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.

ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL

Well these past two weeks have proven to be far more busy than I had anticipated, yet I have very little to show for it Vinland-wise. Because this would make a very boring blog post, I am going to focus more on the exploits of Pendor this week, and I hope you find it as interesting as the usual book-related stuff.

First I’ll give you a little update on Vinland, at the moment I am hashing out the various characters and their interactions with the rest of the cast. This is all quite classified, so I cannot really show you much of what has been happening. Once that is done, my intention is to draw up a timeline of events, including all the problems and challenges which the characters are due to face (the trials and tribulations are after all what makes a book interesting!) from there I can then get back to writing, and will be able to tell you more about Vinland again.

As you know I am the lead designer for Prophesy of Pendor, and I find a lot of my time is diverted to that. Because of the new time constraints, I am going to move the blog entries to only twice a week. One will be published on Tuesdays, and one on Thursdays. This week has been more about Pendor so the majority of this update will be focused on that.

I love my work there, but lately it has been testing the limits of my management skill. For example I recently promoted one of the programmers to the Lead position, however two days later he dropped off the face of the earth. Whether something has happened to him, or he found the new role overwhelming, I simply do not know. This is one of the problems facing virtual teams – you do not know the people with whom you work personally, and if they do not reply to emails there is little that you can do.

Never the less, this left the programming team without direction so I decided to take the plunge and become more hands on with what they do.  This began with an email to the team telling them the situation, and then setting a number of tasks for them to do. As my mentor once said, “Align then raise.  Validate then suggest.” Oddly this is not one of the things they taught us at Brighton, so I am grateful for that advice. Now the plan is to have a working alpha version in place so that we can try out the various factions we have introduced, and get a feel of the world. From here we will be able to add in the features that the design team have been discussing.

Speaking of the design team, we have settled on releasing a preview for Pendor 4, every two weeks and this week was one of those weeks. You can find the latest here : PoP4 Preview. Even if Mount and Blade is not really your interest, you can see quite a bit about how we develop the various factions in that post. First you have the lore (the dialogue between a Knight of the Radiant Heart and the Mercenary Commander), followed by some of the concept art. It then goes to explain in more detail about the faction, and because this is primarily a combat game, how they fight. The descriptions of the units are what was actually given to our coders for use in creating those specific soldiers, and their job is to convert those words into the numbers which will become the attributes of each unit.

Eureka!

So yesterday I had something of a Eureka moment. Thanks to the changes proposed last week, I have been in deep thought on how to make these take effect, especially in the way I flesh the characters out and add depth to their personality.

When the book was more epic in scope, I spent far more time concerned with the politics between factions, the overview of their ambitions, and basically giving a blow by blow account of the tale, much like a reporter does for news coverage of major events. Now that the story is following more of an adventure template rather than the epic, I am free to devote more to the people who populate the world of Vinland rather than the events, as such it becomes more personalised and dramatic.

As a part of this, I began to create an in-depth overview of each of the characters, noting down little details like scars, personal foibles and habits. Things like Jorvik’s black teeth and Gorran’s exclamations of optimism will become far more widespread, and hopefully will truly give life to the people there. Everyone has these little niggling things, but it is only once you get to know that person well enough that you become noticeable. Now, imagine being stuck on a small boat for several weeks, every single habit would become well known to you.

Along with the built up personalities there becomes more scope for conflict, we now have personality traits that are incompatible with others. Leif, for example, plays a prank on Jorvik which leaves him humiliated. How will Jorvik, and his prickly pride respond to this? Friendships grow over time, and are tested by the many trials and tribulations of being an explorer. Religion and faith come in to play, these are the early years of Christianity coming to the Norse, how will the followers of the old gods react to the imposition of an aggressively missionary church?

The Vikings are also a highly superstitious race, how will certain sightings and activities impact on them? Will it drive them apart through fear, or bind them together through overcoming these problems together. What about power? Wealth? Money? Romance? Ambition? All men and women are driven by these emotions, which can make even the most logical and reasonable act entirely out of character, everyone has their own agenda, each with wide ranging and important consequences.

Now a little background before I get onto the Eureka moment proper. I had expressed concern previously about adding in a massive detour which takes much of the cast to Norway in order to develop Norway as the big, evil antagonist, but the time spent doing this would seriously detract from the rest of the story. It was a weak element but needed to be in, in order to tie together everything else, from the vigour that Erik would show in his determination to colonise Vinland to the schism that will form between the Americas and Europe.

As part of the character overhaul I got thinking about Kai’s actual background as it was completely un-developed other than he was a retired Varangian. Why did he leave Byzantium? What caused him to go there in the first place? Perhaps there is something about his past that we do not know...

This led to him becoming a rather more important character to the story. Just why does the King of Norway show such an interest in Kai? Why does Gostav (the bard) begin to take such an interest in the legends of “Greycloak”?

What role will his supposedly magical weapon “Bloodaxe” have for the future of Vinland?

Literary Festivals, Editing and a U-Turn.

 So this week has been rather good for my literary growth. First off, on Wednesday I attended the opening of the Bromley Literary Festival, hosted by my friends at Acorn Independent Press. This was a meet and greet session for authors, writers, publishers and young entrepreneurs interested in the literary arts.

This hit a double whammy for me, not only was I able to garner some interest for Vinland which clearly is one of my passions, but I was also able to get some firsthand stories of other youngsters working at starting their own businesses. Considering my recent efforts to get a Masters Degree in Business Management: Entrepreneurship, this was rather interesting for me. Throughout that course it had all been about the theory of starting your own business, but here I had the chance to talk to those who had actually gone out and done it.

As such I urge you to take a look at the companies of a couple of these young creative minds. They really are doing great things. You can find out about them here;

Acorn Independent Press Ltd.

Firefly Theatre Company Ltd.

Yesterday (Thursday 17^th), I met with the chief editor from Acorn, Leila Dewji, who had agreed to look over the manuscript of Vinland. I sent her three sections from the very beginning and we went over it in some detail, with a particular focus on the detail of the characters and how their personalities seemed to be evolving. This was of great use to me, for it was the first time I had released any of my work (apart from the one snippet on this blog) to someone not a close friend or family.

The result was a lot of great new ideas and an order to reign in the “epicness” of what I was trying to achieve. Currently Vinland is massive, truly massive. I was beginning to get scared that the plot was never going to end, but Leila helped me tie up some loose ends and give the story more of a focus on the adventure of going to America, rather than the geo-political events going on around them, and which frankly were just not as important (or interesting).

The story is now far more focused in what it is trying to achieve, the exploration of America for the first time, the risks of sailing uncharted seas, the superstitions and myths faced by the crew, the clash of personalities, and the maturing of a young Viking noble into a famous explorer. Of course my love of politics will show through in the events still going on back home in Greenland. Much of my original plot will remain, but be rather more concentrated on the activities of Erik in Greenland, and conflicts going on there for love, money, and most of all, power. All of this will lead to what will likely be a second book which covers the real colonial expedition to America, and where the “what if” stories really kick off.

I just want to say one final, extra thanks to Leila for the advice, the input really was valuable.