I hit my target word count for Rydding Village book 3, but I’m only at about 2/4 of the way through the story, and I’m not entirely sure what should happen next. I checked my outline notes, and it turns out that the ending I had planned was based on an entirely different middle (and was pretty vague). It seems I veered into an unexpected direction along the way.

So now I’m regrouping by rereading the book up to this point, since I couldn’t remember what I’d planned vs. what I actually wrote and I need to base the end on what’s actually in the book. It turns out that I seem to have written this book in a kind of daze because I don’t remember writing a lot of this — and it’s only been a month since I started writing.

For instance, in chapter 20 I wrote a scene that involved the viewpoint character trying to figure out who a person was and getting her first impression of that character, since I didn’t think the viewpoint character had encountered this person before. But in chapter 4 there was a whole scene of her being formally introduced to this person.

I also seem to have changed my mind a few times along the way, going back and forth about what a character’s attitude toward a particular topic should be.

Then there are the amusing typos. Some of them come across like I was doing dictation and the transcription software misread what I was saying, like the word “end” for what should have been “inn.” I guess I was transcribing the story coming out of my brain and glitched. Some of them are clearly me hitting the wrong key adjacent to the key I was aiming for or missing a key, but somehow it still makes a real word that makes sense in the sentence while drastically changing the meaning of the sentence. I’m fixing these things as I find them to avoid future confusion even though this pass is meant to be just reading to refresh my memory, but I’m going to have to be really careful when editing because this isn’t something an editor is likely to catch if the editor doesn’t know what I meant to say. It looks like a reasonable sentence if you don’t know what I was trying to say.

Rereading the book is helping me clarify character arcs that will lead to an ending. It’s also helping me check pacing. It takes so much longer to write a book than it does to read one, and it often takes a lot longer to write a fast-paced scene than a slower one, so what feels like it might be dragging might be the most intense scene to read.

I hope to finish rereading today, do some thinking over the weekend, then finish this draft next week. I’m not sure about my release strategy. I might be falling into the holiday rush if I try to publish later this year, so I may give myself a little breathing room for thinking and revising and publish early next year. Things always seem to end up taking a lot longer than I planned.

I’m in big writing mode, about a third of the way through Rydding Village book 3, which means I don’t have a lot of brainpower for much else. It’s been so long since I’ve doing this kind of serious writing, back early in the year, before the move. Since then, I’ve mostly been editing and revising, proofreading, and all the business stuff. It feels so good to be back in the mode of seeing a story unfold. I’ve plotted this book, but I’m still discovering fun things along the way as I write.

The weather’s even cooperated, giving me some good rainy days, which are good for writing. I don’t really have an office in my current home. The living room, kitchen, dining room, and office are all one big room. I set up a little sliver of space between the living room area and the kitchen/dining room area, with a laptop stand and a desk chair facing a window. I can sit there to write and look out the window at some trees. One handy thing about everything being one room is that snacks and drinks are easy to get to. In my old house, I had to go down the stairs to get to the kitchen instead of taking a few steps.

When it’s not raining, I take the laptop stand to the back porch and sit outside to work, though I’m likely to get distracted by the antics of the squirrels, especially now, when they’re running around with acorns and nuts in their mouths, looking for places to hide them. If I’m sitting really still other than my fingers moving on the keyboard, they seem to forget I’m there and will run across the porch, sometimes even under my chair, which startles me. There’s nothing like having a squirrel run under your chair and between your feet to jolt you out of your writing flow.

Writing these books makes me want all the tea, which is another nice thing about having my office essentially in the kitchen. I can get up to make a pot of tea, write a little while the kettle boils, then write a little more while the tea steeps.

Now, back to the writing!

My analysis of Anastasia made me think about my romance “formula,” especially since I’m currently revising a book with a romantic arc, so I’ve been analyzing that story.

By formula, I mean boiling it down to the very basics. To have a romantic story, you need to have a reason for the characters to get together. There has to be some kind of attraction or interest somewhere along the way or there’s not much of a romance. And you need to have something keeping them apart, at least temporarily, or else there’s not much of a story. If the characters just meet, like each other, and get together, that’s great for real life but not a good story. What kind of attraction and conflict you have depends on the kind of story you’re telling.

The conflict can come in a variety of ways:
Internal to the characters — one or both characters have some kind of internal issue that keeps them from being up for any relationship, and they have to get past this in order to get together with anyone, no matter how attracted or interested they are. This is where you get the “I’ve been hurt before and don’t want to risk my heart again” story, as in the guy in Leap Year, or the “chasing the wrong person because of a wonky idea of what love really is” story, as in Stardust, where Tristan (in the movie) is obsessed with the local mean girl, which keeps him from being able to see that Yvaine may be the right person for him. Or it’s the person who’s focused on the wrong goal, such as Flynn/Eugene in Tangled, who has to figure out that his life of crime isn’t going to make him happy if he’s alone. The Beast in Beauty and the Beast has to get his act together and find his inner humanity before he can love and be loved.

