Although I do have most of the next installment written, I thought I'd take tonight off from Two White Queens- sort of. See, I thought I'd take an entry to talk about how it came about.
It started as many of my stories start- in a dream. And boy-howdy, was it a star-studded dream. The two queens were played by Timmain of Elfquest and Jadis of the Chronicles of Narnia. Rohlan? Oh, Rohlan was straight-up Harry Potter of, you know, Harry Potter. As my best friend put it, my dreams have an incredible production budget. I won't go much further into it, for fear of giving away plot points, but let's just say that other major pieces of the story also have their roots in great children's literature (although to be fair, Elfquest is not so much for the kiddies...)
Anyway, I woke up after this incredibly elaborate dream and so wanted to get back into it that I knew I had to write it down while I remembered it, or I would seriously regret it. Needless to say, after I'd spewed the entire (rather incoherent) thing onto the computer screen, I started tweaking. Some tweaks came immediately (for instance, changing the players into characters that had their own back-stories, rather than being reproductions of other writers' efforts), others developed as I started turning the dream into an actual story (and to tell the truth what I'm putting up isn't the story, per se- it's more like an elaborate outline) (rough-draft of an elaborate outline). For instance, having the queen devour her son came from Nathan commenting (after reading the first part) that it reminded him of a fairy tale- of the old fairy tales that were dark and didn't always turn out so pleasantly. Immediately my brain went to the tales wherein the evil queen frames her daughter-in-law, making it appear she's eaten her own children. I already knew that T'myra would be spending time as a wolf, so that seemed the perfect vehicle for a little horrific infanticide.
My dream primarily dealt with the "prologue" (laid out in parts I-III) and then the "ending" (quite a few story-years in the future). I'm currently at the point in the story that my dream conveniently glossed over (edited for television, I'm sure), and it's definitely requiring more effort to mine it from my subconscious. The first parts were like walking into a valley and picking up raw diamonds- yeah, maybe I needed to chip away a little rock to get at them (and still need to polish the hell out of them), but for the most part there they were, waiting for me to gather them up. Now I'm having to carve out tunnels and such. It's possible I may need to kill a former teen heart-throb or two. You know- for the greater good. ::cough::
At least I know where I need to end up- that's some help.
This is kind of how I imagine the Powers That Be feel like (yeah yeah- lightning for arrogance; don't worry, I'm pretty sure you can't be smited by association). They know where we'll end up, but They're watching to see what sort of crazy adventures we'll make up for ourselves on our way there. Because at this point, it really is like I'm poking my characters to see which way they jump. And if they jump in a way that's not conducive to the story I'm trying to tell?
Well then I'll just poke them again.
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