Wolf

In setting down to rewrite a novel I wrote fifteen years ago, I decided to reread the opening. It’s a novel that begins quite aggressively but also in a way that I always appreciated. However, it had been over a decade since I’d last looked at this novel.

Part of me assumed nothing would be salvageable, given how drastically this reimagining was. But in reading this opening, new ideas came to me.

You see, the original novel was split between three characters perspectives. In reconceptualizing this novel into a trilogy, I decided I’d stick to the core protagonist and turn this from an experimental anti-epic fantasy into a more traditionally structured heroic fantasy.

But the trilogy structure also gave me a bit of freedom. Since prologues are such a standard in the genre, I thought this perspective could be used as the prologue to this first novel, and possibly the following two.

And so I decided to entirely salvage this first section of the novel. Of course, getting into what all this means will require me to go into the worldbuilding of this novel. This is probably a useful and necessary thing to do, since it’s not the only novel set here.

So next time I’ll do a bit of explanation of the world, otherwise I’ll just be speaking in generalities, which sort of defeats the purpose of this writer’s diary.

But after salvaging this original opening as a prologue, I came to a very important decision that took me literally an entire day to sort out.

Should this simply be first person, or should I use a frame narrative?

This may require some background as well.

After leaving the literary world behind, I wrote another novel set in the same world as Twilight of the Wolves. More on this when I discuss the worldbuilding next time. But that novel actually came about in a flash of insight, much like this rewrite. Anyway, that novel was, in some ways, a reaction to novels like The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.

Well, it was a reaction to everything I didn’t like about fantasy.

But I used a frame narrative for that novel. And that led me to a frame narrative for Twilight of the Wolves. A bit of symmetry.

But so by beginning with a frame, I needed to find the way into this novel. Which, of course, involved finding our narrator in a crashed dirigible.

I’ll try to update this pretty frequently until I catch up to where I am in the novel right now. I thought maybe I’d just cover the first 60k words in a single post, but that’s kind of insane, yeah? So I’ll get us caught up and then we’ll probably see less frequent posts as I forge ahead.