Stories from Mennistriam
3-6-2019 19:24
A new link has appeared on the front page: Stories from Mennistriam. Ever since I first put this website online, that spot had been occupied by Thaoryn, but because that story hasn’t been my first writing priority for the past year, it was time for an update. On the new page you’ll be able to read what I have been working on and how it relates to Thaoryn’s story. If you want to know more about the ‘why’ and ‘how’, read on…
Many years ago I began my most ambitious writing project yet: a fantasy novel, or maybe two or more, about swordswoman Thaoryn and her mysterious connection to the long extinct dragons. By now I can safely say that at the time I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was getting into. As I was writing, I discovered deeper layers and character developments that made the story more complex than I’d originally envisioned. And while at first I’d hoped to get away with a somewhat ‘default’ world, to better focus on the characters and story, I learned that those two were intertwined so closely with the setting that I needed to spend time on expanding it. Gradually the land of Mennistriam with its history and culture began to take shape, and at the same time I started to realize how much was still missing if I wanted to tell Thaoryn’s story as it should be told.
Last year an event from that history, invented to explain the background of a situation in Thaoryn’s time, started to draw my attention. I got an idea for a new, shorter story, with different characters, set in a single place instead of throughout the country and beyond. Writing hadn’t been going so well for various reasons and I realized that this new story offered a chance to practice for the bigger challenge of a whole series of novels, explore a limited part of the setting, and hopefully write something publishable that I could be proud of.
That was about a year ago and it won’t be a surprise that this project, too, turned out to be more complicated than I’d thought. However, the smaller scale means that I’m running into problems and lessons much sooner, whereas with Thaoryn I might have needed to write ten times the words to encounter them. In that regard Regenlind—the working title of the new story—is the perfect ‘practice story’. Even better: it makes me want more. Mennistriam is full of stories, big and small, some of which are already taking shape. The new page ‘Stories from Mennistriam’ is meant to become a home base for all of those stories, whatever form they may take.