Pirates Don't Just Say "Arrr"

So, I lied.  I have 45,500 words, not 50,000, but I'm well on my way to finish by Monday.

Research and world building for Peter Pan and his Neverland would be incomplete if it weren't for pirates.  Somehow, this isn't something I'd really plotted out, even up to the point I was a few days away from starting.  It wasn't until last week that it really occurred to me I was going to have to write other pirates besides Hook.  And they were going to have to be nasty.  And I would have to do some research about pirates and ships.  Because I know nothing about either.

True story.  We were watching Once Upon A Time and it was at the part where Hook decides he's going to be pirate and change the name of the ship to the Jolly Roger.   I was like "Where did he come up with that name?" to which my younger sister said, "that's the name of the pirate flag."

You learn something new everyday.  Most of the new things I learn come from my younger sister and I'm supposed to be the writer!

I started my research this week with a simple bing search for pirate history.  I do like google a lot more but bing gives me reward points and I can redeem them to feed my Starbucks iced chai tea habits.  As my brother says, bing is so much more inferior, they have to pay you to use it.  It's actually not that bad, but I digress.

The first things that come up with a simple googling, or in this case binging (hello, that's why they're not as big as google.  It just sounds dumb to say you're going to go 'bing' something), were references to pirate movies and a bunch of websites with pirate slang.  I read a bit of it which left me giggling more than informed.

When I picture pirates, I think of smelly, unwashed, missing teeth guys who can't speak the English language properly.  My pirates are a bit like that though I eased up on the smelly portion since I hate reading stories about dirty people, especially when they'll well written.

The word "pirate" has its origins in "per" which meant "to risk" and "pieren" which meant "to attack".  It became the Latin word "Pirata" (Sea Attacker).  The earliest mention of pirates seems to come from 14th century BC.  Basically, these dirty, smelly, moralless people have been around as long as there've been ships in the sea.

In the Middle Ages, Viking's became well known for their acts of piracy.

My pirates don't carry a lot of these origins since they are modernish people trapped in Neverland and resorting to whatever means they think are necessary but even so, I wanted to give them a feel of a swashbuckling pirate, as well as the slightly inept, sometimes funny feel of the pirates from the original Peter Pan stories.  Even so, they need to be dangerous and scary, something I've attempted to incorporate.  This comes into play a bit when Wendy ends up on a pirate ship full of guys who haven't seen a girl in a long time.

So, the pirates are blood thirsty, slightly inept, and just a bit funny but I wanted to inject a bit more personality into them than that.  There are more specific characters the reader will really come to know (Captain Hook, Smee, and a few select others), and while I wanted to carry over this fairytale/stereotypical pirate feel, I also don't want them to be the same tired cliches that've been read before.  They need to have hearts, purpose, and a desire that's more than looting villages and getting women.  

I think pirates bring out my bloody side.  Just today, I wrote this whole chunk where they get attacked by these flesh eating things and one pirate gets totally eaten.  That's a bit weird but the weirder part is...I actually, sorta, kinda, had a bit of fun writing it.  It was super easy, too.

Write again soon!

-Anna Leigh

Character Breakdowns and Legendary Myths

I've been breaking down my characters as I'm nearing the end of my first draft of Queen of Time.  Without even realizing it, I've been weaving a consistency into all of my characters.  It wasn't until I started getting into what made my characters "them", that I realized it.

Gwen is my MC.  She is eighteen, living with a verbally abusive mother and new stepfather.  She has a lot of chaos in her life.  Her solution? Have things as tidy as possible.  In a messy house, she always keeps her room clean.  In a messy life, she lives by the rules.  No illegal music downloading, no jaywalking, no stealing, etc.  She goes from the petty things to the big ones.  It's how she makes her way through life.

Arthur is my male MC.  He's twenty-three, living with a detached father who spends more time ruling a kingdom than being a father to him, and his knights who rely on him to lead them.  Rules are a part of his every day life.  Enforcing the rules tends to mean him living by them.  Only he doesn't always.  He believes rules are only good until the point they cause you to compromise your beliefs.  This is a point of contention between him and his father.

Merlin is the youngest physician in Camelot.  After losing his home in Penrith, he's brought much needed help to the people living under the shadow of the castle walls.  He is very intelligent and believes the technology brought to them from Gwen's world is something they shouldn't be shunning but should be grabbing on to.  He does a lot of work with science in secret so he won't be called out for witchcraft.  He believes rules are made to be broken.  They were made by dull people with dull lives.  The people who've added good to the world were all the people willing to go beyond, to risk everything.

I have several more characters but as you can see with the common thread here, they're one of a few kinds.  Rule keepers, rule breakers, and the one's who take it rule by rule.  They go to varying extremes and each person has a different reason for living life the way they do.

The reason I focused on rules is simply because it shows so much about a person.  When I look at the people around me, a lot of their personality and ethics can be seen in their feelings toward "rules".  When I say rules, I'm not just talking about laws.  I'm talking about a moral code that people live by.  I don't need to know it's illegal to murder in order to know it's wrong.  The fear of punishment doesn't stop me from committing the crime.  It's my own morals that would stop me from even contemplating it.

