Timewaster's Guide Archive

Another Kail chapter, I think the best way to recap is to just include how the last scene with him ended:

“I do, my king. Your daughter is an oathbreaker. Which all in the Dovre know, even if none dare to speak it,” said Reginn, the huldu my father had long ago betrothed me to.
He turned towards me, smiling. The gold etched into his black horns gleaming in the glow of my father’s throne. “The boy is no more ‘greater than all of the trolls in the mountain’ than I am. She is an oathbreaker and her life forfeit.”
A cold shiver ran through me as he spoke. The air beside me dropped in temperature as Kail glared down at my accuser.
Reginn continued, “She has shared both Rings and Blood with a mortal boy . . .”
Oh no.
“. . . and taken him as her mate and husband, in one of our most ancient rituals of marriage, one never before performed with an outsider, going against her own father’s wishes.”
Kail took a step back from the stand, obviously shocked by Reginn’s words.
“Husband?” he turned to me and asked.
His reaction did not go unnoticed by the other huldrene in the courtroom. My father lowered his head, unable to meet my gaze.
Reginn laughed. “Do you see! She has deceived even her own mate!”
As Kail looked at me, his eyes suddenly narrowed and flared brightly in anger. I looked into the cold windows of death.
It happened . . .
“She has no honor!” Reginn shouted.
I sobbed, my eyes welling up with tears. Kail stared at me, gritting his teeth in a look of pure hatred and wrath.
 . . . I’d made him hate me.
Kail turned his back on me, leaping down from the stand.

Thanks for reading!

Me too. (I think).

I think its just hard to read anything after reading The Lies of Locke Lamora because that book was just filled with so much awesome.

So I wasn't really happy with this chapter when I sent it out and obviously it shows. It was a complicated chapter to write for me.

After reading your comments, I think having Ellie and Mordred looking down on the army, watching, was a mistake. Maybe I'll put them right at the front of the enemies first charge. I feel like I got the events I wanted to happen down, but I just need to work on how I convey those events.

Like someone recently posted: The first draft is for what you want to say, the second draft is for how you want to say it.

I know that I want to do more to build up Modi and Magni (the sons of Dor) they are two of the most powerful characters you'll encounter in my books. I think most of you know that the Ellie chapters are always a lot harder for me to get right, hopefully I can make this one come out better in the next draft.

To answer your questions:

Maybe I missed this by not reading the rest of the story, but why did you pick Arthurian names for your characters?

I'm really only hinted at this, but Mordred actually is the Mordred from Arthurian legend. He's at least the source of the legends.

Morrigan's grace, the use of daggers (though the whole raven feather to daggers skirt thing was way beyond awesome, please tell me you came up with that yourself)

Those are all me
I wanted a Raven motif for Morrigan and while I was thinking about it I thought that man, a ravens feather would be pretty killer as a knife if it was as hard as metal. And by the time I'd gotten the idea I'd already written that Morrigan wore a skirt of feathers.

First, (and this may be due to not seeing an Ellie chapter in some time) where did the battling armies come from?  Last I recall, Ellie was wandering along the road with her captors and a small escort of around 100 men/knights.  Then all the sudden we have a full blown battle with two armies.  It has been awhile so I may not be remembering clearly the size of the groups and events leading up to this chapter, but I found it puzzling.

The army's always been fairly large. Two dozen Sigil Knights and a few hundred horsemen. I haven't been really specific with the numbers yet. I might up it to a thousand soldiers in the final draft. The army was sent by the Emperor to put down the rebellion Malik led and capture him.

Third, you need to do a hard read through and edit of the action sequences in this chapter.  I had to scratch my head and re-read paragraphs on several occasions to figure out what was happening with the fighting.  Usually your fight scenes are clean and clear, but these weren't.

I do want to tighten up the combat a lot in this chapter before the final draft. I want the readers to have a sense of just how powerful Modi, Magni and Morrigan are and be wowed at the same time. Morrigan, for example, is the the most skilled fighter I can think of in fiction. There are few warriors in fantasy that I can think of that would even be capable of wounding her.

Fourth, why did Morrigan send Ellie to Bloodbath?  This puzzles me to no end and it makes no sense.  If Morrigan knew Bloodbath was in trouble, she also knew that Ellie was grossly outnumbered as well, so why would she send her to aid him?  The only thing that makes sense is Morrigan knew Ellie would get her self in trouble, Bloodbath would start to die, and Ellie would have to give over the sword.  This makes sense if Morrigan is really a bad guy only pretending to care about Ellie, but I got the impression that wasn't what you were going for.

