Welcome to the first edition of The Writer’s Room. Writing is difficult and takes a long time so it is almost impossible for me to write more than once every two weeks. Therefore I’ve created a behind-the-scenes edition which will be published a week after every story is released. This allows me to expand on what inspired me for this particular story and gives you a chance to have your own takeaways without my intent infringing on that.
This week’s edition focuses on last week’s story, A Court of Deception.
A Court of Deception, is the longest short-story I’ve ever written, so long in fact that it could fit the previous three stories inside of it. The next factor is a little closer to the root of the issue and that is that I've needed a bit of a break from publishing and this time of year seemed like the right time to take one. Apart from that, I’ve been building my writing schedule back up, in the hopes that I can publish again around two weeks apart. This should be easy as I managed to do that very thing while I was travelling.
This story started with an idea I had a long time ago and have tried several times to flesh out into something worthwhile. Books in almost every genres have had mentor characters whether they had a long white beard and pointy hat or knew how to fly a spacecraft. I’ve always wanted to tell the story of one of these characters from their view, where they were not the hero, but still had an important role to play. This is where Gardoor the Great came from.
The world was also inspired by the many fantasy stories I have read and watched and in some ways is almost a characature of them in general. In particular, I liked the vibe of The Witcher TV series and decided that the world for this story would benefit from a similar gritty feel.
Yet, despite all of this forethought, I couldn’t quite make the story work until I introduced a frame story that would add another level of trickery to the magician’s deceit, to make the internal story a lesson in itself for the grown up Noah. This, although difficult to get my head around really helped me get excited for this project.
While plotting this out, I began to notice that the story itself almost resembled my process in writing these stories and that the magician and I were not so different after all. That’s when I added the third and final layer to the story where the entire story, from start to finish, is an illusion created by the magician(me) because that’s what I do essentially.
Perhaps now you can understand why it took me so long to write this story.