You know how the most motivating feeling in the world is the blind panic of impending deadlines?
I am getting so much done right now!
Positioning
Last chapter of the Nine, Under the Sea, was largely a matter of opening moves. I had to get Bleys into Rebma, and have various undertakings down there, but those seeds aren’t going to germinate for a bit. Likewise I had to get the royals out of the castle.
There’re a couple aspects I’ve got in mind. First, Benedict has now lost use of both hands. Anyone who counts Benedict out on the mere basis of losing both hands is overconfident to the extreme, but anyone who doesn’t think being behanded is going to affect him is equally overconfident. Benedict’s entire power structure has changed, and the character has noticed.
Secondly, Bleys now doesn’t have a ring. After the madness that fell on him before, he gave both of them up immediately after Gerard walked the other six through the Pattern and broke/weakened/did something to Sauron’s hold on them. But he’s also not being a great guy. There is treachery and gamesmanship afoot, and Bleys is no novice.
Happy reading everyone.
If you want a reply or advice on something, please let me know. I’m not terribly skilled at C&C, and improving that will help me. Receiving C&C may help you, and at the very least, it might alleviate the feeling of sending work out into the void. I know that feeling well. Either way, good luck on your own writing everyone.
Feel
The Nine is getting a lot darker than I expected.
It’s exposing me to a couple of my bad habits, the first is the desire to stuff dragons or vampires into everything. Everything. There are vampires in LotR, but I’m holding the (silver) line against them. The dragon got in because, Hey! Dragons! –which was pretty much verbatim my thought process.
That’s sort of true. I was doing a bunch of plotting and outlining, and needed a scheme, plot, characters, etc. And I thought to myself: this needs more menace.
Hey! Dragons!
But the feel is getting dark. Even in triumph the dark powers are nearby. Tolkien himself developed this, but JRRT had an obsession with Götterdämmerung I cannot relate to. It’s a peculiar notion, to me, the idea that our best days are all behind us, and while we can defeat the evil for a time, it will return. You see this in Galadriel’s mention of the long defeat. Victory is short, but defeat is forever. As such, so long as battles happen, in the end evil will necessarily triumph.
It’s the necessarily triumph, specifically the ‘necessarily’ bit I disagree with.
That does not imply, not should it, that good is going to necessarily win in the Nine. I’m not entirely sure how things are going to end, so there’s plenty of room to maneuver. I quite like bad endings, wherein team good is defeated and the world is plunged into ruin, provided it feels suitable. I don’t like it when it seems tacked on, like good should have won but the author decided to be edgy. I dislike the other side as well, where evil should have won but deus ex machina brought victory from the depths of plot device. I like endings that suit the body, and good or evil winning specifically is not as important as who earned it, and how the book feels.
There are some interesting points in there about evil earning anything, but see my ethical philosophizing in the Kangaroo Graveyard. If you work really hard and try your best, and then kill a few species of people, you’re still a bad guy. Earning your evil doesn’t make it less evil.
Unrelated to everything, I’m not terribly impressed with WordPress’s spellchecker.
Anyway, thank you for reading the Nine or anything else of mine, including this website.
Character Build: Tatianna
Who is she?
Tatianna is a created person out of shadow. She was Ledes’s last painting, a full-sized portrait of Atiana, a dead woman he bore unrequited love for. She was his Atiana as he saw her, perfect, dark, and beautiful. The creation of the painting and the drugs killed him.
Melies conjured her. Tatianna gained some knowledge from Ledes, her painter, including language and rough social norms, and some knowledge from Melies, including the basics of conjuration. She was given to Julian as a gift, and he wanted more, instructing her to remain with Melies and learn more conjuration. After teaching her, Melies took her on the pathways to Amber and gifted her to Julian again.
The shadow-magic conjuration of Tenthet did not work in Amber, and the conjuration failed. She fled Melies and Julian, and arrived in Amber alone. By her narrative appearance she is almost broke, and an accessory to robbery and possibly murder. It is unknown if she and Obrecht killed people.
What does she want?
1) A sense of self-worth and power over her own outcomes. Melies didn’t see her as a thing, Ledes created her as personal erotica, and Julian cared little for creatures of shadow. All her decisions were made for her until she fled in the forests of Arden. She wants self-determination as well as to be a person.
2) To be recognized as powerful
3) To live
Why can’t she have it?
1) She’s broke. Poverty cares nothing for who you are. She doesn’t have the money to buy a better life.
1a) Her conjuration doesn’t work in Amber. It’s the only thing she knew how to do in Tenthet and one of two sources of her power up until arriving in Arden. It doesn’t work any more. (The other source of power, sexuality, is somewhat less than she thought because there are a lot of beautiful women in Amber, more in shadow, and the people with true power, the scions of Oberon, aren’t limited by what’s around. Julian specifically includes a bolded asterisk.)
2) Shadow conjuration doesn’t work in Amber, and she isn’t of the blood.
3) Bleys is chasing her for her ring.
The Nine at AO3 Nine for Mortal Man Doomed to Die
I take commas out of titles. In JRRT’s original poem there was a comma. I know. I took it out.