Kayla Writes

A pantheon of unaging Lords reaching the 250th anniversary of their first acquaintance. They're as mysterious as they are wise, as feared as they are respected.

But also... the ~drama~. Grudges that span decades. Pettiness and banter. Imagine when a secret slips within their circle—or when one makes its way out. Imagine the royal blunders when you involve magic.

How about multi-POV... 👀

"Out of Nowhere" is placeholder title I never knew would belong, years later, to the second draft of a novel.

Check out my new site to track its progress (and see what the rest of the plot is about)!

The wind knocked some pretty large branches down today, and among them were two that were perfectly sword-sized and hilt-thick. (Well, one was slightly shorter than the longswords I'm used to and the other was slightly taller than I was.)

You bet I was out there doing Zwerchhau and Ochs and this and that with all my steps and combos under a moody sky until the approaching thunderstorm drove me inside. (I've recently taken up HEMA and haven't gotten a true sword of my own yet.)

Anyway, one of my characters carries around this long ax (which I should probably be calling a bardiche), so before the wind knocked the power out I did a little writeup on just how easily I could manipulate a stick so long, how safe it really feels to have all that range, and how I could see feeling cramped with it in close quarters.

Thanks to sticks, my combat scenes are going to be even better in my novel's second draft, because I'll have that much more experience behind them. (Toootallly didn't join a sword fighting and archery club to make my fight scenes more realistic. Totes didn't take a History of Books elective to help me describe my arcane tomes and pretend I was a wizard.)

Let me just say that as a writer (and HEMA enthusiast), I like opportunities to bring out my inner child for "research".

...And narrate aloud?

I'm a passive Hamilton enjoyer. I'm familiar with some of the songs—and yeah, they're bops. Occasionally a new one comes across my radar, so I give it a listen and end up enjoying it.

This happened, and then some autoplay. I ended up on "Non-Stop". (Some of you already know where this is going...) I, a writing enthusiast, hit 4:42, and... yup.

It is now my novel-writing anthem and the cure for all of my burnout.

If you have any songs that motivate your creative endeavors, please share! I'm on the lookout for more. 👀

I like that little voice in my head when I write out a scene from my outline and it tells me something's off.

I didn't know old books could get so forensic. The last thing I expected was for them to hold details—images—hidden to the naked eye.

The pronounced vertical lines are chain lines, and the horizontal ones are from the screen from the paper-making process.

And then, if you can make it out, the paper has a watermark which tells you who milled it (and thus where and when), and it's called a watermark because the paper was wet when it was imprinted!

Where the watermark is and the direction of the chain lines (vertical/horizontal) tells you how the paper was folded.

Here's another example from the same book I was looking at:

This second image has the book's most repeated watermark, the bull's head. It's in the center of the page with vertical chain lines, so this book is classified as a folio, where each sheet was folded once to make four pages. (Other common folding styles are quarto and octavo.)

We can turn to Charles-Moïse Briquet's Les Filigranes, a multi-volume watermark dictionary. (This is also available on the Internet Archive.)

With a little French, we can find pages that match our watermark. Here we have "Tête de bœuf," which Google Translate says is "Beef head". (It's a bull head.) Then we play a game of spot the difference. The second watermark looks similar to 14183 (of the 4th volume), so for the sake of the exercise, we'll look at that one. The entry contains "Belfort, 1458" or a variation from "Marbourg, 1459".

For the other page, with the crest, I found "Armoiries Bande," or the band version of a coat of arms.

The closest match I found is entry 995 from Vol. 1.

I write for the scenes that make me grab my chest—the drama, the fuzzy, heartwarming moments, and the ideas that make me open a fresh document and write "AAAH! What if—" across the top.

At some point, I order these scenes relative to each other, and I call that my outline. Then I work forwards and backwards from each point, bridging the gaps as best I can.

Sometimes, though, I just can't think of what goes in between two scenes.

That's when I turn to my draft.

All I need is enough of an idea to write out the next chapter, and then I have a new vantage point to work from. Often, that's enough.

Sometimes, I pause mid-chapter, mid-dialog, feeling... considering... "What if that door bursts open right now? Wh—WHAT IF—AAAH!" (You get the point.)

And my outline, with its gaps, lets me try it.

I outline for structure, the themes, the arcs, the general order of things as I discover them. I write from the seat of my pants—be that drafting or brainstorming—to do the rest.

When one method fails me, I turn to the other.

And when both fail me? Come morning alarm on a given weekend, I stack up two hours' worth of 10-minute-snooze button presses, launching me into a hallucinatory state where I'm awake but asleep but awake and maybe I can steer this and how about that scene I was working on, and mmm—MMM... Maybe I'll accept that I'm just burnt out.

Because resting your mind is a part of the process, too.

Boom. That's it. There's the writing prompt.

