So I’m taking  a few classes this semester and there are some short breaks in between them. Such is the case for my Saturday. I have one Saturday class that is broken up into two different parts: a lecture and a lab. There is often a short break between the two where I have nothing to do. Instead of using that time to check up on my facebook page or what have you, I will be using that time to thrill and amuse you with the tales of my day to day life! Doesn’t that sound grand? Kinda? Maybe? Some kind of substitute for the adventures of Desa and Marc and all the rest of our fantastic cast? ~shrug~ It’s what I got.

I don’t remember if I mentioned it already and going back to check seems like a waste of time, but I am a Journalism major with an English minor. As such, I’m taking a couple English courses this semester with a fairly large reading load. Last week, I had to finish Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle.

May I just say? I hated Jane Eyre with a passion previously reserved only for Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. It is *so* boring. And when it’s not boring, it’s retarded! Maybe it’s inappropriate for me to be reviewing someone else’s work on a site dedicated to my own (and Rich’s), but I feel like it gives you an idea of what my style is likely to be. Writers can’t help but comment on other writers. Why do you think all your books have quotes from other authors filling up the front few pages? To further my point, dear reader, I make you a promise right now. I vow by chocolate, coffee and all else holy that I will never, ever take two hundred pages to get to the heart of the plot of any story I tell. If I do, may lightning strike me where I stand. I shall also endeavor to make sure my characters are somewhat consistent and have a real life of their own. I will not just have them do whatever I want to happen. It will make sense. I swear!

Alright. End of break time. Talk to you all later!

Okay, so let me keep you abreast of what’s going on.  Jourdan and I are redoing chapters 1, 2 and 3. Why? Because, as I’ve told you all before, this web-novel started as a tandem story. And as such the original versions of chapters 1, 2 and 3, were really just independent short stories.  While they were good for what they were, I really don’t feel that we had gelled as a team yet.

So, I will be redoing chapters 1 and 2 and Jourdan will be redoing chapter 3.  You’re gonna see a lot more time spent with our characters, more in-depth back stories. You see this time, I get to tailor chapter 1 knowing what Jourdan plans to do in chapter 3. That wasn’t an advantage I had the first time around.

Now since then, we’ve been teté a teté about chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and so on. However, the early chapters were written very independently. So we want to go back and do them as a team. Make them more cohesive.

That’s all for now.

Rich.

Others of you will ponder, “Who, exactly, is this incredibly awesome, handsome, and awesome person making this post?”

The answer to the first question is easy, it’s German.  I’m on a kick lately.  The answer to the second is a lot simpler – it’s Jourdan’s older and wiser brother, Alex, guest-blogging from the nethers of the Internet.

Don’t be alarmed that there was an actual post onto the blog, though nobody will hold it against you if you are.  After all, the last change of any sort to this blog’s public face was in October!  OCTOBER!  There wasn’t even in (I just typed with a stutter, it made me giggle enough for it to stick around instead of being editted away) a “Hey, we’re still working on the book, I promise!”  or a “God.  We’ll post when we feel like it.”

Jourdan would like to inform the viewing audience that she doesn’t blog because those assholes at her school keep expecting her to be a student full-time, and her job necessitates she work in most of the rest of her waking moments.  And so she can only work on Desa’s story in the limited free time she has remaining – and which she doesn’t use in order to save Ferelden from The Blight.

By all accounts, though, Rich is hard at work making Desa’s story better.  He probably even worked on it a little during his recent journey from the Great White North into America’s slum – Texas. (Texas is not a slum, Alex. Any place that our brilliant Jourdan occupies is awesome by definition -  Rich.) If he isn’t, he isn’t sharing his excuses with me; ask him yourself!

Perhaps we’ll meet again.  If not, good luck in finding Licatia, my little corner of the web.  But be warned, I don’t always play as nicely as I promised to here.

The Prologue

I see them every time I buy gas or pick up stuff at the pharmacy: girl magazines. They’re everywhere. Feminism is a very important topic for me, so I think it’d be good if I take a moment and explain why I’m always bitching about these magazines on Twitter. Let’s start with the worst offender, Cosmopolitan.  This is the image that has been assaulting my eyes at least thrice weekly for the past month.

We’re gonna ignore Megan Fox for the moment, mainly because discussing her picture is irrelevant. But as an aside, I really dislike it.  All right, let’s look at the articles. “Bad Girl Sex,” “The Sexy Ass Workout,”  “What 81% of Men Expect on a First Date,”  “Sex Panic,”  “The 26 Best Beauty Products?”  Are we sensing a theme here?

