Purchas continues.
Jan. 9th, 2006 04:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloThe novel- Purchas- has been running a week.
I started off with a single idea. I wanted to explore the life of an Immortal. I decided that my hero(ine) would be a child who swallows the elixir of life by accident.
And that's all I knew when I started to write.
I set myself the task of posting it in daily installments on LJ. The first week's worth are on display now at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
purchas. I'm afraid the format dictates that one has to read from the bottom up. Sorry about that. It's rather jerky, but there you go....
The novel is part fantasy, part history. The year is 1482 and all the details are, so far as I can make them (thank you, thank you, Google!) historically accurate.
I know what happens next. Just about. At present I have two or three installments in hand. What happens further on is very, very cloudy. But I trust my characters. They will tell me how their story is meant to go. I have the feeling that the entire saga already exists, in some form, somewhere, and that it's being unveiled to me bit by bit.
I don't know how long I'll keep it up. I envisage the present novel running for 60,000+ words and after that there'll still be 500 years to go. But whether I write the sequels is hardly up to me. If Purchas wants to tell me about her post-medieval adventures she will, and if she doesn't she won't. But I've let her know that I'm very, very eager to learn about her meetings with Cagliostro and the Count de St Germain in Paris in the 1770s...
I started off with a single idea. I wanted to explore the life of an Immortal. I decided that my hero(ine) would be a child who swallows the elixir of life by accident.
And that's all I knew when I started to write.
I set myself the task of posting it in daily installments on LJ. The first week's worth are on display now at
purchas. I'm afraid the format dictates that one has to read from the bottom up. Sorry about that. It's rather jerky, but there you go.... The novel is part fantasy, part history. The year is 1482 and all the details are, so far as I can make them (thank you, thank you, Google!) historically accurate.
I know what happens next. Just about. At present I have two or three installments in hand. What happens further on is very, very cloudy. But I trust my characters. They will tell me how their story is meant to go. I have the feeling that the entire saga already exists, in some form, somewhere, and that it's being unveiled to me bit by bit.
I don't know how long I'll keep it up. I envisage the present novel running for 60,000+ words and after that there'll still be 500 years to go. But whether I write the sequels is hardly up to me. If Purchas wants to tell me about her post-medieval adventures she will, and if she doesn't she won't. But I've let her know that I'm very, very eager to learn about her meetings with Cagliostro and the Count de St Germain in Paris in the 1770s...
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-09 08:22 pm (UTC)Something about the encounter with the Mother Superior (am I remembering correctly?) suggested Purchas was a girl, while still leaving me in doubt!
Were you really being subtle, or was I too distracted to pick up properly on what was an obvious clue?
I love it when my characters start telling me their own story. That's when I know I'm onto something.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-10 02:31 am (UTC)But then it struck me that the only way I could sustain this was by being coyly evasive, so I changed tack.
The encounter with Mother Superior was the decisive moment. I realised that Purchas couldn't be taking baths, with people in attendance, and still keep her secret.
I haven't been working to a plan. I started with next to nothing and just forged ahead. But that's the way I've always written fiction...