Come Winter

Well, roughed out my test chapter to see if I like two of the primary characters enough to keep writing about them. I sometimes do test chapters just to try things out — milieu, characters, concepts — before committing to a piece for more than that. On more than once occasion, I find that I can’t stand the characters or the backdrop or what have you once I start actually playing with it. I had one novel attempt where I got to a hundred pages of writing only to discover I couldn’t stand my protagonist. Now: I write a chapter or two and look at what I have to see if everything works for me, if I can get into the characters’ heads or if the world sits right. This time, it only took me about three hours to write an outline for something that will probably be read in fifteen or fewer minutes. God, put that way, it can be kind of depressing.

I came up with a very thin version of the chapter while laying in bed last night. I’d decided that the protagonist needed help from the mage, who was attending to monotonous bread-and-butter work and she was impatient for answers. And, being sloppy drunk, she doesn’t give a rat’s ass that she’s interrupting his work, which happens to be in front of his client. To add to it, things aren’t going smoothly for the mage, and he’s have one of those “I always wanted to be a lumberjack” moment instead of what he is. You know — something with fewer frustrations. She interrupts, and ends up solving his current frustrations as well as uncovering something that will set him apart from his peers (if true). He is intrigued, she is passed out. Everyone is happy except for the client’s adversaries, who dislike what they heard because they wanted something else to be said (or nothing at all).

Happy, well, except for the protagonist, who is going to wake up with a epic headache.

Tale’s working name is “Come Winter”, just because it sounds good. It may not last.

Protagonist: Rain Randell

Mage: Tucker Longley

I’m not sold on either name, but they were the best that came out of the Scrivener name generator tool. I’m using Scrivener 3 Trial to decide if I want to fork over the $25 for an upgrade. So far, it seems to work as good as the original, possibly better. I haven’t delved into the toolbox too far to see if there are any goodies hidden away. I like that you can use Scrivener to write scenes that can be moved around to hide you wrote in a linear fashion, or that you wrote in a nonlinear way and want to make it look linear after you compile it into a single document. That said, I’ve also gotten frustrated with unnecessary limitations that they code into the software (like who you can cloud sync with, at least previously).