A lot happens in a week. We don’t often stop and reflect on what has and has not happened, but sometimes it just hits you out of nowhere that a lot happens. It sounds obvious, I know, but sometimes you need those moments to sit back and reflect on things that have been achieved. We hit that point last night, where we could say … finally, after so long things are starting to slot into place and we can see where we’re going. I say this now, and no doubt I’ll be cursing this in a couple of weeks to come but for the now things are working.
It wasn’t all that long ago that we decided that we were going to rip up ten years worth of work. And perhaps that was one of the hardest things we’ve done, to say: no, it’s wrong. We need to start over. More than that we need to build a world, we need to build a magic system, a political system and so on and so forth. We need to understand what makes our world turn, what makes it tick We need to know why A does this and B does that. So we took the decision to make our work better – in our eyes at least.
So for the last few months, it’s been a lot of development. There’s been a lot of world building, character making and development. And at times it seems like it’s never ending. I’m not saying that we’re close to the finish of the world building and such, because I think we both know that it never will end. There’s going to be the constant building and development of our world. But that’s the joy of writing, we never know what each day will bring. You don’t know what system you’ll discover or what weird and wonderful fact your character will suddenly dump on you. Or that point where you figure out that one of your good guys is a bad guy gone good guy gone I-don’t-know-what-to-call-it-guy.
We have creatures, we have landscapes, we have … almost everything in place. I say almost everything because I’m not going to tempt fate (again!) and say everything’s in order. What I will say, is that having had that moment of almost clarity at the weekend we both had of: this is it. And sure, we still have things to do and things to sort, but with these last few weeks of this year that’s what we’re doing. We are sorting. We are world building, so that come 2017 we can hit the ground running and put pen to paper.
Of course, we’re putting pen to paper now in our development, writing some of the background scenes for our characters. Things that will probably never come to fruition in our stories, but things for our benefit, but who knows? One day it may well see the light! All I will say is that we’re excited, and we know that soon we’ll be writing our own epic fantasy the way that we wanted to write it and probably should have started writing it years ago – but hindsight’s a wonderful thing, and having learned those lessons we can move forward from here on out!
Charlotte and Clara 