It's been a good thing for me to remember as I'm writing each character.  When I write Merlin, I'm always asking myself how someone who enjoys breaking rules would react to a situation.  It will hopefully convey his mischievousness.

I'm up to 112,000 words.  I was surging a bit further ahead in word count but I deleted some portions this week and I had to work on my chapter for my critique group so I've neglected my manuscript for a few days.

I was reading a history of King Arthur, mainly the legends involving his death.  I'm using a portion of them for the ending conflict of the book and going a bit of a different direction than I was expecting too.  From what I've been reading, Geoffrey of Monmouth's works are the oldest dramatized accounts of King Arthur we have.  In his works, Arthur succeeds his father at the age of fifteen after Uther's death.  He then leads armies to defeat the Scots and the Picts (who by the eleventh century were Scots as well), conquering Ireland, Iceland, and the Orkney Islands.  At twenty-seven, he sets out to expand his empire by taking over Norway, Denmark, and Gaul.  Because Gaul is still under control of the Roman empire, it leads to a fight between Arthur and Lucius, emperor of Rome.  Arthur wins but while he's gone, Mordred (his nephew in Geoffrey's works) takes over the kingdom and steals Guinevere to be his queen.

My version doesn't go a lot into the battles of Arthur and in my book, Uther is still alive and Arthur is an adult.  Still, battles and the peace of the surrounding territories would've been a big factor in both Arthur and his knight's lives.  I've certainly included more than I intended to when I first started.

I haven't done too much research into Excalibur.  I know its original name was Caledfwlch (also called Caliburnus) and that its magical properties were a big part of several legends, including Arthur's pulling of the sword from the stone.  While Arthur does have a special sword in my book which plays into the story a little toward the end (right now), it isn't magical.  Everything in my book is explained by science.

I've never cared for history too much so to be doing research on a fictional legend from Europe is really outside of my comfort zone.  It'll be interesting to see how this all works out!

- Anna Leigh

First Draft Madness

As I said in the last post, I'm working on my first draft for my current WIP. I've discovered several things in the last few weeks since this manuscript is different than anything else I've worked on.

Unlike my previous posts, I might actually break this one up with a few pictures.

First off, I'm using the King Arthur legend as a base for my book. For those who don't know of anything past the quite trashy romantic retellings which have been circulating for hundreds of years, the original is quite different. King Arthur is rumored to have lived sometime in the late 500s to the early 600s. Arthur's name was originally Artorex and he didn't start out as a king. Rumor has it, he didn't even originally start out as royalty but as a duke.

It wasn't until the 12th century when the knights were introduced into the stories. They were brought in to add to the romance. A French writer first introduced Lancelot at that time.

Though the original legend first tells of Arthur succeeding the throne from his father, King Uther, at fifteen, Arthur is in his twenties in my story and his father is still alive. After several years of peace, Arthur ventured out from his home to begin conquering other lands. In his absence Mordred, who would later end up killing him, took over the throne and married Arthur's wife.

Merlin is said to have aided Arthur's father though in my story, he is a much younger man and spends more time with Arthur than King Uther.

I am only bringing bits and pieces of my research into the story but I felt it would be necessary to know in order for the time period to feel right. Research has never been my strong point and having to do it for something soooo old is hard. Everything I bring into the story I have to go and look up. Real searches of mine: when were saddles invented? What did they call dresses in the 600s? Did they have boots in the 600s? Did the women wear veils in the 600s? 

These questions come up right in the middle of a sentence and I have to write them down on a note for research later. If I stopped writing to research every time I had a question, I'd never get my first draft written.

I've looked up a lot of pictures to try and get a feel for the clothes they would'v worn but the popularly recreated medieval times are nothing like what the people in the 600s would've worn (from my understanding). I've saved a lot stylized paintings which give me a picture of the romanticized times. I have a Pinterest board full of them and am saving character pictures for my character wall. Now I need to go and buy some corkboards. I'm working on character profiles right now which are super hard and not my favorite thing to do at all!

The picture to the left is a popular one usually found when you search for this time period. The dress would be really wrong for the 600s but I like the picture. It makes me feel like I'm there.





My critique group has been really kind about my first chapter and gave me some great pointers. I'm planning on reminding them this week that it's an ugly ugly first draft and I really just want critiques on the plot and characters. The writing is going to be bad and the phrases will be repetitive and passive. I want to remind them of that this week because my second chapter is, well, a first draft chapter.

My last point of awkwardness in the POV. I'm writing in third person which I'm not comfortable with. I'm strongly considering switching it to first person when I do the second draft.

Oh, and one last thing. King Arthur's crest is NOT a dragon! As anything else, that's the romanticized crest but out of all the things I read, the one I found the most was three gold crowns against an azure background.

Back to my book. I've distracted myself long enough!

-Anna Leigh