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

One thing about becoming a magical knight: you have to be sane. And over fourteen, or you're not mature enough. They tend to go for twenty-one for tradition, because back in the day, you had to be a man strong enough to bear full armor. But fourteen is the lowest possible.

All right, some mental problems are feasible, but you understand the nature and quality of your actions.

So I was pondering what happens if you go insane. Or perhaps they don't go insane, the magic prevents them.

Can't work for wizards, I realize, because I have already put insane wizards in, doing plot significant stuff because they are insane.

The hero is years older than he was last chapter.

Now, how to indicate it. He's grown taller and stronger, he's learned things about the village and towns about. . . and it's all in close third-person so that will be hard to infiltrate into the story.

A royal character who does not become a wizard -- and the amount of study means that course is discouraged -- becomes a magical knight.

Does he, or even a noble character, get more say than others in the power set he will get?

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The kid sidekick. The trope of the Golden Age that has perhaps taken the worst beating. Possibly because adolescent boys are no longer considered the chief audience.

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If the princess was in the habit of playing with the other children, I should probably throw in at least one scene of it.

Not to mention that she ought to know them better from that.

And then I have to dispose of them because they have no future part, after she grows up and falls under the curse and escapes it again in their lifetimes.

Maybe they will all run away from the armies.

Two ideas are slowly turning to stories.

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A story opens, like many a fairy tale does, with a boy. A great boy of seven, as he would insist, and his adventures in the forest and the magic there.

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One complication of using a child as the point of view character is keeping not just the observations within the child's power to make, but the voice.

It's not so tight a point-of-view that I have to be absolutely strict, but  it's not so loose that I can festoon their thoughts with erudite polysyllables.

Though, on reflection, the oldest of the children I am working on now is chiefly a problem because she's kinda silly.

Finding places to explain why the children of royalty and nobility do not play with the children of servants, even when they are very young:  because you have to stop the friendships entirely at a relatively young age.

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Sometimes I quip that the difference between the juveniles of my youth and the young adults of today is that in the juveniles, the main character could be an adult, albeit young, but in the young adults, they have to be juveniles.

That's not entirely true. Some YA books I have read have legal adults as main characters. The thing is, they tend to be in the military.

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