Morrigan weaves a tangled web. Did she send Ellie to save Bloodbath because she knew that doing so would put the Sword of Worlds into her son's hand? Did she do it because she saw that Bloodbath's death would change Ellie and make her do something she shouldn't later on? Is Bloodbath going to save Ellie, Mordred, Morrigan, or someone else important at some point in the future? Is he going to do something that needs to be done? Would keeping the sword have led to Ellie's death or harm? Has she seen that Mordred needed to possess the sword for some reason? Did she just do it so that Ellie would be in the right place to hear Mordred give the order to have Malik killed?

Hell, even I don't know at this point 

Finally, I am still wondering what the plot climax will be for Ellie.  What is it all building toward with her?  You just had a major battle scene and a major turning point with giving over the sword and using the ring on Mallik (still don't know what that did which was kinda annoying), but it wasn't a climax, not really.  I feel like we are nearing the end of the book, but I don't feel like we've built toward any kind of plot climax for Ellie.  Similarly, if Kail's climax in the book is his winning over of the troll nation to save his love, it's going to feel somewhat like a let down.  You promise epic in the beginning--magic swords that are keys to the universe, rampaging bad guys invading and destroying worlds, a god-slayer hero--but if the climax of your first book is guy gets girl and girl frees prisoner, your readers are not going to feel very satisfied.  Something big had better be coming down the pipe.

To be honest, I'm still working on how I want the book to end for Ellie. I have something Epic planned for Kail. But I haven't quite figured out how to complete Ellie's character arc just yet. It's in the works.

As for nearing the end of the book, really I'm sort of in the middle still. At this point in the book I'm at just over 60k words. Since I'm shooting for 100k I think I still have some room for a big epic ending. But it is my first book, I might have to do some trimming when its done.

Oh, and Malik told Ellie about her rings at the beginning of the last Ellie chapter. Brotna is the one that 'breaks magic'.

Ok, so I read chapter two and thought that it was really well written. I'm liking both of the characters that we are seeing so far.

At this point I feel like its hard to give comments on the story. The writing is solid, its just the story and plot that might concern me, but its too early to tell so far.

I will say this, I think a thief type story is hard to write, it will take a lot of work on your part to pull off correctly. There are a lot of them out there. You really need to dazzle us with how clever or skilled Mia is. And more so from Jannas.

Personally, from what I've seen so far I think you can pull it off. Maybe not in the first draft (I don't think I could either, I think a great thief story takes some rewrites) but I think you'll pull it off nicely.

The only thing that slightly annoyed me in chapter 2 was the ending. They are supposed to be a secret group but they've already been found out this early in the book. I'm more then willing to read past that and see where it goes from here, but it did irk me slightly.

(And I know they were only found out by the freaking king, but still. Isn't he the main person you'd want to avoid as an illegal group of rogues?)

Seriously though, I'm really enjoying the story. It's very well written. The characters are great and I think we are learning about the world at a good pace. I just really like thief type stories and would like to see this one shine.

If you haven't read it yet, you have to read The Lies of Locke Lamora. I'd recommend a few of the Vlad Taltos novels too.

Keep it coming!

When last we saw Ellie she was trying to convince Mordred to heal her giant wolf companion, Bloodbath. Before she could get him to agree they learned that an unknown army was approaching them.

Thanks for reading!

I just finished Bones of Faerie by Janni Simmer. If you're looking for a clean book for YA readers its pretty good. It's a little dark. The book starts off with a baby girl being born with faerie hair. Anything of faerie is shunned so the baby's father takes her out and leaves her in the forest for the faeries.

A few hours later the baby's older sister (our protagonist) sneaks out to try to go and get her baby sister but the wild animals got to her first and she finds only half eaten bones . . .

So I bit the bullet and just sent the query to Moshe!

I went with:

Kail thought he was just an average kid until his best friend entrusted him with a magic sword with his dying breath. After it transports him to another world of magic and legends he'll be confronted with the seemingly impossible task of overcoming faeries, unkillable body snatchers and even gods in order to keep his promise to his friend. But while there he will meet a beautiful troll that will reveal to him that he is more then mortal--a Godslayer. Alone and stranded, he will have to make a choice: save the one he loves, or save the world.

He told me he'd look at it, unless its YA! LOL. If it's YA he has to refer it to Susan Chang since she's Tor's YA editor. But he also offered to help me get in contact with her!

All in all, I'm happy with the response I got. It seems positive.

I replied to him and explained that I wrote it thinking it would be YA, but that others have told me that they don't think that it is. I gave him a little more info. We'll see if he thinks its a YA or not.