So I’ve spend a lot of time the last few weeks pouring through The Elarra Solstice Book 1: Whispers and Shadows. I’ve made several tweaks, edits, and minor revisions that have strengthened the story and I’m really pleased with how it’s coming along. I can’t wait to finish and upload the new sample chapters (with some additional content for those who have already downloaded and read the chapters). I’ll start querying and submitting again in earnest once this latest edit is done and that’s another process that excites me.
Along the way, however, I checked the Forgotten Annals story about Thoran: Lindallin Snowfall, for consistency and to make sure I was getting some allusions to that story right. Having not read the story for a few months, I got swept up in reading the whole thing and ended up making some editorial changes that strengthened that story as well. Not any story changes, per se, just refining the writing and making it better (plus I fixed some pesky grammar errors that I hadn’t caught prior to uploading it). I spent my allotted writing time yesterday and today fixing that up and decided to write some background info in the Author’s blog. To sum it all up, I realized how much I like this story and wanted to share some thoughts.
Lindallin Snowfall started out as a short story that I wrote in high school, probably somewhere during my junior and senior years. About 2 years ago, during a visit to my parents’ home, I dug out an old folder containing some of my writing projects from high school. I found the printed and marked up then-final draft of Lindallin Snowfall (which had no title at the time). I remembered having written the story and liking the structure. Skimming through it, I realized that it was a story worth telling and fit right in as a good background piece about the Allorynn and Thoran in particular. What turned out to be a blessing in disguise was that I couldn’t find a digital copy of the story anywhere. So I ended up essentially re-writing it, using very little of the actual original writing. The outline remained basically the same—although I did add in the sections told from Kydri’s point of view—and the theme became much better developed in this latest (and final) incarnation. I changed things around to better match the developments in the overall story that I’ve made in recent years, and ended up with what I think is a great addition to the Elarra Solstice canon.
What I like about the story are the characters and the themes. Jen asked me after she read it for the first time why I spent so much time developing Ellanora when she never appears in the actual Elarra Solstice series. I replied that she was an important person through whom the readers can better understand the Allorynn. I loved the idea of her character: the normal, everyday person who saw the Allorynn once when she was a little girl, and to whom the Allorynn and the “great human kings” are faraway, larger than life characters; super heroes, if you will, of her fairy tale imagination. And then, all of a sudden, Thoran—the greatest of these legendary Allorynn—appears in front of her in her village, nearly beaten to death, collapsing in front of her. I tried to build up this perception of the war and the Allorynn and the Enemy being distant from her village; kind of like the Shire in the Lord of the Rings being this innocent land untouched by Sauron on the power of the Ring. And then Thoran’s arrival—which should be something exciting and wondrous—is the herald that brings the war straight to Ellanora’s doorstep. How do you react to that? How do you deal with the worst kind of adversity when it comes to you, on the heels of something great and unexpected?
I also like the themes of self-sacrifice and honor and the value of dreams of different scope. I thought this story deals with those themes well. What kind of sacrifice should we be willing to make for others? Thoran is a leader of nations and peoples, the Ancient Enemy’s most feared enemy. Is it logical for him to fight for an out of the way backwoods village? From a strictly strategic perspective, no; and that’s what I wanted Thoran to learn about himself. Despite the fact that the Ancient Enemy took that light from him, those noble, honorable attributes that make him who he is cannot be taken away.
I’ve often also thought about dreams and vision. What dreams do we have as people for our lives? What do we want to accomplish? Is the dream of someone who only wants to provide a simple life for their family less noble or grand than the person who dreams of leading communities, cities, or even nations? Different, yes, but neither is more “valuable” than the other. Thoran’s conversation with Ellanora toward the end elucidates his perspective on that, and what I believe makes honorable leaders honorable.
[Update 3/1/11]
So….as I’ve been re-writing The Elarra Solstice thanks to some great feedback from Mike Sirota over the last several months, I’ve actually incorporated Lindallin Snowfall into Book 1, which I’m retitling Echoes of Elarra (at least for now). I’ve got to get a blog entry up! It’s been too long.