refilling my head

I've just started work on a new series of novels related to the Wealdland Stories; the Berand Tales. 


Berand is the elf who forged the Sun and Moon Swords as a peace pact to end the Elf Human Wars, two thousand years before The Last Elf of Lanis.


Although I have a pretty exciting outline to tackle, I find myself wandering through news stories on the internet, and flipping through books in my modest library, wasting time. And then it hit me, and I smiled to myself.


I need to refill my head.


Stories and ideas play on an endless loop somewhere in the back of my mind until I can get them out by writing them in context in some novel or short story. I've described writing as a kind of exorcism for me, and it sure feels like it. The ideas of a story can become irritating, buzzing around my consciousness, coming to the fore at the most inopportune moments. Usually I bore my wife to tears when an idea gets too overwhelming in my head by yakking about it until I see her eyes glaze over. 


The completion of the Wealdland Stories, with the first draft of The Lord of Lightning, has left a vast hole in my mind. These were ideas that were playing on that endless loop since 2005! Six years! And now my mind is calm and rather placid. 


But calm and placid does not make for good novel writing. Although I have the skeleton of a good outline, it has no meat. So, I need to look around and see relationships, see troubles, see worries, feel connected, then the ideas that matter will come to me. 


What are the ideas that matter? The personal problems of the fictional characters. Readers have said to me that they enjoy my novels because they felt engaged with the characters, their problems seemed real, and they worried what would happen to those fictional characters in the course of the story. That's a very nice complement to a writer.


So... I haven't quite got there for Berand and the other characters of his world. I will tell you that Berand will be more 'Bilbo-ish' if I'm allowed to say that. He is someone who will grow and change with the telling of his tale. Iounelle was someone who was mostly locked into the horror of her world, and in that sense, the Wealdland Stories are more like The Lord of the Rings, again if I am permitted to say that. 


So I'm telling my complete saga kind of backwards. But not really, because there is so much more. Once you read the The Lord of Lightning, and then Legends of Haergill and Conniker's Tale, you'll understand. There is SO much more to come.


But, in the mean time, I have to fill my head back up: books, news articles, myths, music, plays, movies, talk, all the threads that create the cloth of our existence; they become reflections of the threads that make up the cloth of my fictional worlds.


And then, when I'm ready... the beautiful music of the clacking of the keyboard!


cheers,


Kurt


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