The second draft of The Wizard of Suomen is coming along!
I’ll give a fuller update after the epilogue gets posted, but I realized that I’ve been kind of quiet lately outside of actual story posts. I did some more background world-building and got those things straightened out in my head and written down, and since then I’ve been working pretty steadily on actual second-draft edits to the story. I’m most of the way through Part 1.
~Ethelinda
Sometimes, I write something in TWoS, and then a few weeks later my brain goes, “Hey, remember that thing you wrote back in scene X? That works really perfectly with Y that needs to happen now.”
And I go, “Hot damn” and dance around a little bit in excitement.
Yay for (un)intended(?) connections!
~Ethelinda
I just broke 100,000 words on The Wizard of Suomen.
Still a ways to go yet, but that’s a nice milestone to have reached! 😀
~Ethelinda
I just finished up what will be part two of TWoS.
Just over 94,500 words for the whole story thus far.
Part three might end up being a bit shorter than the other two, though I’m not quite sure yet. Part two still needs some work as I go along and post it, but it’s a solid draft.
It feels really, really good to be making so much progress on this. I’m excited about this story, and how good it will (hopefully!) be once I’m all done.
~Ethelinda
So, it seems that I’ve gained quite a few followers over the last few weeks and months! Welcome! I don’t know how many of you are following my writing or not, but thanks for the interest. 🙂
For anyone who is interested in following my current story, The Wizard of Suomen, you can find links to all the chapters on the “Land of Winds: The Wizard of Suomen” page. The chapters are each linked to the previous and following chapters within each post as well.
Here’s a summary of the story:
The Wizard of Suomen follows Ilari Virtanen, a powerful magic-user in a land prejudiced against magic, as he attempts to defend his country from the aggression of a neighboring country with many strong magic-users. Throughout a long, cold Suomilen winter, faced with new and terrible magic from enemies getting ever closer to home, Ilari struggles to protect his land with few allies and opposition seemingly on all sides. With Suomen’s King making what seem to be an increasingly unwise series of decisions about the war, the soldiers, statesmen and courtiers around Ilari must make their own choices about where the real danger to Suomen lies. Can the Wizard of Suomen overcome misunderstanding, prejudice and treachery in time to save not only himself, but everything that he cares about?
Come find out which way the Winds will blow….
~Ethelinda
Since I sat down to write last Saturday evening, I have written almost 15,000 words of The Wizard of Suomen; the total word count is now over 70,000. It’s unlikely I’ll have this good a week again for awhile, but it feels wonderful to have made such solid progress.
I’ve got the whole rest of the second part of the story well laid-out in my head now, so I should be able to write that pretty steadily, even if I don’t manage to be quite this prolific! Overall, the story breaks up into roughly three parts, at least in my head. (Chapter 14, as I post it here, will finish out what I think of as part one, in case anyone is wondering.)
Also, this week’s progress means I’ve got a much better “lead” between where I’m posting and where I’m writing, so the chance that I’ll have to switch to posting chapters every other week is greatly lessened.
I hope everyone who’s reading this is enjoying it, and excited about what’s coming up! I definitely am. 🙂
~Ethelinda
This story, The Wizard of Suomen, is going to be my main project for the time being, though I’ll be posting some other things as well. This is definitely a work-in-progress, though I have a good chunk of the beginning done, and my plan is to be writing more steadily so that I can keep posting steadily. I have a few notes that I wanted to put up ahead of time, though, and I’ll probably post the first chapter tomorrow.
Firstly, I just want to note that I am borrowing heavily from Finnish for certain aspects of this story, but I do not speak that language myself. Please feel free to point errors out to me! However, as this is a fantasy story, then there is a chance that it is a deliberate change on my part (this applies mostly to character names, which I have borrowed and changed liberally from a variety of Scandinavian and Eastern European backgrounds). If it is something I’ve deliberately changed, then I may not “fix” it to be more accurate to the real world, since that is not always my goal. 🙂
Secondly, the main Finnish words that I use with regularity are some military titles, listed here with translations:
soldat – common foot soldier, equivalent of a private (this one is actually Swedish, all others are Finnish.)
kersantti – sergeant
luutnantti – lieutenant
kapteeni – captain
majuri – major
eversti – colonel
kenraali – general
tuundae – a variation I made up from the Finnish tündér, which means fairy
There may be a few other things as the story goes on, which I’ll note in those chapters, and/or here.
Thirdly, you will see that I have this tagged as being part of a series. It is my intention to (hopefully) write this novel so that it will stand alone, but there is an idea for a second story that could follow it, so it might possibly (probably) someday have a sequel.
Acknowledgments
Last but certainly not least, I would like to acknowledge Lydia, for inspiring me with the idea for the very earliest version of this story (though it has now changed quite significantly since then), and Cat, for supporting me through writing and then helping to edit that earliest version. Thank you both very much!
ethelinda writes 