Pyrotechnics, sirens and sleepless nights

So the last week has been rather... invigorating. Several weeks ago my old Scout master phoned me and asked me to return as an assistant leader to which I agreed to. The last few days I have been away with the Scout group on their annual summer camp, at which I have quelled the pyrotechnic in me for a week or two.

Stupidly I set off with all my various notebooks and plenty of paper, expecting to have lots of spare time while the kids were off on one adventure or another, time that I could use to catch up on the recent lull in working on Vinland. How very wrong I was, I got back on Wednesday evening and checked through my notes to find that I had only one new entry (spoiler alert): “The sirens were really whales”. There we go, all my hopes of an industrious week essentially came to just that one sentence.

Going on this camp however did bring back many good memories of my own childhood, and made me remember just how tough it can be to survive in the wilderness, skills and insights I fully intend to incorporate into Vinland. Just how will Leif and his crew feel in the middle of night, with the creatures of the night creeping all around them, wondering if their hidden watchers were walking on four legs or two, having no idea if this new world is inhabited or not. Just how tough is it to survive on what the land can give, the identification of edible plants and skills at hunting and tracking – and the bane of all backwoods campers; finding enough dry firewood to burn in order to cook at all.

Shelter is of course another concern, and while we came packed with nice modern tents, the Vikings would be left with making do with what they could. I saw a number of bivouacs in the forest by our site, none of them looking particularly healthy. Bear in mind that the Vikings of Greenland have no forests in which to acclimatise themselves, and the dense woodland of North America would have been entirely alien to them.

Finally there are the social implications of living so close together which must be considered. While true cabin fever can take weeks to set in, living in an enclosed space with only a few other individuals can quickly lead to conflict. With the Scouts we came away with only a bloody lip or two, but how would the heavily armed Vikings fare, especially when they come to Vinland already packing all the problems from back home.

What will become their greatest enemy? Will it be the ruthless natives, the uncompromising land... or will it prove to be themselves?

Not Forgotten

Just to let you all know, i've had a busy week this week and simply not had the chance to write on the blog. I will also be away for part of next week, so there will not be another until Thursday 28th July, at the earliest now.

Conflict of... Conflicts?

During the creative writing course at university, and while working as a writer in various games something has been rammed into my skull over and over, this is that there needs to be conflict or drama in a story to make it really interesting. Although most people like a happy ending, no-one would read it if that is all that it is. People want to see the characters facing down problems and overcoming them (or not), and this is something I had partially left out in the first rendition of Vinland.

Now that I have completed the character overviews that I had started some time ago (curse you Pendor, for taking up so much time!), I am going through and devising every kind of conflict that I can dream up between the characters. Things are currently going from greed to humiliation, jealous love to lovers being spurned, regicide to mutiny and everything in between. That is not to say that the book with be a cacophony of conflict, as many of these problems will not be introduced. My aim is to take the most interesting and then devise ways in which these problems transpire and see how the characters deal with the situation.

Some authors sell books based on the mantra “whatever can go wrong, should” (with George R. R. Martin being the classic example. Just beginning to like a character? Great, he dies soon). I do not intend to follow this trend, if something is always going badly then it does get a little predictable, it also prevents you from getting too attached to the characters, as the cast is continually changing because they keep dying.

Instead, my plan is to create an overview of each character which lists their personal traits (height, hair colour), general personality (practical joker, warrior, merchant, monk), and what they want to gain out of life (power, happiness, love, money). They are then pitted against a number of problems, the solutions however will devise themselves organically – I can only plan so much, for the characters to really be believable the way that they handle themselves should evolve as the character does. What might be a good solution when first planning the character maybe completely unrealistic in 100 pages when their personality has been bent and twist by other issues.

Once I have the character drama in place, I can create a rough time-line and begin writing once again.

Edvin

“Nyet, I am not captain” the man said in a good attempt at Norse. He had a wide Slavic face, but oddly bright blond hair. He cast another look back then fixed his attention back on the burly mayor.

“I am Edvin, merchant from Novgorod, which you may know as Holmgard” he said, hand snaking out.

Background

Edvin was one of the first benefactors of the rewrite. Initially he was a minor character, watching the development of the story from the side lines, but now he is far more important to the plot than before. When Leif decides to find Vinland, as described by Bjarni, he needs to raise money to pay for the voyage, and Erik refuses to foot the full bill himself.

The solution appears in the form of a bedraggled and thoroughly soaked Edvin (On arrival to Greenland he is pushed overboard by one of his more boisterous comrades), he is a merchant from Russia, which at the time was being colonised by the Swedes. Several of the most famous Russian cities today were founded by the Vikings as part of their domination of the Russian river-based trade routes, the biggest of which are Novgorod (known at the time as Holmgard) and Kiev.

These trading towns have a history of bringing much wealth and producing crafty merchants, a heritage I wanted to bring alive in Edvin. By the time that the Vinland tales comes about, the golden age of the Vikings is coming to an end. No-one really knows why the Vikings disappeared from prominence, particularly considering their widespread influence and power at the time, however some historians attribute this to a cataclysmic civil war between the warrior and mercantile classes. The merchants had consolidated all the power which the warriors had fought so hard to build up, and over time the warriors had simply become obsolete, there being no powers to stand up against them. The warriors, refused to slip from existence and returned to doing what they did best – raiding. This time the targets were their own merchants.

I have tried to include this in the story as the personal conflicts between Edvin and the Frisian warrior, Rorik (the man who actually shoved him overboard).

Traits

Edvin is something of a hybrid of two different types of character. Firstly he has the natural cunning of a successful businessman. He has significant wealth and is savvy in which trade routes are profitable, however his choice of profession is not down to his love for money, it is instead his interest in exploration that drew him to it. At the time most merchants did not stay in one place and run a market, but rather they sailed with their goods from port to port, buying and selling whatever commodities that they could find. Some would settle into established trade routes, taking goods from towns where supply was high, to towns with a high demand.

However, there would always be those who simply travelled, stocking up in what they could and taking it to where they believed it would sell, relying as much on intuition as on sound business logic. These endeavours were high risk, but also high reward. For this kind of adventuring spirit, like Edvin, the lure of new and unexplored markets would be irresistible and so he signs a deal with Leif and joins him on this journey in the unknown.

Loves and hates

Edvin is interested in anything that is new and adventurous... even better if there is a potential for profit. Although he doesn’t hate the warrior classes, he dislikes their apparent disregard for anyone who doesn’t fight and raid like they do.