Mortaine’s Blog

I have created a new journal at to house my NaNoWriMo novel, or at least a log of it, I think. I haven’t decided if I’m going to post just a running “words per day” and my notes, or if I’m going to keep the novel itself in there. Given the trouble I have with saving journal entries from LiveJournal into a format that I can actually use, I might just keep it on a hard disk and post it there as needed.

Well, I made the mistake of going over to the NaNoWriMo genre boards and stopping at the “Heroic Fantasy” board to post my Fantasy World-Builders website address.

Argh!!!

And again– argh!!!

Now I’m thinking of ditching the romance novel idea and write about Sincai and Arathel, my desert-dwelling characters from a D&D game. I’ve written one story about them before, and started a second one, which I can (and pretty much did) abandon. They’re Dark Sun characters, so I would want to pull them out of Athas a little bit and give them a sun-burnt world of their own. But that’s really not hard for me. And I would want to make Arathel not half-giant necessarily, but just a freak (a 9′ tall freak).

Sincai: an adventurous, half-elven psion whose main area of discipline is “moving things around,” herself (teleportation) and other objects (telekinesis). Sincai is also an outdoorswoman (in D&D terms, she’s a ranger), who knows how to take care of herself in the scrublands. Sincai’s psionic gifts are not 100% accurate– frequently, she ends up in the wrong place. In fact, that’s how she met Arathel– teleported right into her cell at the gladiator rings. Some people regard her as “touched” because she has seen and described to them an ocean.

Arathel: an enormous fighting woman who has made a small level of name for herself in the gladiator pits. Arathel is about 9′ tall and tremendously strong. Like many of the residents of this world, she also has minor psychic talents, but hers are limited to enhancing her physical prowess for a limited duration of time, such as in one of the rare psionics-permitted gladiator matches. Arathel is not terribly bright, and she believes she makes friends easily. In truth, however, most people only like her for her strength and protection, and because she’s pliable. Unlike Sincai, she does not have a strong moral compass, and can easily be persuaded to do the wrong thing. As a gladiator, Arathel was a slave, and she originally fought under the name “Beast.” It was Sincai who gave her her name.

Jenny: Jenny is a small, ferret-like critter (called a “janx” in D&D) which is Sincai’s pet and companion. Jenny has large, poisonous barbs on all four of her legs– if struck by one of her barbs, a limb will wither and die within about a minute. If struck in the head, the victim will die in about the same amount of time. Sincai has her trained, but Jenny is unpredictable when she’s away from her mistress. (She’s a little unpredictable when she’s with her mistress!)

Currently, I do not have a plotline for a novel for these characters. In the story I had started, someone released a type of poisonous beetle into Sincai and Arathel’s room, which Sincai trapped and released outside in the middle of the night, telling Arathel that they’d need to find out who sells these in the city– they’re not native to the area, and are generally very reclusive anyway. While she was outside, Sincai was kidnapped off of the street, a heavy, shielded sack dropped over her head to block her mental talents from letting her get away. That was it– I hadn’t got further than the very beginning of a good little kidnapping-mystery.

As characters, it’s easier to write from a third-person POV with Sincai at the forefront. Arathel is hard to write about because her thoughts are fairly simple. She’s definitely a follower, not a leader. However, when with a group of people who are free-thinkers or who brainstorm ideas a lot, she does start thinking “outside the cell.” Ultimately, though, that’s because the people around her expect that of themselves, and she therefore starts thinking of things herself. They’re not always good ideas, but they’re generally more sophisticated than “let’s bash the door down and take what we want/need.

Sincai, on the other hand, is a mercurial kind of person who tends to just go wherever she feels like it, and who never gets upset or disturbed if she ends up somewhere she didn’t plan to be. Her freedom is extremely important to her, so if confronted with a situation of enslavement, she will do what she can to get out of it– provided she isn’t actually choosing to stay there. Unless a psionic block is being used on her, or she’s hurt and needs to rest before she can teleport, she pretty much chooses to stay if she arrives in a place.

Currently, Sincai and Arathel have the “two women adventurers and friends” relationship. It’s nothing more than that, and I don’t get any sex-tension from either of them. I don’t think Sincai is “straight,” because I suspect she’s too changeable to limit herself to one gender. I think Arathel is the kind of person who, if shown love and affection and even passion, would go along for the ride because it’s not something she’s ever had or expected before (typically in the gladiator rings, prize fighters are mated– they do not choose to whom).

This just proves to me, yet again, that people all over really suck. For crying out loud– not only is there no real point to targeting Australians, but how many Indonesian workers did these guys kill, anyway. Think about it– some guy went to work on Sunday night (yes, tomorrow– but earlier), thinking that his day was just going to be more dishwashing or waiting tables or tending bar, and hoping maybe for some tips or something so he can feed his family, and then BOOM a bomb explodes and now he’s dead or hurt or maimed, and now who’s gonna feed his family. I’m not afraid of terrorists, but I am getting pretty damned pissed off.

Cocksuckers.