Hey folks, as I mentioned in last week’s post, there will not be a chapter this week. As of writing this blogpost – which I’m writing right before posting it – I haven’t even started on the next chapter yet, to be honest with you. I’m enjoying my spring break and although I have been writing a lot the past couple of weeks – this is looking to be my most productive year yet – the focus has been on other projects. Mainly, the focus has been on polishing the first volume of The Hesitant Hero, reworking the second volume to be much better than it was and finally, doing some worldbuilding for my other series that I really want to start diving into more actively; The Necromancer’s Daughter. Let’s talk about all of it.
First, the progress on Hesitant Hero 1 is going well. I’ve rewritten the early parts quite a bit and I’m working my way through the journey towards Milinia now. The main things I’m changing from the blog version are the way that Kimi’s trap works, the worldbuilding you find throughout the journey and adding some more consistency and realism to the story. In the first version of the story, Cobal recovered from severe burns and claw marks in the span of about two days, which even in a fantasy world feels a bit cheap. He is still a stubborn little prince that does way more while in recovery than he should, but it’s not nearly as egregious as in the original draft. Once we get to the forest, there will be massive changes. I’ve done a lot more planning about what that part of the world actually looks like, who the characters might encounter and how long the journey takes. What will stay consistent even in this nth draft is the actual plot. Cobal and Mana still travel to Milinia, they still meet with Mirgia, the council and Dionil, and the latter still whoops Cobal into a better person before he trains the four travelers. None of that is really changing, and the reveal of Sapher missing will still be how the story ends. But if I ever want to send it to a publisher in hopes of having them pay for me to have a physical book – I have long accepted that writing will be a hobby, not a job since I like my current job anyway – it needs to be better than what I’ve posted here.
That is especially true for the second volume. In volume 2, Cobal, Mana, Mirgia and Kimi travel from the capital of Saphestan to the city of knowledge; Marsolin. They visit an island full of cultists, encounter an Irkan man and some bandits and deal with a pirate lady who is probably my favorite character. I love powerful women who end up being big softies in fiction. Don’t look too deeply into what that says about me. There are several big changes I have for this volume although just as with volume 1 – the end point will remain the same. First, Eliana will be more involved with the church of Owlana. I think it fits her character to be kind of a rogueish servant of the goddess of knowledge, especially after her history of sailing a bunch of archeologists to one of the islands. I will also expand upon said islands, turning the place into more of an archipelago than it is. I have plans. Finally, the road they took from Jasodar to Marsolin – if I may say so myself – is incredibly boring. There’s much more I could do with it, and I will. They will now take the much less traveled northern road to avoid the chaos in the southern half of the Rilodar Kingdom, and because of this come across many more problems. The bandits and their link to the cultists will be expanded on and hopefully I can make it all come together.
Finally, I’ve been working on worldbuilding for the aforementioned Necromancer’s Daughter. For The Hesitant Hero I started writing the story with only a few things actually prepared:
- A hero with anxiety that is possibly on the autism spectrum
- A royal family with blue names
- A mostly unexplored continent with civilization on the edges of the continent
- The truth about what happened to Might
- An underwater city
To tell you the truth, in the very first concepts of this story, there was going to be a Cthulhu-esque monster and the main character would not be summoned by the kingdom but by the gods themselves, and spend time in a forest cabin learning about the world. I figured that would be a boring way to start, so I ended up changing it, but I still want to write a more chilled out Isekai story at some point. Not that I think I’d do a great job at it, but it’s just a genre I love so dearly. An overworked character suddenly wakes up in a forest cabin and gets to just live out their best life? That’s what real power fantasies should be like. Screw being a hero or becoming the king of the pirates, I want to be Ted Ka…. okay maybe not him.
Contrary to The Hesitant Hero, I wanted to have a really fleshed out world for The Necromancer’s Daughter before I dove back into that realm. So far I’ve decided a rough outline for the five continents and their core principles – one is icy, one is hot, one is filled with natural magic, one is more down to the earth and the final one has completely fallen in a massive doomsday event that wiped its population, sending a few survivors to join the other continents. I’ve also developed my pantheon and created a holy site for each god, which I’ve called the Azak Varadh. These Azak Varadh are holy sites where the center of each religion is located. But this post is already getting to be quite lengthy, I will save you from nerding out too much about my own worldbuilding here and instead I’ll just bother you about it again with a completely new post. The Hesitant Hero should return next week if everything goes according to my plans, and outside of this extra break, I hope to only take a break every five chapters as I initially planned. I also plan to write more content for volume 4 before this year ends, so look forward to that. I have notes for about three epilogue scenes, some of which might even take more than one chapter. Thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 