Loki's Game – The Well of Images Part 5

Read “Loki’s Game” at WritersCafe.org.

It is finished! The final chapter in The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster is written, reviewed, and posted on WritersCafe. It is time for Samuel and Hope’s confrontation with the Deceiver. What is he planning, and what chance do our heroes have if they play his game?

Having just written the end of a story, I thought I might take some time to talk about the art of writing endings. What makes an ending satisfying? What is the difference between something like Persona 5, which ended in a train wreck; Kingdom Hearts 3, whose ending was so-so; and Avengers: Endgame, which was amazing?

Endings are hard. It is not enough to just wrap up the plot threads and stop writing. An ending needs to make good on all of the emotional promises made throughout the book. It has to take all of the themes, all of the interesting things that makes the story unique, and fill them out to their full potential. To write a good ending, a writer must remain in tune with the feeling of the story.

When outlining “Loki’s Game,” I made a list at the top of the page of all of the things that had been introduced during the previous parts and needed to make an appearance. Then I looked at the list, and figured out where in the story each entry needed to be. Some, I knew, had to happen at the climax. Some had to happen at important moments. Some had to be used as foreshadowing. And a few just needed to be put in wherever they fit best.

How did I know which was which? First, I knew that I had to include everything that made my story unique. This meant, of course, everything that makes the Unconscious Realms different from Reality and from magical worlds in other stories. This meant there had to be archetypes, symbolism, and magic, the characters had to travel to new realms, they had to use their waking eyes and return beacons, and all of that good stuff. For the climax, everything that gave the plot tension had to come to a height. This meant everything related to Samuel’s hand infection and its consequences, the themes present through the rest of the story, and of course, a chess match with the Deceiver with a big final confrontation.

The Well of Images is not over. Hope and Samuel will return to the Unconscious Realms in book 2: Mind and Mirrors.

The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster:
1. Pandora’s Gate
2. Where Secrets Lie
3. Limits of the World
4. The Fool’s Gift
5. Loki’s Game

You can also find links to other stuff I’ve written here.

If you like my stories and/or blog posts, or if you’re not impressed but you believe in the spirit of amateurs doing what they love, I would love to have your support on Patreon. Even a gesture of as little as $1 / month would mean a lot to me.

The Fool's Gift – The Well of Images Part 4

Read “The Fool’s Gift” at WritersCafe.org.

The saga of Samuel Locke and Hope Emmerich and their adventures in the Unconscious Realms continues! Hope and Samuel have followed the symbol of the torch on its path through the Realms, and have arrived at the doorstep of the Sage. Before they are granted an audience with the mysterious archetype, they must pass through a gauntlet of tests. However, in the shadows behind the scenes, the deck may have been stacked against them.

“The Fool’s Gift” is part 4 of the story arc, The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster of the short story series, The Well of Images. You can find the previous installments at WritersCafe, or by following the links in the “finished stories” tab at the top of this blog.

As October started and NaNoWriMo approached, I held the first draft of “The Fool’s Gift” in my hands, knowing that if I did not polish it to beta stage by November, it would be delayed by another month. Having just published a blog post about the value of hard work, I knew there was no choice but to put all of my effort into getting the second draft and proofreading run done in just one month. It was a looming challenge, and I did not know if I could do it, one month later it was finished, and now two and a half weeks after that, it is up. It reminds me of some advice I recently heard from the mathematician Eric Weinstein, who I consider a real life sage, “we need more people to over-promise and over-deliver.” Telling myself that I would finish the revision draft of “The Fool’s Gift” in a single month was an over-promise, and getting it done was over-delivering.

The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster:
1. Pandora’s Gate
2. Where Secrets Lie
3. Limits of the World
4. The Fool’s Gift
5. Loki’s Game

If you like my stories, or want to help out a fledgling novelist, you can support me on Patreon. Even a gesture of $1 per month would be a great encouragement.

Limits of the World – The Well of Images, Part 3

Read “Limits of the World” at WritersCafe.org.

Though it’s been four months, another installment of The Well of Images is finished, beta tested, and ready to read. We pick up with Samuel and Hope on their journey through the Unconscious Realms, as they search for the next symbol of the torch that will lead them forward.

