Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

Ah, inspiration. I have the villains of the piece. Poisonous people, literally. Using a world as their chessboard, and abducting people from other worlds to push about it as their chesspieces, having murdered a lot of people to clear the way, and slandered the survivors.

Now, oh villains of the piece, come out on stage. Show our heroine what you can do. Give her a reason to run away from the people you are deceiving. Make her think on how she has to help protect some innocents. I know that she rejects you all in the end, but give her a reason before you tell her that you have to use this world to protect your own.

Hey character -- you there. I put you in already.

Come over here and eavesdrop so the hero can learn something that happened while he was dead.

Plugging along in the story, comes to the point where the heroine joins forces with another wizard.

Wait a minute, why would the other wizard do that? How does she know what she needs to know to motivate her to do that?

That was an interesting piece of dialog. Hmm -- perhaps I need to play up two other characters. I didn't say she knew them, but I could say it.

How quickly can a character determine a house is empty?

A hero recently ran through the entire thing to find this. (Later to find the bones in the yard.)

But now a heroine is going to glance at a kitchen and a stable to conclude that. I think it helps that she's more frightened than he is.

Our hero is trying to off-load the children onto their families.

So, he has to find out he can't.

Took me a bit to figure out why not for one. The family would certainly reject her -- she would, indeed, be in danger of her life -- but what persuades him when he testes the waters is that they are eager to assure him that they drove her off.

Quite as fun as the metaphor suggests.

The hero has done things, and I have let the rumor get back to the secondary hero. It helps that because both of them have white hair while rather young, the rumors said the secondary hero did the things.

BUT -- the hero is now dealing with other characters. It occurs to me that they may have heard the rumors, too. And being rumors, not perhaps the truth. Definitely not the whole truth. . . .

sigh

One thing about an isekai is that the character seldom think about the plot device  that got them into the world.

This can generally be granted as preventing distraction -- the machine to get them to the world is granted, and we get on with the fun stuff.

It is, however, a nagging annoyance if a character, stuck in a game, thinks that ending the game will get her back home.  She should consider whether that's possible.  If she does not know how or why she came into the game, she does not know how or why she could escape.

There's one easy side to having the hero moving about the castle.  (Or house.  Or possibly edifice.)  

He's finding it all very odd.

This makes it very easy for him to notice all sorts of things in time for me to show them to the reader.

Better yet, it's time limited as he gets used to it, so I don't have to keep remembering how odd he finds it as the story winds on.

Was pondering what personality-based powers to give two rather nasty characters -- 

When I remembered that only very strong-willed characters (and those born with their powers) exactly fit their powers.  Wizards can impress a different set of powers, if not too incongruous.

Fortunately these two are merely extremely spiteful and potential bad influences.  Plus potential sources of misinformation.  Not that the hero and heroine are any slouches in their own misunderstandings -- culture clashes are involved. 

In fact, it will. 

The hero realizes that those who took over his childhood village were in cahoots with the necromancer, but has no evidence.

( Read more... )