Auras

The holidays put a damper on writing my medieval story for Vella, but once things settled down, I played with it again last week. I’m writing as I go right now, but soon, I need to stop and plan out the rest of the plot. At the moment, though, I’m listening to my characters and feeling my way to foster ideas.

One of the things that made me start To Protect Their King was an image that sprang into my mind–a young woman trying to defend her village against a giant, magic lizard that rose out of the river to attack them. No one else in the village had a sword, but her mother “sent” her the sword she used when she was killed in battle. Her mother had magic, and the sword was bespelled.

Sylwan’s mother and father disagreed with the greedy king they served, angering him, so they had to run for their lives. Her mother had magic and the “sight,” which the king feared. Her father was a weapons master who trained knights, but he had no magic, so couldn’t use the magic sword.. When her parents had to run, her mother’s brother and his wife immediately laid claim to their lands and tried to hunt them down to show their loyalty to the king.

When I sit down to work on the nuts and bolts of the story, I want to decide the rules of how magic works in Sylwan’s lands. I read a great post by C.S. Boyack for Story Empire about “special items” in paranormal novels. He wrote one for science fiction, too, if I remember right. He advised to determine the balance between magic and ultimate power. https://storyempirecom.wordpress.com/2020/08/07/special-items-paranormal/. I don’t want to give my characters so much power they don’t have to struggle. And I decided to make it so that to use the magic sword, people had to have magic of their own. Sylwan has her mother’s magic and she sees auras.

A long time ago, I had a photo of my aura taken at a fantasy conference. It was fun reading what the colors that surrounded me meant–and I had a lot of different colors–purple, blue, green, and a lot of white, a smidge of yellow, a band of orange, and a small tip of bright red. I gave Sylwan the same mix. No one sees hers, but when she meets someone new, she can tell who the people are who despise the new king and his generosity to the peasants. I intend to use her talent for a few plot twists.

And when I get tired of fiddling with Sylwan and her effort to help protect the new king, I turn to working on plot points for my next Karnie book. I won’t get bored for a while:)

Hope you avoid boredom, too. Happy reading and/or writing!