Tag Archives: title: the wizard of suomen

Progress!

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I was getting close and wanted to break 45,000 words for The Wizard of Suomen tonight. I actually made it to just over 46,000 words. It feels really good to be making such progress on this draft! 😀

Using a blog as motivation for working on this story more consistently has been an interesting process. It’s clearly helping, even though I’ve only been doing it for a short while. My life is somewhat uncertain and unsettled in a lot of ways right now (some good, some not so good), and in the past I’ve found it difficult to work on my fiction in those circumstances. It feels very good to be able to work on this story consistently despite that uncertainty, though, so I’m glad that this seems to be working as a motivational tool. Concrete goals and progress are definitely helpful.

~Ethelinda

Backstory

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I have for some time been writing a more extensive backstory for one of the characters in The Wizard of Suomen, partly because I like the character and partly because it helps to flesh out some things about several characters and the world itself that I’m not sure will fit well into the main story. Snippets of this backstory will be in the main story at a certain point as flashbacks, but there will definitely be a lot more than that, and I am planning on posting the whole thing at some point after the main story is finished. Working on part of it tonight, I wrote almost 2000 words in just an hour, none of which will show up in the main story at all, so it seems that my muses are definitely interested. 🙂 (I’m using this backstory as a way to make sure I have a really good grasp of the character in question, since in the main story I’m working on a section where this character’s motivations and actions are central, and I want to be sure they fit and make sense. Hence, I’m writing some things that won’t be posted until I put up this backstory as a whole after the main story.)

This is definitely another balancing area for a writer (something I have noticed as a reader of fiction), the issue of what to include to make a new world intelligible and interesting for readers, without overwhelming them with facts that they won’t remember and don’t need to care about. I hope I’m striking that balance so far, introducing new information as it’s needed, but not so much at a time that it’s overwhelming or hard to remember. This is another reason that I wanted to have a website, actually; in addition to posting and getting feedback on the story itself, this website will give me a place to eventually post this backstory, plus other notes and background information that I have made as I do world-building, but that might not fit neatly into the story itself. Hopefully some readers will enjoy those things as well!

~Ethelinda

Progress!

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Wrote another 1100 or so words of The Wizard of Suomen today. It always feels really good to make progress on a story, even if it’s not a huge amount. 😀

I’ll put up chapter 2 on Friday, and hopefully will update this one weekly. I might start posting a couple of other things as well, though updates on those are likely to be much more sporadic, at least for the time being.

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!