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Freya's Daughter
Dec. 30th, 2009 09:35 amAs my main project for January, it seems like a good time to talk a little more in-depth about this, so what I'm going to do is try and outline where the story currently stands, what I'm aiming to do and a little bit about the basic plot.
I'll start with the plot (as that's probably the bit that most people are interested in!). Freya's Daughter (FD from here on) is basically the story of a college/university student, Carrie Evans, who finds herself caught up in an ancient struggle between good - as embodied by Odin, Freya and the rest of the Norse pantheon - and evil - as embodied by Loki, the Norse trickster.
What Carrie learns is that Loki, in an effort to out pace the fate laid out for him in the Ragnarok prophecy, bound Asgard shut, trapping the Norse Gods there and giving him free reign in Mitgard. At least, that was his plan. Unfortunately for Loki, both Odin and Freya took steps to counter him, and that's where Carrie comes in as the latest in the line of avatars for Freya.
It's not exactly something Carrie feels comfortable with! But, as things heat up, it's also not something she can deny.
With her in the adventure are a couple of her friends - Dan Symonds and Rebecca McFadden - and several characters out of Norse mythology - Hermod, Munin and, of course, Loki. There's also quite a large supporting cast, which includes the rest of Carrie's circle of friends (who go on to play bigger roles in the subsequent follow up stories...which I'm not going to get into here!) and pretty much all the major players from Norse mythology.
So that's the basic plot.
The story, as it was written for NaNo 2006, was set in the Haverford/Rosemont/Ardmore/Bryn Mawr area of Pennsylvania and did feature one or two chapters that were pretty blatant padding to get the story to stretch out to the required 50,000 words. In other words, the geography is iffy (!) and the story telling could definitely use quite a bit of tightening up.
In the subsequent stories, it's suited me to relocate the whole story/setting to the UK - partly because of the demands of the stories, partly because it makes the geography easier - so one of the big things I need to do for FD is a full relocation. I also need to de-Americanise the dialogue which is a fairly major effort on its own!
Once that's done, I've then got to look at the padding issues, some of which are as simple as doing as Hemmingway advised and ditching the adjectives and some of which...aren't. The biggest problem here being how to feed in the relevant Norse information without resorting to the current solution, which is El Grande Infodump!
So, in some ways, what I'm looking at is largely a complete rewrite of the story and in other ways, it's just a tune up. Whether I can get ALL the work done in January is a little up for debate, but I can certainly get quite a big chunk of it done and, if I can polish up chapters 1-3, I can look to get the submission process going while I finish off the rest.
I'll start with the plot (as that's probably the bit that most people are interested in!). Freya's Daughter (FD from here on) is basically the story of a college/university student, Carrie Evans, who finds herself caught up in an ancient struggle between good - as embodied by Odin, Freya and the rest of the Norse pantheon - and evil - as embodied by Loki, the Norse trickster.
What Carrie learns is that Loki, in an effort to out pace the fate laid out for him in the Ragnarok prophecy, bound Asgard shut, trapping the Norse Gods there and giving him free reign in Mitgard. At least, that was his plan. Unfortunately for Loki, both Odin and Freya took steps to counter him, and that's where Carrie comes in as the latest in the line of avatars for Freya.
It's not exactly something Carrie feels comfortable with! But, as things heat up, it's also not something she can deny.
With her in the adventure are a couple of her friends - Dan Symonds and Rebecca McFadden - and several characters out of Norse mythology - Hermod, Munin and, of course, Loki. There's also quite a large supporting cast, which includes the rest of Carrie's circle of friends (who go on to play bigger roles in the subsequent follow up stories...which I'm not going to get into here!) and pretty much all the major players from Norse mythology.
So that's the basic plot.
The story, as it was written for NaNo 2006, was set in the Haverford/Rosemont/Ardmore/Bryn Mawr area of Pennsylvania and did feature one or two chapters that were pretty blatant padding to get the story to stretch out to the required 50,000 words. In other words, the geography is iffy (!) and the story telling could definitely use quite a bit of tightening up.
In the subsequent stories, it's suited me to relocate the whole story/setting to the UK - partly because of the demands of the stories, partly because it makes the geography easier - so one of the big things I need to do for FD is a full relocation. I also need to de-Americanise the dialogue which is a fairly major effort on its own!
Once that's done, I've then got to look at the padding issues, some of which are as simple as doing as Hemmingway advised and ditching the adjectives and some of which...aren't. The biggest problem here being how to feed in the relevant Norse information without resorting to the current solution, which is El Grande Infodump!
So, in some ways, what I'm looking at is largely a complete rewrite of the story and in other ways, it's just a tune up. Whether I can get ALL the work done in January is a little up for debate, but I can certainly get quite a big chunk of it done and, if I can polish up chapters 1-3, I can look to get the submission process going while I finish off the rest.