Between the characters — there’s something that puts the characters at odds with each other. They may belong to different factions so they see each other as enemies or they may have a personality clash. This one is a big reason why I don’t generally get my love stories from romance novels, since this is a big focus of the romance genre. When I was trying to write romances, I kept hearing “if he’s a firefighter, make her an arsonist” from editors. They wanted CONFLICT. My issue with that is that if the conflict is so big, why would they even bother? If I meet someone I hate, I move on and find someone I don’t hate. This sometimes requires contrivance to keep them in proximity long enough for them to fall in love.

It can work, though. This is what Pride and Prejudice is all about. They have a big personality clash because they make incorrect assumptions about each other. I think the trick to making this kind of thing work is making the conflict something they can move past by growing and changing or getting to know each other better. If it’s just a basic personality clash, it’s harder to believe in the relationship working out in the long run. Why be with someone who just annoys you and sees the world in a totally different way than you do? I find it hard to believe that a firefighter would ever be happy with an arsonist. Even if she realized the error of her ways and changed, would he be able to get past the fact that her actions had put his colleagues in danger by creating fires they had to fight? He’d want her to face justice. For the same reasons, I have a hard time with enemies-to-lovers stories, unless it’s someone who’s been brought up in an enemy culture without knowing better, and once they learn the truth or get to know someone from the other side they choose to change sides — like the princess in Willow.

The outside world/circumstances against the characters — even if they don’t have internal issues they have to get over and even if they don’t have conflicts with each other, there’s something in their circumstances keeping the characters from being able to be together. This would be your Romeo and Juliet/West Side Story type of situation, where they’re from opposing factions but don’t really have any issues with each other. It’s just all the people in their lives who are tearing them apart. Or there’s something like The Terminator, where they don’t really clash, but they can’t be happy together while a killer robot from the future is relentlessly pursuing them. I used this in my Rebels series, where the rules of society mean they can’t be together — so for them to be together, they have to change society. On the lighter side, this is the conflict in While You Were Sleeping. They get along great and seem to be made for each other. The thing keeping them apart is the fact that everyone thinks she’s engaged to his brother. Remove that obstacle, and they’re fine. This is the kind of conflict we often see when there’s a love story in some other kind of story, where they gradually fall in love along the way as they do other stuff, and it’s the other stuff keeping them from just being together. Once the quest is done and they’re out of danger, then they can explore a relationship.

It’s pretty common for there to be a combination of these in a story. They may start at odds with each other, then overcome their differences as they go through stuff, but then they still have external stuff keeping them apart and personal issues they need to deal with. The interpersonal conflict can be caused by the personal issues. Think Tangled — her issue is that she’s being gaslit in an abusive relationship with her captor who’s pretending to be her mother and she needs to find her independence. His issue is that he’s compensating for being a poor orphan by stealing to get enough money to be comfortable and being loyal only to himself. He dislikes her because she’s forcing him to escort her to the celebration, so he’s trying to make things as unpleasant as possible so she’ll give up, which puts them at odds. They get over the interpersonal conflict as they get to know each other and find themselves dealing with the external issue of the guards and his former allies coming after them. Then they both have to get past their personal issues to prevail against her “mother.”

The other side of the equation is the attraction, and I think that’s where a lot of stories fall flat because the writers are so busy building up the conflict that they forget about why they might want to be together other than that they’re both attractive. The stronger the conflict, the deeper the attraction needs to be because they need to have a reason to push past the conflict, and too many romances don’t deal with that well or focus on the physical attraction — the “I hate him, but my traitorous body can’t resist him” thing.

That’s where I think Anastasia didn’t work. There was all that bickering, then he saw her in a nice dress and it was love. Why did he come to love her enough that he was willing to give up everything so she could be happy? We never saw any reason why she loved him, other than her later learning that he didn’t take the reward. That’s nice, but it’s not something to base a relationship on. This was why I liked While You Were Sleeping, on the other hand. We got some nice conversations in which we saw that they had shared values and interests, and they encouraged each other to pursue their dreams.

In the thing I’m working on, I know what brings them together, but I’m not sure I’ve shown it through their actions, so I’m trying to come up with scenes that illustrate their growing bond.

