Yet Another One

It's ok though, this time I actually started on the right foot.
I come up with characters, worlds, magic systems-and sometimes even religious cults-all the time, but it isn't very often that I come up with a really good conflict. Conflict drives a plot forward after all, and if you can't get that cauldron of conflict really bubbling good, then the story will never be that interesting.

So yesterday I sat down, with no idea what I wanted to write about. So, I just started somewhere.

There is a girl, she's noble or rich, otherwise has led a sheltered and or pampered life.

Now she's carrying a bag up a mountain, she has an entourage with her.

They're headed for a mountain fortress, why...

Ah, the kingdom is under attack! What kingdom...

The elves, the elven homeland in fact. And oh yeah she's actually the Princess.

The young Princess, she isn't actually of age yet.

She reaches the fortress, and is followed shortly after by a message.

The kingdom has fallen to a suddenly powerful enemy, she is now the Queen, and has to save what little is left of her people.

Starting from there, I got five pages of rough draft yesterday, more notes scribbled down, and a whole lot more ideas bouncing in my head. It's infrequent that I get ideas for stories starting with conflict. Usually I have an interesting system or character that I want to be in a story, so I write one about it. The problem is that these stories tend to be uninteresting to anyone else, as I've basically written them for my own amusement. This one is a bit different though, in that I came up with a world conflict before I even knew what a single character would be, or really anything else about the world.

For now, I'm calling it Immortal Lands. The Immortal Lands are an actual place in the world, though what precisely is there, no one alive in the world will know. And to be entirely honest, I'm not sure myself, yet. I will sort that out in the course of writing the story, and it will feature very heavily in the plot, but I'm not going to push myself to sort it out now, as it doesn't really matter. If Immortal Lands became a series, no characters would actually set foot on them until at least book three, probably later.

I would actually like to write a series, and this world has the potential to be broad and interesting enough to actually hold my attention for long enough to do it too.

So, that post down there about my current projects? Yeah I'm ignoring most of those and working on this instead. I'll still be trying to put time into Besetting Shadows and Chronicles of the Prisoners, but no promises on how fast that will happen. We'll see how things go, but I'm fairly excited about Immortal Lands.

Grace and Peace,

-Matthew