PoB - Rebuilding the Gift
As is incredibly original and witty to say while updating a blog again after a long hiatus, “the report of my death was an exaggeration”.
My PhD defense will take place in early February, in the meanwhile I’m still working at the uni in an effort to wrap all of my activity up so we can actually get some papers published. Also, I’ll officially be unemployed from March on, so in case anybody needs a creative mad scientist who can cook muffins please let me know.
In what little spare time I have, I’m working on PoB revision phase 2. It’s pretty hard to assess progress in this phase, since as shown in my earlier revision masterplan, it consists in replotting/rebuilding/recasting the beast.
I’m currently rebuilding and tweaking the basics about the Gift and how it impacts people, society and the landscape. On Jan 17th I worked on how the Gift is born, and on Jan 18th on how it works and interacts with the so-called world of crimson (the paranormal dimension that bleeds occasionally into the world of PoB). Next, I’ll have to address:
- how the Gift works on its own, independently from world of crimson phenomena;
- what the whole deal between the Gift and metaphorical or literal blood is;
- how scars work and how they come into play with the titular path of blood;
- how the Gift impacts society in terms of defense systems, emergency procedures, laws and so on.
To clarify, it’s not like I didn’t know any of this before writing the novel. I’ve had the bare bones on how the Gift works, why it’s important and its impact on society clear in mind before starting. Other aspects of it and the details though were winged up on the go as I needed them. Which created a really focused story and made for a fun first-draft ride rich of surprises, but of course, looking at it now, it calls for a serious tidying up for it to make sense.
Of course, I won’t have Faurel or anyone else actually stop the story to lecture poor Erthel about the inner workings of the Gift because I’ve built all of this cool stuff and I want to show it off. I’ve learnt to love implied worldbuilding, and this is one of the first things that tells me “look out, this is good stuff” when reading something new. Most of the things I’m building will only show up in the novel as subtle changes, with the exception of those directly impacting the end which I already know will require more work. But what’s important is that I have to know the details about how all of this works, so that implied worldbuilding does not end up being just confusing.
