Wolf

Everyone is sick at my house and I’m reading about currencies. This isn’t super relevant to this first narrative arc but will be important to the second one. Hilariously. I’ll end up doing all this research and it will probably only find its way into twenty lines of dialogue.

Though part of the underlying narrative to this series is economic colonialization. The original novel was more about explicit imperialism and colonialism, but I’ve decided to do something a bit more interesting. Or at least interesting to me. Because you may ask yourself: is military rule or conquering land even necessary if you can get other countries to use and rely upon your currency?

And so this invasion is a slow, more insidious, nearly invisible form of colonialism. At the start of the series, there will be a handful of different currencies, mostly locked nationally. Each nation uses their own currency, which is fairly normal, but there are also edge areas where the actual on the ground currency is a bit looser and more flexible. But by the end of the series, there will be one or two currencies, and they won’t be the native currencies we began with.

Of course, that’s more of a background narrative element. Along with that, we’re beginning the world in a pre-industrial place. But by the end, there will be trains and machines and smog in the air.

These moments of transition fascinate me.

Anyway, this crystalized in my head just the other day, and so now I’m planting the necessary seeds, reading about currency and trade, while also keeping an eye on the characters and relationships that actually need to drive the story. Because while big ideas about colonialization may get a reader to open the book, they won’t stick with it if the page by page narrative and character work isn’t there.

And so this puzzle construction of a novel keeps weaving more and more threads together. A grand web of an adventure! So you present these different and seemingly disparate narratives and then you slowly pull them all together until it crashes over the reader all at once.

That’s the idea, anyway.