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

On both stories I am working on, I realize I must go back and establish things.

One is a magical bird. The characters have to have reason to think it is where they are going.

The other is trivial magical charms that the hero and his associates have to have because they do routine things to exclude many nuisances that I don't want to deal with.

Such is the life of a writer.

When you are half way through the outline and you still haven't defined what exactly they are going after.

Not even whether it's a person or an object.

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Was poking around with what one of the villains is doing. . . and realized he was after what was almost the ultimate Macguffin -- a Macguffin being something that motivates the characters in a story without the audience caring about it.

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So how long does the magic take to work?  And how long does it last?

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My heroine is useful.  She knows that a bloodstone is just the thing to deal with the fell magic they face.

Now they just have to get their hands on one.  Whereupon I reject the obvious, and my heroine also knows that none of the noble families about have one -- the virtues of stones in this land being reason enough for people to keep track of them.

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A story never gets written if you never sit down and write it.  On the other hand, sometimes you can't force it.  It has to slowly simmer not just while waiting for revision, but before even starting.
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Stemming from a discussion of portal fantasies, the sort of story in which a character goes through a portal to Another World for adventures.  And then comes back.  Or doesn't.

And now I am going off on a tangent about Dorothy's motives in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which were, you remember, to go home.

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It's amazing how firmly the notion of buried pirate treasure lasted.  There's one case of a pirate burying treasure from the Golden Age of Piracy. . . .

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Sending characters on a journey has its problems -- the cast is major characters (the travelers) and bit parts (everyone else) -- though it does keep the setting fresh and provide a good excuse for running into new things.  Sometimes you can counteract the first effect by having them go about in circles.  (Not just one circle -- there and back again -- though in multiple circles they do not all have to return to the same point.)

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Sometimes pieces of local color really prefer to be foreshadowing.

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