“Limits of the World” is part 3 of the story arc, The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster. You can find the previous installments at WritersCafe, or by following the links in the “finished stories” tab at the top of this blog.

There are times, during the course of writing a story, when excitement for how amazing it will be later makes it hard to concentrate on the page in front of you. It feels like you are stuck at a boring part, and you wish you could skip ahead to the good stuff. That’s where I was with “Limits of the World.” I couldn’t wait to get to the parts of the story where the archetypal themes shine, but I was stuck with a part where the main characters run around on a scavenger hunt. Still, it was important. The best parts of a story can only have justice done to them if they are properly built up to.

So I toiled away at “Limits,” adding structure to the narrative, making sure that everything that happened was there for a purpose, and that the descriptions were interesting and representative of the viewpoint character. And you know what? It turned out well.

The Mentor, the Hero, and the Trickster:
1. Pandora’s Gate
2. Where Secrets Lie
3. Limits of the World
4. The Fool’s Gift
5. Loki’s Game

If you like my stories, or want to help out a fledgling novelist, you can support me on Patreon. Even a gesture of $1 per blog post would be a great encouragement.

Giving Star Wars Episode 7 a Good Story

Star Wars has always been the space opera of my life. After seeing the original trilogy when I was about 4 years old, I’ve seen the first six movies each about a hundred times. Though people hate on the prequels, and not without good reason, I like them anyway. I have read a good half of the hundred-odd books in the Legends timeline, which was canon before Disney. However, I have had mixed feelings about the new films. At first, I thought it was only that I had to get used to an alternate timeline, and I would grow to love them just as much as all of the other Star Wars stories. But I am finding I like them less as time goes on, not more, and I am starting to see it is because the stories really are bad.

First, the new movies ignore everything else that has happened in the Galaxy. There is a vast and rich world built up, with plenty of planets available to choose from. In the first six movies, Tatooine appeared in four of them, Coruscant in three, Naboo in two, and Dagobah in two. Yet in the new movies, none of the planets the characters visit have been mentioned before (excluding Rogue One). It is as if the new writers want everyone to forget that all of the other Star Wars stories existed.

Second, the new movies run hard into the scale-magnitude problem. The dialog would aim to convince us that the fight between the Resistance and the First Order is on par with, and in some cases greater than, the struggle between the Rebellion and the Empire. But there is no effort put into showing this, and instead everything looks tiny, like it could have been a squabble between two small countries. In order to write a satisfactory story where the entire galaxy hangs in the balance, you have to interlace the presentation with hints of the scale of the galaxy that is supposedly hanging in the balance. The original trilogy did this well by dropping mention of things like the Senate and the Clone Wars, and the prequel trilogy did it better by having much of the action take place at the Republic capital with political drama in the background. In the new trilogy, there is simply nothing there to care about.

These problems got my imagination spinning, and I found that with just a few tweaks, Episode 7 could have fit in much better. Here is my version of an alternative Episode 7, in a form similar to a title crawl:

It is a tenuous time in the Galaxy. The Empire has collapsed, and in its place two powers have arisen: the New Republic, and the Imperial Remnant. Furious at the New Republic for claiming what they perceive to be rightfully theirs, the Remnant has been building a secret weapon, a cannon that can fire deadly beams of energy through hyperspace and has such great accuracy that it can pinpoint any city on any planet in the Galaxy. After a demonstration, they have turned their eyes to the city-state of New Alderaan on the planet D'Qar in the Ileenium system, the New Republic’s symbol of hope and renewal, where Queen Leia struggles to rebuild her people. Meanwhile, the New Jedi Order has fallen, and Luke Skywalker has vanished, leaving only a map with an old friend on the backwater world of Jakku.

As you can see, not much has changed. I’ve thought since the beginning that Starkiller base was a stupid idea, especially since it took the economic power of the entire galaxy to build the death stars. The events of the story could play out mostly the same, just on a smaller scale and with ties to the rest of the series. This time, it is not the galaxy that is threatened, only a single city, but by making it the revival of Alderaan, whose destruction had been the symbol of the Empire’s power, the stakes feel momentously higher.