But if you're curious, it's from Robert Darnton's “What is the History of Books?” from The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History p. 108:

The history of books began to acquire its own journals, research centers, conferences, and lecture circuits. It accumulated tribal elders as well as Young Turks. And although it has not yet developed passwords or secret handshakes or its own population of Ph.D.'s, its adherents can recognize one another by the glint in their eyes. They belong to a common cause, one of the few sectors in the human sciences where there is a mood of expansion and a flurry of fresh ideas.

On that note, it's pretty cool to look through 500-year-old rare books with a forensic eye.

Actually, it's very cool.

Just look at it! Who wouldn't want to flip through a book like that?

I might stage a heist if it weren't for medieval book curses. Artwork:

"Baldurs Gate 3 Gale Fan Art" by Gerry Arthur

"Daily Practice#097" by Kittichai Rueangchaichan (Razaras)

"Sirius" by Anna Helme

"Owain" by Marta Nael

So I tested out my new eReader with Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, and one day and 18 Google Doc pages of quotes later, I found it quite interesting and motivating. These quotes resonated with me most:

I was built with a love of the night and the unquiet coffin, that’s all. If you disapprove, I can only shrug my shoulders. It’s what I have.

Write what you love! Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames immediately comes to mind. I could tell Eames had so much fun writing the book, and it made the whole reading experience that much better. (Highly recommend if you like your fantasy with some blunt, laugh-out-loud humor.)

…let me reiterate that it’s all on the table, all up for grabs. Isn’t that an intoxicating thought? I think it is. Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn’t, toss it. Toss it even if you love it. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch once said, “Murder your darlings,” and he was right.

Don't restrict yourself before you've even begun. I need to remember this more often. "But the audience—" "But the plot—" Write for you. Experiment! Especially in your first draft. Even if it doesn't work out, that's wisdom you can take with you.

You can’t please all of the readers all of the time; you can’t please even some of the readers all of the time, but you really ought to try to please at least some of the readers some of the time.

Something else I like to hear. I tend to put wine glasses in my audience's hands and raise their noses, telling myself they would disapprove if I did it like this, the way I want. But there's also a whole world of others that might just enjoy the same things as me, and maybe I can focus a little more on them. (Key: still keeping some semblance of an audience in mind.)

You must tell the truth if your dialogue is to have the resonance and realism that Hart’s War, good story though it is, so sadly lacks—and that holds true all the way down to what folks say when they hit their thumb with the hammer. If you substitute “Oh sugar!” for “Oh shit!” because you’re thinking about the Legion of Decency, you are breaking the unspoken contract that exists between writer and reader— your promise to express the truth of how people act and talk through the medium of a made-up story. ... The point is to let each character speak freely, without regard to what the Legion of Decency or the Christian Ladies’ Reading Circle may approve of. To do otherwise would be cowardly as well as dishonest, and believe me, writing fiction in America as we enter the twenty-first century is no job for intellectual cowards.

King repeats the importance of honesty in writing, and how it invests readers with a layer of life and meaning. This is something I strive for.

My first-draft characters tend to curse more than they probably should—even the ones supposedly known for being more wholesome—but I should strike a four-letter-word for being out of character rather than for worrying what my parents might think when their unvulgar daughter relinquishes one of her chapters to them.

Background: I like to brainstorm new stories by feeling. Atmosphere, tone, mood.... I make a lot of moodboards and as I get going I find myself making playlists for my characters and my themes. A relatable activity for a lot of writers I know. Above all, though, I consider conflict in all its forms, which is the heart of a story and the basis for depth and dynamic characters.

“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself” ― William Faulkner

― George R. R. Martin When I brainstorm, I want this inherent conflict, this juxtaposition, and surprise. In the past, I've turned to random noun generators and endless Pinterest scrolling. But what works best for me (and which I find enjoyable, too) is... The Strategy: Juxtaposing an image and music.

A bloody fight scene, the dragon is bearing down on the hero, and... Mr. Blue Sky by ELO. This is a normal, happy occurrence for the hero. Or maybe he's a bit unhinged.

A girl framed in deep red and black, her glowing eyes suggesting something supernatural or evil, and... a melodic, dreamy song that asks, "Who is she? A misty memory..." It implies a past. Maybe a gothic, childhood infatuation, and you wonder if she's been this way all along.

A girl running her hands through a field of flowers, her back turned to the viewer, and... a harsh, dark song lamenting: "I'm haunted by shadows of the past." You take her shoulder and turn her around, and her dark eyes tell you there's more to her story. But after all she's been though, she's still innocently running through a field of flowers.

Oh, that's different, I think. I want to learn more. I want to know Why, and Who. Where have they been, and where are they going? I enjoy this activity because there's the possibility for so many different interpretations, and I often find myself picking out aspects of artworks I hadn't really noticed before—Could that smile be a little evil? Is our hero actually that dark figure in the background? I'd like to know what others think or if you've done something similar. I'm always open to new processes, no matter how wacky or abstract! Pairings referenced: (1)

ArtStation: "Warriors of Krynn" - Dominik Mayer (2)

ArtStation: "Dark Guardian" - Artem Chebokha (3)