Rewrites Re-railed And Jontastic tidbits

Good news! Jon decided to go with my Massive Proposed Change. The rewrites are back up and hurtling towards the finish line. I still don't think I'll finish before the first because I doubt I can write six more chapters and then go back and change everything else in the next 29 hours. I'm shooting for sometime next week. So, stay tuned for that.

Also, this weekend we were visiting our friends in Chicago (those of the vegan Thanksgivings) and Jon was really in top form. Check it:

• He coined the term 'parson berries', which are cherries, specifically those which have been pitted by Jon with his bare hands ("You see, they're called parson berries because only parsons have the time to sit idle plucking pits from cherries on a weekend," he explained.)
• He declared that he wouldn't be gay if he was in love with himself, he would instead be an egosexual.
  
• He referred to me on more than one occasion as "an intemperate witch."
  
  

Rewrites Derailed

I've been meaning to write a post about how the rewriting of Jarthen Book I is going and now is as good a time as any. Mostly because I'm kind of stumped by it.

Here's what happened: Jon and I compiled Book I into a massive 270 page word document, reread and annotated it mercilessly, and then compared. When I was rereading it, I was trying to conserve as much as what we'd already written as I could, but when we touched base and started divvying up the sections, it became very clear very quickly that there were some really major changes that needed to happen. Characters were mercifully renamed with less retarded-sounding monikers. Some characters were dropped completely. Other characters were aged. A race of sentient beings was dropped since we weren't really using it. We made a really major revision regarding the central characters and POV. Dialects were made less impenetrable.

Jon's been tackling the Bertronius side of things and I've been working on the Jarthen side of it. I essentially rewrote the first half of the book from scratch. I think I used maybe about five pages total of text for the first seven or so chapters from the stuff we've published over on the blog. The general storyline is the same and everything, but the tone was wrong and given all those aforementioned shifts it was really just easier to scrap it and start fresh. It was going pretty well for awhile there, I was clipping along and feeling good about it and I was totally on track to finish the rewrites by the end of the month, which is what we were shooting for. Looks like for the first time ever, Jon's going to make that deadline and I'm not. The shame.

And now I'm derailed. At first, I thought it was because the pirate book and this other book that came out of nowhere (more City of Mages 2nd generation stuff) were sucking up my time and brainpower, but it's not really their fault. The reason those were easier to write was because I was slamming up against an invisible wall with the rewrites everytime I tried to work on them.

Yesterday, I finally caved and proposed a truly major change to Jon about it. One that I think might make more sense in the long run by sort of fundamentally undermines his initial conception of the Jarthenverse. He said he needed to sleep on it (that's how big it is). So, I guess I'll just wait it out and hope for the best, but either way I'm sort of screwed:

• Change is not made - still have to deal with the hurdles that have been derailing me, and likely will be plagued with doubts regarding said change for the rest of the books

• Change is made - sweet, things make more sense now! Except that I have to go back and rewrite substantial chunks of stuff that's already done.

Damn it.

I love a good map.

Seriously, for someone like me who is a total logic/consistency fiend they are so necessary. It's like a cheat sheet - it tells you where you put things so you don't have to go wading through mountains of text, or how apart things are, or what borders what. All good things. The oldest map, Jarthen-wise, is not actually by my own hand, it was drawn by my friend Van two (maybe three?) Thanksgivings ago:

(this is a photo of the original I printed out, annotated, then scanned. It is a storied document.)

We drew this when Jon, Van, and I had a dispute about how big Elothnin was. Apparently, in that historic prologue, Jon had assumed it was rather small - maybe the size of Wales. The kind of place where battles happen between armies of tens of people. And I thought it was roughly the size of China. So, kind of a gap there. Van mediated us into settling on something about the size of the American West roughly the shape of the Indian subcontinent. The really lovely thing about this map, though, is that it gave us a chance to nail down the surrounding areas, those places outside of Jarthen and the Border Wars that had to exist (since it's not like Elothnin was a damn planet or anything) but hadn't really been discussed. Fun fact about this map: the provinces of Elothnin are outlined up there, but all the names we came up with (besides the Fethil, which was well established by that point) were so shitty that none of us wrote them down.


This is the most recent map. Partly I drew it because I firmly believe that despite what Jarthen and Queen Lilhelndine and Jon would have you beleive, Elothnin is not a goddamn empire. But the Elvo-Felintark Empire, is. And is totally sprawling and shit. But this really got drawn because I have a character that ends up traveling through it a good deal (starts in the City of Mages, hops down to Elothnin for a bit, then over to Shalakesh, then up to Shangri, then he runs around a bit in the Elvish Grasslands for awhile before making the long walk back to the City of Mages) and I literally just needed places for him to go. Period. Becuase even though I wrote a novel that is set in the Empire here for the first third of it and it is the only really nation besides Elothnin that we've developed I had no idea what was actually in it. Or how big it was. Or what (if anything) lay beyond it. I rather like the way it turned out -- especially Sparky the Sea Monster.