So let me be clear, am I in favour of frank and open discussions about sex?  Yes. My problem is that this magazine and the several dozen others that copy it – thus occupying an entire shelf at the convenience store – seem to discuss little else.  So, why is this a problem?  Can’t it be the girl equivalent of something like Penthouse? Well, putting aside that I have issues with Penthouse and its companions, the problem with Cosmo is the enormous number of women who read this crap and believe this magazine actually has something of value to say.

Girl magazines, like this, are obsessed with sex to the point of excluding all other topics; but they talk about these raunchy topics under the guise of feminism and female empowerment. And there’s the rub.  How do I know this?  Because I’ve read some of these magazines. This shouldn’t surprise you, I’ve had women in my life: family members, girlfriends. I wanted to see exactly what these magazines say to them.

And to summarize the point (since this is not an academic paper), the message is pretty simple: master your sexual power and you’ve mastered your femininity. You’ve essentially conquered the gender divide. In short, the only strength a woman needs to acquire is sexual in nature.  If she’s good at being beautiful, being desirable, and having great sex, a woman has “liberated” herself.
*BUZZ*

Wrong.  Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

A book that you all might want to check out is called Female Chauvanist Pigs by Ariel Levy. In this book, Levy documents the ways in which this generation of women (25 and under) have applied to themselves the same sexism that men were notorious for up until the 1970s.  Now, before any of the guys get up and shout “See? They’re doing it to themselves!” I’m going to say one thing: Levy’s book makes it quite clear that men are encouraging these girls to disenfranchise themselves!

Female Chauvinist Pigs follows several young women on the Girls Gone Wild tour. I’m sure you can all guess what happens: the girls strip in front of the camera,  there’s a lot of hooting and hollering and it all gets put on video and sold for a nominal fee. So, while she was following the Girls Gone Wild tour, Levy interviewed many of the young women who appeared on camera and they mostly said the same things. “I feel liberated!” “I feel free!” “I’m empowered!”

In short, the book documents that to SOME women, putting on a thong is equated with casting off the shackles of male-oppression.

So, what’s the problem with Cosmo? The magazine sends this exact message and repeats it ad nausium.

Stripping is not empowerment.  Sexual desirability is not empowerment.  And if you’ve ever read a single public statement by Megan Fox, it should be entirely clear that she is not the kind of woman that any girl should emulate.  While I don’t know her personally, every single public statement that Fox has uttered makes her sound vapid, stupid and self-centred. So why is Cosmopolitan promoting these kinds of behaviours? Heaven forbid we should see a female philanthropist, a savy entrepreneur or anyone we might like our daughters to emulate on the cover.

And I know you’ve probably heard it before, but when the only thing a  women’s magazine talks about is sex, it sends the underhanded message that the only thing women are good for is sex.

Feminism is a complicated issue – or maybe I should say set of issues – that largely revolve around recognizing the roles of women in society and treating them with the same dignity and respect that men have always received. While comfort and confidence regarding sex is an issue in feminism, it is by no means the only issue; and few people would tell you that it is the most important.  Other issues include wage equality, appreciation of women’s rights, power imbalances, perceptual biases and appreciation of female perspectives in art, literature, politics and science.

And I want to be clear that female perspectives are not more important than male perspectives, but equally important.  All of the above disciplines should have a mix of male and female perspectives.  Another important branch of feminism is finding common ground between the genders.  But will women’s magazines ever address any of these issues?  No.

Will Cosmo ever do an article on wage equality? No.  And why?  Because that would upset their corporate masters if companies suddenly had to start paying female employees more. So, Cosmo and its peers will remain nothing more than the gossipy manifestations of celebrity culture that keep us dumb, distracted and compliant.  And that, my friends, is why I despise this magazine (as well as 90% of everything else on store shelves).
Well, that’s it for me.

Rich.

The Bravery – “Believe.”   From the album: The Sun and the Moon.

Matchbox 20 – “Hang.” From the album: Yourself or Someone like You.

ACDC – “Guns for Hire.” From the album: Rising Power.

Alanna Myles – “Bad for You.” From the album: Arrival

Attack in Black -  “If all I Thought Were True.”  From the album: Marriage.

Chairlift – “Bruises.” From the album of the same name.

