Writerly Things: Shadows Dancing

Remember when I said I'd post a lot more often? Yeah. That obviously didn't work out as well as planned (or at all), so I will be putting a whole lot more effort into this, since I don't have any actual excuses. 

So, anyways, I decided to make a post every little while to talk about a project of mine. There will probably be repeats-- I'm prone to those-- but it's just a space for me to blab about my pain. In other words, complain profusely. 

Shadows Dancing has been one of the hardest projects I've worked on-- and I'm not close to being done. It has a complex world with a ton of complicated history, various levels of society, and characters that lead such different lives yet end up a close knit group anyways. 

It's also the only book I've tried to plot out completely, which shows just how much I struggled with it. But I know, without a doubt, that this is a book I want to finish.

So, in order to explore the world of my WIP, I wrote a short side-story that followed a new character that lived a normal teenage life in the setting I created. Through the side story I was able to make the world (at least the part of the world that many of the characters would be most in touch with) far more detailed. With that, it became so much easier to envision what it all looked like and what the characters were interacting with. 

She'd seen the grass and felt the fresh air. She'd felt so alive. And she pitied the boy, because he'd never seen that. Never experienced that freedom, however brief it had been.

The character had actually been so completely different from Robyn (the MC of Shadows Dancing) that it allowed me a moment of relaxation. Some characters I never stop being able to write for. Robyn is not one of them. I have to zone in and concentrate, or else I put in a lot of things she would never say, but another character, say Caster, totally would.

Which brings me to the couple of Caster and Robyn. While they do start out disliking each other immensely, they both either want the other's company or need the other's support. Caster wants answers and freedom. Robyn needs someone to guide her through the new world. There's another couple in this book, but they're much less angst and much more fluff than Caster and Robyn.

Robyn is a ghost. Dead for over a century, vengeance bringing her back, power coursing through her veins... the whole deal. She is filled with very well covered hatred, even though it clashes with her naive, trusting personality. No one expects her to be as strong as she is.