I’m getting close to being halfway through with book 2 in the Rydding Village series, and I’m having to make some decisions about how to handle the worldbuilding. There’s a balance between realism and fantasy in any secondary-world fantasy — that is, fantasy that’s not set on our earth. I’ve come to think of this as the Potato Problem.

There’s something about a potato that makes it seem like it should fit in an old-fashioned world. Potatoes roasted in an open fire are so simple and basic and the kind of thing you might eat while on a fantasy quest. Except potatoes didn’t become common in Europe until the late 1500s because they’re originally from South America. Your medieval peasant wouldn’t have been roasting potatoes in the fire or having potatoes in a hearty stew, even if Medieval Times (a sort of dinner theater in which you eat a Ye Olde Meal while watching jousting) serves roasted potatoes.

But can your characters in a fantasy world based on medieval Europe eat potatoes? That’s a tricky question. The really pedantic people who know history (like me) are likely to get thrown out of the story by a mention of potatoes. But your world could be one in which potatoes grow in the continent where your characters live, since it’s not our earth. Or people from the continent where your characters live could have traveled to the place where the potatoes are earlier than they did in our world. The big question is whether this detail will add to your world or detract from it. There’s something cozy and homey about a potato that just seems to fit, but you also don’t want to sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about.

It’s an issue that has come up even for Tolkien, who was a medievalist who probably should have known about this, but the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings books eat potatoes. I actually think the hobbits don’t seem all that medieval. Their costuming in the films seems sort of 18th century, when potatoes would have been in England, and that costuming fits the descriptions in the books, which refer to things like waistcoats and buttons. In behavior, the hobbits strike me as Edwardian gentlemen. It’s only the other societies in that world that seem medieval. The hobbits did have to explain “taters” to the others, so maybe they hadn’t spread that far.

I’m going with a roughly 17th-18th century level of technology in my world (aside from gunpowder, which I don’t think they have), so potatoes would be a possibility, even for Europe in our world. I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to use them. This actually came up when I was thinking about how I would make a particular pastry mentioned in the book, and the dough that would be most suitable for it contains potato flour (or potato flakes). I’d probably not mention the ingredient in the book, but if I provided a recipe it would have potatoes, and would that be a problem?

There are similar issues relating to tomatoes, which come from the same place and came to Europe at about the same time. You might find tomatoes in Italian food starting around the 1600s. Tobacco and corn also came from the Americas.

Then there’s the issue of language. Can you use words based on proper nouns from our world in your fantasy world? Can you put your feet up on an ottoman (named for the empire) or eat a sandwich (named for the earl) when those people and places don’t exist in your world? Or do we assume that the whole book is being translated to modern English, and those words are the nearest approximation in our language to what they’re saying in the language of that world?

And this is probably getting way too nerdy. Most readers only notice if the world seems real and believable to them. Only a few weirdoes are going, “Ha! Potatoes!”

One good bit of writing advice I’ve heard is to pay attention to your own likes and dislikes. What are the story elements that catch your eye if you see them in a movie description or book blurb? Is there something that makes you think, “Ooh, yummy!” when you come across it? Pay attention to that feeling when you get it and try to figure out what it is that makes you feel that way, then try to determine why it gives you that feeling.

These are the elements you should use in your own writing. For one thing, that will make you more interested and invested in your own work. It’s more fun to write your own catnip. But it will also likely resonate more with others, since there are few things that are so specific that you’re the only person who likes them. That’s why you figure out the why, since nailing the reason you like a thing can allow you to use the reason even if you don’t use the specific thing.

This week I noticed a new one for me that I hadn’t realized before. I was watching a British documentary series in which a group of historians and archaeologists were spending a year on a 17th century English farm, trying to go through a year doing the things people would have done then, using the technology and techniques they would have used. They were taking things that they’d found in their studies and putting them to the test. The same people (mostly, the members of the group vary from series to series) have done similar series set in other time periods. There’s one in which they join that project in France where they’re building a medieval castle using period technology, one in which they live on a Tudor-era farm, a Victorian farm, an Edwardian farm, etc.

While I’m mostly interested in the history of it, I found myself getting caught up in the teamwork aspect. These people are having to do some really difficult things, often figuring them out as they go, but they all seem to be getting along, encouraging each other, and helping each other. I was fascinated by the dynamic, and seeing them working together was giving me warm fuzzy feelings. I found myself really hoping that this wasn’t just for the cameras, that they were becoming friends from working together. I’ve learned that when something really catches my interest like I should think about it, and I’m having to add “teamwork” to my list of things I like.

