#408 - Story Time

I slept in as one should on a Sunday.

We stayed in bed and watched a few shows. I was still feeling the effects of being tired even though I had a wonderfully restful day on Saturday.

By five PM I started thinking about the story I wanted to write and because I have a tendency to want to write more complex stories lately, and that isn’t what my mentor is trying to get me to do, I thought to plan it out just a little.

I wanted to know at least the broad strokes. I needed to have a small enough problem to solve in less that 9000 words. And since it had to be a fantasy, which requires plenty of the words to be spent on describing the setting, the smaller the problem the better.

So, it was back to pen and paper to brainstorm.

I needed to create the fantasy world the story would take place in. I decided upon an ancient citadel that had been built be a race of extinct giants. Humans had moved into the cites and made it their own. Large massive stones too large for humankind t move were patched up with smaller works made by the more current residents.

The city had magical properties like glowing carvings which had dimmed over the centuries. The protagonist finds one of these bones in a disturbing forest found to the east of the citadel while looking for herbs for her sick grandfather, but on her way back into the citadel, some of the city’s hidden functions start coming to life attracting all the wrong kind of attention.

Brigands corner her in a massive alley and take the magic relic, but the King’s Guard intercedes. A battle ensues and she is caught between the two forces.

The brigands take the day and defeat the King’s Guard by using the powerful relic. But then our hero manages to get possession and save the day.

That was my premise. It’s one thing to have an idea for a story and a completely other thing to write it.

I wrote until about three AM before I got to the end of my energy and the end of the story. Looking back on it, I think I should have gone even thicker on the description of the citadel. I had many more ideas in my head about the place than I put down on the page.

It was world I could see myself writing in again sometime in the future and I am not super interested in writing fantasy these days. But maybe now I am? Once I had the world, it slowly came into my mind all the other things that might exist there. And of course, there would other citadels and monoliths left by the ancient builders to explore leaving my plenty of stories to mine in the world.

Getting to bed by three, felt better than staying up until seven or eight in the morning. But I did go to bed feeling like I had forgotten something. And I just think it was that I should have spent an extra half an hour adding description details.

I had a good day resting and then even managed to write a story.

Until tomorrow.