Tag Archives: series: land of winds

Progress – The Witch

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All right, I have officially sent a completed draft of Luule Ehari’s backstory, The Witch, off to my first beta readers! It’s a short story (just shy of 8,000 words), so I’m hoping that the editing process won’t take too long. There may be a bit of a delay in getting cover art together, but with luck I’ll have it out in the next few months!

If you have not met Luule and discovered how awesome she is yet, check out The Wizard of Suomen. 😉 I’m glad she decided to give me more of her story! I’ll put up a snippet once I get it back from my betas.

Next on the list is to finish up Alexei’s backstory!

~Ethelinda

FREE: The Wizard of Suomen

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The Wizard of Suomen is free on Amazon for the next 5 days, from March 31-April 4. Give it a try risk-free!

When Elof Kálmári arrives at the border in southeastern Suomen, he hopes that rumor has exaggerated the trouble he is walking into. He has heard that this conflict with their neighboring country is serious, and that his new commanding officer is a magic-user. To his dismay, both rumors are true. Elof struggles to deal with the unfamiliar, destructive magic wielded by their enemies and his own leader, General Virtanen. Then disaster strikes: the enemy gains access to the very heart of Suomen, Suomen’s King makes a series of increasingly unwise decisions, and uncertainty and mistrust divide their allies. General Virtanen, Elof, and his comrades must put everything on the line to keep the King alive and give their people a fighting chance against a powerful enemy. Come find out which way the Winds will blow…

Book Release: The Wizard of Suomen

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Book Release: The Wizard of Suomen

I am delighted to announce that The Wizard of Suomen is now available on Amazon! If you like a good sword & sorcery fantasy, this one is for you. If you enjoy it (which I hope you will!) please consider leaving a review and sharing it with your friends!

When Elof Kálmári arrives at the border in southeastern Suomen, he hopes that rumor has exaggerated the trouble he is walking into. He has heard that this conflict with their neighboring country is serious, and that his new commanding officer is a magic-user. To his dismay, both rumors are true. Elof struggles to deal with the unfamiliar, destructive magic wielded by their enemies and his own leader, General Virtanen. Then disaster strikes: the enemy gains access to the very heart of Suomen, Suomen’s King makes a series of increasingly unwise decisions, and uncertainty and mistrust divide their allies. General Virtanen, Elof, and his comrades must put everything on the line to keep the King alive and give their people a fighting chance against a powerful enemy. Come find out which way the Winds will blow…

Draft 4 done!

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Drafts three and four of The Wizard of Suomen are finished!

Draft three was a line-edit on paper, because it’s easier for me to catch some mistakes that way. I got that done and the edits transferred back to my electronic copy at 12:31AM on February 7, 2016, with the story at 157,594 words, 329 pages in Word.

I finished the fourth draft two nights ago, at 11:00PM on July 26, 2016. As of now, the story stands at 157,228 words, 328 pages in Word.

And, as of Wednesday, I have sent it to my editor! I will be working with Gina Hilse of Facets Fiction Editing. I won’t be doing any further work on it until I get her feedback. Undoubtedly there is still a lot of room for improvement, but I’m looking forward to putting the best possible version of this story out there as a finished product!

In the meantime, I’m going to do some planning on bigger projects, and hopefully get some other short things written (though given my current pace, I make no specific promises. >.>)

~Ethelinda

TWoS Progress Update

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I just finished the second draft of The Wizard of Suomen! 😀 😀 😀

I’m going to do a line-edit on paper before sending it to my editor, and then there will definitely be more edits to make, but at least I will feel like I’m sending a decent draft!

…

I’m really excited! 😀

~Ethelinda

Second draft progress

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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

Getting there

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I broke 120,000 words last week.

The end is in sight now, both story-wise, and in the sense that I can actually see what remains of my outline all at once on a single page. This is slightly terrifying (the ever-present worry that it won’t be good/interesting/dramatic enough), and also very motivating, because I’m definitely going to finish this. There will be a lot of work to do then, since this is just a first draft, but that thought usually helps me get past the worries; it doesn’t have to be perfect now, and in fact it can’t be. But it can get better, once I have a full first draft and can go back with a full story to edit and revise.

Mostly, I’m just glad that I’ve been able to make so much progress in just a few months. I’ve found this post from Patricia Wrede to be helpful in my thinking on that regard. She comments:

“Writing takes time. Also some thought and effort, but mainly the whole “butt in chair, fingers on keyboard” thing. Regardless of whether you are an intuitive writer or an analytical one, a plodder or a sprinter, actual words-on-paper/pixels has to happen, and that takes time.”

I really love that “butt in chair, fingers on keyboard” quote, because that’s what I’ve managed to do this year, and that is what has gotten me where I am now. It’ll take a lot more of that, and some “butt in chair, pen on paper” time too, before I’ll consider The Wizard of Suomen an actual finished, polished novel, but having gotten this far makes me confident that I can go the rest of the way. That whole post from Ms. Wrede is inspiring on this point actually, because I’m not just sitting back and waiting for a perfect, “blockbuster” novel to magically appear in my head. Putting in the time and effort takes that time and effort…but it also leaves you much more certain that you are going to get where you want/need to go with something.

I think I can now tentatively estimate that the first draft will be 140K-150K words. Tentatively. Where it will sit after the major edits that need to happen, I have no idea.

Thanks again to everyone who is reading and liking or commenting! It’s my goal to have an even better story for you by the time I get around to a final version, so stay tuned! 🙂

~Ethelinda

New followers!

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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

Story Intro – Land of Winds: The Wizard of Suomen

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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!