100 Scenes

By Holly Lisle

So. I broke out my themes into elements, and when I started looking at the elements, I realized if I started playing them off against each other, I had this amazing list of conflicts. AMAZING.

If you list all the good points about something like immortality, and then you list all the bad points, and do the same for mortality, and then do the same for humanity as a whole, and then you start bouncing good against bad, and good (for immortals) versus good (for mortals), and so on, you realize that you have way, way more than a hundred scenes you could write, and every one of them has a taut, important conflict built into it.

So then you start picking and choosing conflicts, visualizing your characters, getting a feel for backstory, for who’s going to come down on the side of what.

It gets beautifully juicy fast.

(Better clarify—I don’t have all one hundred scenes yet. I do have 8100 potential conflicts from which to pick the best 100, and about 20 already picked.)

Got names today, too. My two leads have been nothing but Him and Her for ages… but now they have names. Probably the ones they’ll keep.

Her–Aleksa Kralj — ethnic Serbian, raised Orthodox Christian, from Kosovo. Adopted into an American family when her own was wiped out in a religious purge.

Him– “Ki” Kideronarasu Fox — Minoan. Or at this point, I guess, American with edges. He’s been around a good long while. I got the Minoan from the syllabylary for Linear A, and … ah … winged it. Ki is the nickname, Kideronarasu is his actual name, and if it’s something hideously profane in Minoan, nobody’s gonna know it but him, because we’ve lost Minoan as a language. Ah, elbow room. 😀 And Fox is the Anglicization of a last name that started out as a family crest and that he’s been dragging through place and time since around 2500 BC.

And on another note, I finally did a header for the website. And the blog. And the shop. And they all match. 😀

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