of nature and the responsibility of man to his creation. I don't think those apply here.
Sigh. I can hear my backbrain saying, "Oh, just shut up and write it, okay?"
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}