She Who Guards the Doorways

Having just had offline crit from Ingi….

That’s another positive response for Aurelius being a fascinating character, both for the reader and within the world. Which is really, really encouraging, because the greater story is about his character (when it’s not being meta) and the reaction of other characters within the story to him don’t make sense unless he’s got a certain presence. If I can keep this up, I’ll be very happy.

The big negative was that the in media res opening is too much in media and the res is insufficiently engaging. I don’t think I can sensibly push the start any further back for this story, but there is always space for an early one within the bigger picture. And I think that primarily wants to be about who Gules is, with more background on Tethera.

A huge problem I’m having with this is that the world and the characters have been sloshing around in my head for a very long time now, and dribbling it out is a very fine line between obscurity and infodump. Gules is clearly too obscure at this point for his pivotal role in this story, which is why the “backfill” should be about him. There’s also a great inconsistency about how much physical description a character gets on introduction, which makes it look like there should be an early, descriptive introduction. And tells me who I get to use in the earlier story. But Ingi said there was something of Lucius Malfoy about Aury, which set me off into crippling giggles at the thought of adding him to the wielders of this set. The scary thing is, I’ve enough of this world in my head to know where the damn sword would come from.