Which is weird because I dreaded group projects in school. But still, I seem to really enjoy team/group stories in which a group works together toward a common goal and becomes friends along the way. I think that’s probably because this is the fantasy of a group project, where everyone’s equally invested in the process and the outcome and really does work together and come to like each other, unlike almost any group project I’ve ever been a part of. In fiction, you can make it work that way (or when you only see the parts that are edited into the finished program — they’re probably not going to show these archaeologists cursing at each other because the way one of them thought something should have worked based on things found in digs turned out to be wrong).

My favorite part of The Lord of the Rings is The Fellowship of the Ring — the part before the party splits up, when they’re all working together. In fact, in just about any group/questing party/team fantasy series, I’ll lose interest when the party splits up. I loved the prison arc in season one of Andor because I liked that the prisoners all worked together on an escape plan. It wasn’t like your usual story in which the falsely accused hero is thrown into prison and has to survive against the vicious prisoners. These guys all worked together well and looked after each other. I guess this is connected to the “found family” trope in which a group of random people thrown together come to function like a family.

I haven’t written much of this in my books, mostly because it’s really hard to write a good team/group/ensemble cast in a novel. It’s like juggling, and I’ve never gotten the hang of juggling. I can’t toss and catch two balls at once, let alone keep a bunch of plates in the air and moving without dropping one. It’s a lot easier to focus on one or two characters than to keep a team moving.

This is also connected to that “community” thing I noticed when I was watching Christmas movies, where I was more interested in the characters finding and building communities than I was in romantic plot lines. I think I’m doing that with the Rydding Village books. I may focus on one character at a time, but I’m gradually building a community that will get bigger as I address more of the characters, and they’re all going to have to work together eventually.

I just started writing book 2 yesterday, so I can be conscious of using this element as I write it.

Watching that Dungeons and Dragons movie last weekend reminded me of something I’ve noticed in fantasy movies that amuses me: the obligatory scene of the heroes riding across a nearly deserted landscape. Fictional fantasy worlds seem to be just about entirely unpopulated. The characters very seldom run across any kind of civilization when they travel long distances.

But given that most of these fantasy worlds are at least somewhat based on medieval Europe, that’s pretty unlikely. The population was lower then, but that meant that each of the settlements was smaller. They weren’t very spread-out, though. When your only transportation is by foot or horse, things tend to be closer together. In a leisurely afternoon stroll in England, I once walked through three villages — and that was on the public footpath instead of on the direct road (which was built on an old Roman road, so it’s a road that would have existed in medieval times). If I’d been on the main road and had walked another half hour or so, I’d have hit two more villages. Apparently, there were even more villages that died off over the years, either literally (a number were depopulated after the Black Death) or just by becoming irrelevant once people no longer needed to live so close together or they relocated to be near railroads.

Germany is similar. You can avoid civilization on the public walking paths through the woods, sort of. You still may run across a farm or a hamlet (smaller than a village), though. Just a casual afternoon stroll can take you through several villages if you’re not on a path designed to be a nature walk.

In some of these fictional cases, they’re avoiding civilization. That’s why Frodo and his friends don’t seem to run into any towns before they reach Bree at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings. But if that world was populated like the England that world was based on, they’d have to work to bypass the villages along the way. I sometimes amuse myself by imagining that the thirty seconds we see of the characters in these movies riding in a vast overhead shot is the only thirty seconds they have to run free between villages.

I watched a Fantasy Cheese (low-budget fantasy full of cliches and tropes) movie a while back that was particularly amusing, in that it had the hero walk across the kingdom to the home of the lord who was supposed to give him a position in his court, and he never ran across another soul — no farmhouses, no villages, no towns, not even an inn at a crossroads. I imagine that was to do with the budget. They’d have had to hire more actors or do more set decorating to have something that looked appropriate. They shot the lord’s home at an actual castle, but there must not have been any good villages that weren’t too modern.

This came up for me in a book I’ve been working on that involves a journey, and I had to rework my map because I realized there needed to be more towns, especially as they got closer to the center of civilization. I’d been thinking in Texas scale when I needed to think Europe scale, or at the very least the northeast of the United States. Being used to Texas warps your thinking. You even look at maps differently. I remember a business trip to Connecticut when my coworkers made me navigate, and until I realized that the fold-out gas station map of Connecticut was on a different scale than the map of Texas, we kept missing exits. It would look like the exit we needed was at least fifteen minutes away on the Texas scale when it was actually right ahead. If you’re in a world moving at horse or foot speed, you’re probably going to have some kind of settlement within a day’s walk of any other settlement if the general area is settled.

So, what fantasy needs is more villages unless the characters are actively trying to avoid people. Come to think of it, I guess the D&D characters were avoiding people, since they’d escaped from prison. Still, that soaring overhead shot maybe should have included a village in the distance.