It's A Small World

The original title for this entry was "#PlotterProblems".  Then I realized that could be the title for this entire blog.  It's probably best that I wasn't in the habit of using hashtags when I started this thing.

So as I've talked about before, I'm plotting the sequel to THE ACCIDENTAL WARLOCK.  I'm not saying what the title is, both because that seems a little presumptuous and because everything else about this damn book has changed so far, so there's no reason to think the title won't too.  -_-  I've been hacking away at this plot on and off for months, and I've never been able to get it to be what I want it to be.  And I only recently realized what the problem was.

I started creating Abraxas, the world of TAW, over a decade ago.  That world had its seeds in the second novel I wrote, and also became the world of the D&D game I ran in college.  So I've been living in Abraxas for a long, long time.  When I sat down to write TAW, I made up new stuff and changed other things as necessary, but I knew the place and the people.  I knew where I was going and what I was doing.  And I expected writing another book in Abraxas to be much the same.

I was wrong.  Really, really wrong.

Although it's long for a YA book, TAW only covers a few different places.  All of those places were ones I'd developed long ago, places I'd seen in my head for years and knew well.  The sequel, as far as I know, will take place in only one location.  It's a new place, one only created while I was working on TAW - it didn't even exist until I made the changes at the end of the second draft.  And I didn't realize the problems this would cause.

To make a long story short (too late), I thought that just because this new place was part of Abraxas, I'd be able to dive into it and just go.  Yeah, not so much.  Funny thing about sequels: they're books too.

So I sat down and started hashing out everything about this one place, this small piece of the world, and everyone plot-relevant who lives there.  And once I set the place and its people firmly into my mind, the plot started coming together.  It's not there yet - I know how things start and how they end, and various bits in between, but how Shiloh gets from point A to point Z is still something of a mystery.  But at least now I truly know where it happens.

And if it all falls apart again, at least that won't be anything new.

Bit of an aside for the end of this: one of the characters in that D&D game was Rashad RiLeon, a fighter my then-roommate played.  I liked the name so much I brought him into Abraxas, along with Aerillion, a port city that was part of his journey.  Rashad himself appears briefly in TAW, but his sister Alexi plays a significantly more important role, one that truly starts when she and Shiloh arrive in Aerillion.