Led Zepplein – “Nobody’s Fault But Mine.” From the album: Presence

Ubitquitos Synergy Seeker . – “Laces Out.”  From the album: Questimation.

Metric – “Give Me Sympathy.” From the album: Fantasies

Who’s Anna?  Oh.  A topic for another time.

So, when I posted chapter one, I talked about the origin of Desa.  So, now I’d like to talk about the evolution of Desa. Those of you who read chapters 4 and 5 will probably notice that the story is moving in a different direction than it was in chapter 1.  For one thing they’re a lot bigger. When I wrote chapters 4 and 5, they were both one big chapter. It was actually Jourdan’s idea to split them in two. So why were they so big? Well,  Chapter one gave you an introduction to this world, two introduced a new character and three set up a conflict. But it was all, set up, set up, set up.

When was it gonna pay off?

I decided it was time to make the stories pay off.

A lot of things changed for me in between chapters 1 and 4. Not to repeat myself, but when I wrote chapter 1, it was a one-shot deal. I really didn’t expect to go any further with it. I started it at the Theoryland website to be a tandem story. I hatched this little fish and sent it off to swim on its own.  I was more than half expecting some other writer to kill Desa.  She pouts every time I mention that.

At the time of chapter 1, I really only wanted to write about three things. 1) I wanted to do a short story about an angry character whose life had been ruined; and how she found empowerment through fighting back. 2) I wanted to make this character female to defy gender stereotypes. 3) I wanted to show that Buffy could defeat a wizard. And so, having armed my character with slayer-like powers, I pitted her against a wizard, finished him off in a clever way and put the whole matter behind me.

You have to understand, I don’t write epic fantasy. I’m a science-fiction writer. My characters have very modern outlooks, they’re very genre-savy and they tend to laugh at me whenever I apply a writing trope to them. “Oh, you’re going to call us that?” Desa says to me. “You do realize Night Shadow is a very cliché name, right?” And until recently, my entire experience with fantasy has been with writers like George Martin, Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind and Tad Williams. (And okay, even a  little J.K. Rowling.)  So, I honestly thought that to write fantasy, you had to write brooding, moody characters that took themselves very seriously.  And I just can’t do that.

So, I wrote chapter one and I created a brooding, serious, typical fantasy character.  Well, Barb wrote chapter 2; and this brought in Marc. Again, a brooding, moody, serious character.  Then Cathar wrote chapter three. So, Barb said to me one night, “No one is continuing the story, you may have to do the next chapter.”

I formed the image of chapter 4 around a western style gunfight in the middle of a town. Morley was gonna shoot at Desa; she was gonna dodge the bullet and shoot back. I sat down to write it in the fall of 2008. Before I got a page into it, Desa grabbed me by the shoulder spun me around and said, “Listen. I am not brooding and serious. You are not brooding and serious.  Neither of us can live with ourselves if you write me that way. So if you write me as brooding and serious, I promise, I will take corporeal form and stick my sai in you…  A vague disclaimer is no one’s friend.”

So, suddenly Desa starts displaying the kind of wry sense of humour you see in chapters 4 and 5.

And then there’s Marc.  I decided that he was going to be the typical, white knight fantasy character. That was the way Barb made him; and that worked because the story really wasn’t about him. So, Marc alternates between being jolly and kindhearted and displaying a strong, serious sense of duty.

Lommy came next. Once again, when I wrote chapter one, I never intended to continue it. So I never bothered to name the “lanky blonde” who attacked Desa.

Marc came off as really incompetent in Chapter 2. (No offense, Barb). So the first thing I wanted to do, when I got my hands on the steering wheel, was to show just what a bad-ass warrior he could be. I brought back the “lanky blonde” from chapter one and had him try to shoot Marc in the back. Marc does his  cool flip move and his “don’t fuck with me” swordplay. Problem solved. But what about the kid?

J. Michael Stracynski said that the art of writing is to ask yourself “what’s the next logical step?” After Marc disarms the lanky blonde, I asked, “what happens next to this poor kid?”  Well he’s kind of unfortunate, he’s often picked on by his brother. No one in the town really respects him.  I realized that if this kid didn’t get out of that village, he was gonna hang himself. So, off he goes with Marc.  And his name becomes Lommy. (Because Lommy is the worst possible name a boy can have. Actually, it’s short for something. Wait til you see what it is.)