This, though, this is a beauty. This is a map of the City of Mages, probably my favorite spot we've written about. It's a bizarre place, built by a race of hermits who no longer live there, abandoned and repopulated with a whole mess of races that have turned it into the most cosmopolitan place in the Jarventherse. It's a place full of culture clashes and weird little cultures of its own, a great place to explore identity issues for sure.

And until I drew this map, I had no idea what it looked like. I've been filling it in as I go, noting who lives where, how far this shop is from that one, and so forth. Some of the dots up there have popped up over and over and over (Moshel's apartment, for example, is a point of interest in the book about the gay elves, shows up in the first City of Mages book and a scene or two in the still very unformed and amoeba-like scenes of the second City of Mages book, a novella about satyrs, and will likely at least be referenced in the second or third Jarthen book. It's a happening place. Not really, it's actually full of clocks and books and grumpy gay elves, but whatever.) and some of the dots I thought would appear but never did (Theo's apartment, I'm looking at you.). It's got multiple generations overlapping in it - for example, one character has lived in four different places labeled up there across hi life span. This map is basically always out when I'm working on the City of Mages stuff. This map is canon, I'd live and die by this map. Go, CoM map, go.

Maps that will likely be drawn at some point: Susselfen, Neerhemhind (with special attention to Elftown and Captfael Castle), Opleneer pre and post war, Tarquintia, possibly Norsa, the T'Langan archipelago in greater detail (and possibly full scope. I wonder what's east of the Erkenheld Forest?), and some continent on the other side of the world. Oh, we have plans for that. Oh yes. They involve black elves and slave traders, woot.

So, about those music videos...

...They were for Jon. More specifically, I posted them so that we would be able to rock out Friday night in celebration of it being his last day of work. See, what happened is that Jon's been temping lately (working on this book-scanning project for Google. It's apparently super-secret....and I may have already said too much), and he worked from 4pm-midnight. This was fine for now, but during the semester, he'll have afternoon classes and wouldn't be able to stay on. Classes start in a couple of weeks, so he decided to quit in order to give himself time to get prepared to start classes and find a job that's more compatible with his student schedule. He wanted me to make sure that everyone knows that he's not slacking off, and the he's at a job interview as I write this! He has several more scheduled for the week.

Anyway, I thought he'd earned a break so I threw him a surprise quitting party Friday night, and the music videos were part of it. I should clarify that said party was attended only by me, Jon, and the cats. It was selective.


So, these were the decorations. I printed out a bunch of words and phrases associated with being jobless and taped them around the apartment (Jon's favorite was "The Best Stand Down"). Originally, they were going to be suspended from the ceiling, but I'm short and that didn't work out. We had a good time.

To keep with the theme here, I have a couple more bits of Jon-centric news. In knitting news, I'm making him a sweater!


As you can see, it's not just any sweater....it's a full-out slouchy old man sweater. It's gone super-quick because i'm using bulky yarn and size 13 needles. I originally bought the yarn to make the spicy fitted V neck top from Fitted Knits. I ended up making the entire body of the sweater in, like, 3 days, and realized that something wasn't quite right. We've all been there, right? Awesome pattern, nice yarn, but the garment just isn't working. I set it aside for a couple of days and realized I'd never wear the damn thing because I look terrible in gray. I still don't know what possessed me to by it in that color. So I ripped it.

Jon liked the yarn, so I offered to make something for him out of it. Thus, the grandpa cardigan was born. About all I have to do for it now is make some big patch pockets, sew on some buttons, and weave in the ends. And it could stand a good blocking.

In non-kitting Jon-related news, he's got a blog now, too! Well, more specifcally, it's a blog where he's serializing his fantasy novel. He wrote the prologue as a project during college when he was too young to know better. Then, a couple of years later, a bunch of us were hanging out talking about what bad writers we were when we first got to college and Jon showed it to us. We had a good laugh, and then got weirdly obsessessed with it. Seriously, for the last 3 or so years, a group of about 4 or 5 of us have outlined the novel (and sequels, since all good fantasy books come in trilogies.), held dramatic readings complete with funny voices, and had heated discussions about such things as the philological inconsistency of character's names.

Jarthen, a most brave lad

If you're interested, pop on over and check it out! There's a couple of character bios up already and a magnificantly detailed map of the fictional country it's set in. I'm still tweaking the layout, so it's subject to change, but the story's already being posted.

I'll give you behind-the-scenes infor regarding Jarthen and co. And if you do check it out, leave the big guy a comment, will you? He's an absolute sucker for flattery or attention in general.