Adelle and Selande round out the cast. Now we’ve got a whole party of “good guys.”

Now let’s look at the baddies.  Morley’s resurrection has to pay off. Benworth sent Morley after Desa, but it’s too early for him to get involved just yet, so he isn’t in this chapter. It was Cathar who decided to take the soldier who shot Desa’s family and turn him into Doran.  So, now we have the unlikely pair of Morley and Doran.

The Weaver, I’m proud to say, is entirely my creation. I wanted a character that fought very indirectly through manipulation and subtlety. So, you have a crazy, mind-bending sorceress.  The Weaver is what happens when someone gets too good with the pathos. Since pathos is the magic of emotion and chaos, a master of it tends to go insane.  I’m telling you this here because I can’t really put it into the Weaver’s narrative. She’s just not sane enough to contemplate her own insanity.

So, the Weaver loses her grip on reality but reality also loses its grip on her. That’s why she teleports so much.  She can’t teleport directly to any location; but if she sets off from Los Angeles in the morning, she’d be in New York by nightfall. She just walks in the direction she wants to go and keeps jumping a little further ahead until she gets  there.

And the Shadow-men. That’s the loose term we use for the seven hooded figures who command the Weaver. As I’ve said before, when I set up this story, I set up a plot line for epic fantasy. There was a horrible sorcerer named Bazantus, who conquered the world. And then he died; but prophecy said he would return one day. Again, I wanted to give the Theorylanders something familiar that they could work with.

Then I realized I didn’t want to write epic fantasy.  Well, the Bazantus plot-line was published; so we can’t scrap it now. And don’t worry, we’re not going to scrap it. But I decided to make it more complicated. I asked myself  “What if Desa finding Delothra’s Eye doesn’t prevent Bazantus’s return but actually causes it.”  Well, now we have an interesting shade of gray.

So I created these seven nameless figures who’ve been pulling Desa’s strings all along.

And guess what? They don’t even care about bringing Bazantus back!  Oh, they’re going to try to bring him back, but that’s not what they really want. No! No! No!  No secrets here. You’re going to have to  RAFO.  That means Read and Find Out.

So when you weave all these elements together, Chapter 4 ended up being fifty pages long.  This is where Jourdan comes in.  Jourdan read chapter 4 and said  “I love it. Can I redo Chapter 3?” Cathar had disappeared off the face of the Earth, so  I said, “Sure.”

It was Jourdan who invented the character of Azra. It was also Jourdan’s idea to split chapter 4 in two so that we had two chapters instead of one huge one.

And there you have it. That’s how we got to where we were.  I’ve plot arced the next 6 chapters and they’re in the works right now.  No spoilers. Sorry. All this time, I was sitting there, saying, “I’m not a fantasy writer,” only to realize that I’m writing fantasy and I love it. It was so nice to work with a team that I decided to put it all up online.

So there’s our story.

Jourdan and I have decided that we’re going to stick by our roots and we’re not going to redo chapters 1, 2 and 3.  However, the story will move in a different direction than those chapters might have led you to believe. We will be redoing the prologue.  It’s a little too “epic fantasy” and I think it turns people off.

So, that’s our story.

Good night, everybody!

It’s Rich.  So, Jourdan and I  want to express our regrets on why it’s taken so long to get this chapter out to you.  The editing for Chapter 4 took much longer than expected.

So, this is where you guys get to be completely awesome and help us out.  You see, during this chapter, Barbara stepped down from the project. She did so amicably; but that left us lacking a second editor.  A new editor, named Christine, will be joining us for Chapter 5 onward.  She’s very talented and I hope you all make her feel welcome.

But, as I said, this left us in the lurch for Chapter 4. Due to Barbara’s departure, Chapter 4 didn’t get as many read-throughs as a I would like.  Well, those of you who come from the Wheel of Time sites will know that type-os happen. I saw one or two in the new Prologue.  So, I’m offering you guys a chance to help our project.

If you see any type-os, then you can e-mail them to us at desakincaid@gmail.com. If you’re the first person to spot an error, you may ask me any question about the series and I will answer it truthfully.  I will reply to you via the blog, listing the type-o you spotted and answering your question.  So pay attention to the blog posts! Fair warning – I’m an excellent equivocator.

Please include the page number and the first few words 0f the paragraph that has the type-o. It’d also be a good idea to explain what the nature of the error is.

Thanks so much for being patient with us and thanks for reading!

Take care!

Rich!