What are you writing about now?

Server Room Gremlin said:

I checked the Silmarillion before answering, and what I said above is what I read (in Chapters 11 and 13). If they were still on the Ice as the Moon rose, they must have been very close to Middle-earth's coast anyway.
"even as the Moon rose above the darkness in the West, Fingolfin let blow his silver trumpets and began his march into Middle-earth"

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Just a bit of an aside, but I wonder if 'Fingolfin's silver trumpets' (plural) of this passage ... if one of them was the 'silver horn' referred to in the 'Passing of the Grey Company' chapter in Lord of the Rings?

To stay on-topic of the thread, I'm diligently working on my 4th age fanfic with what seems every moment I have free.

Vardarianna said:

Just a bit of an aside, but I wonder if 'Fingolfin's silver trumpets' (plural) of this passage ... if one of them was the 'silver horn' referred to in the 'Passing of the Grey Company' chapter in Lord of the Rings?

To stay on-topic of the thread, I'm diligently working on my 4th age fanfic with what seems every moment I have free.

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THAT is a fun idea. I'm sure it wasn't intended to be, but it's possible. A gift to a trusted human retainer, which was passed down and treasured.

Made some progress yesterday and today. I've written (very!) high-level summaries of what each new chapter in Volume I needs to achieve, along with some ideas as to how to do that. I've started to track key magic items, when they appear or are significant to the story, and what the reader is to learn about them when they so appear. Not a lot of that in the new material, but I'll add to it as I go.

I'm just now starting to track "Hooks", as defined by "A question I put in the reader's mind that (hopefully) they will want an answer to." Some questions will be answered later in the same scene, others the same or next chapter, others in a later book, others at the end of the book or series, and others will be left unanswered.

I'm listing each question and linking it to the chapter/scene it first appears in. Then I'm adding links to track what I reveal or obscure about that question's answer.

I'm doing this for several reasons.

1) Hooks are good things to have. I'm more likely to have more hooks, and better hooks, if I really think about them in detail.

2) No point in trusting my memory, which leaks like a sieve nowadays, to remember all the hooks I think up and when to reveal/answer them. So I'm planning it.

3) If I go to the trouble to put a question in the reader's mind, I don't want to forget to answer it. I want to be fully intentional if I do not answer a question.

4) I hope this will be more productive when it comes to the actual writing. The more snippets of ideas I have in front of me when it comes to write a chapter or scene, the more entry points there are to stimulate my imagination and get me started.

All this is very unnatural to me. I'm more of a make it up as I go sort of writer. I'm experimenting to see if my first draft is significantly better this way.

-What are you writing about?

I Don't even know at this point. 🥲

Tyelkormo the Fair said:

-What are you writing about?

I Don't even know at this point. 🥲

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I've been there many times, and expect to re-visit the place on a frequent basis!

Got my outline with the extra info prepared and merged it into my MS Word file ('cause I prefer writing in it to Final Draft which I used to create the beat board and outline).

I'm very glad I did this process. I believe my story will be much better for this planning. I expect I'll get better at the planning with more practice.
I'm will NEVER attempt to plan EVERYTHING in the book ahead of time, I believe my subconscious mind can't be that easily controlled or interrogated. But that doesn't mean I can't prep it with a better thought out starting point!

This process let me see a number of ways I can tighten up the story and tie more parts of it together over space and time. Woot!


As a different point, one of my writing mentors made the observation that many fiction readers aren't all that good at reading attentively. (Mystery lovers being the possible exception...)

So, if something is important, it may be wise to find ways to bring it up periodically until it is resolved. Seemed like good advice and I wanted to make good use of it.

Now, the structure of my first two books are different from the norm. They are history/biographies compiled and organized by an historian, then another historian came along later and added more source documents and re-organized the material, and now I'm "translating" this document for a modern reader. Each chapter may be told by a different person, who might be telling it with firsthand, 2nd hand, or even 3rd hand knowledge of the events. There are gaps in the story because the historians couldn't find what happened during that timespan.

Now, that could easily get an attentive reader confused, and an inattentive reader would get befuddled mighty quick if I don't help them out. So, everytime a chapter starts, I orient the reader with (1) "when and where is this story taking place?", and (2) "who is telling it?" I always put this information in a unique and standard format. Hopefully that will suffice!

In this case, volume 1 is starting off being told by a guy who wrote an account of the events along with a note about the story to someone very dear to them. We are told by the historians that the account was found on the body of a warrior in Moria in the very early 4th age, and that the dwarves there returned those remains with full honours to Lorien. The historian tells us where to find the full account of the warrior's return (which isn't made available to the reader until volume 4). Hopefully, this puts several hooks into the reader.

• Who was this warrior?
• What did they do to earn such respect from the dwarves?
• When did they do it?
• Did the warrior write the story and note, or were they just a messenger?
• Who in Lorien received the body and what did they do then?

They'll start getting clues over half way through Vol I, but they won't get a full confirmation for their guess until Volume IV. That's a long time to wait! I need to make it memorable!

I don't want to say "From the name of the warrior" as the speaker identification tag because that would give away the answer too quickly and easily. I want them to work for it a bit. I thought about several other phrases to use before I settled upon "From the Unknown Warrior". They'll see that speaker identification at the front of every chapter in the first half of the book, and for a few after that. It's a tiny reminder that they should pay attention for clues.

Or so I hope.

I sat down and made a good amount of progress on my Amandil story. I've almost reached the end of my "No" answers to "Is the preservation of your moral integrity more important than your life or the lives of your loved ones". Once those are finished, I can move to the "I don't know" answers, and we'll see how that goes.
After I finish those...I think I can start crafting characters...but again, I'll have to start working on that when I get to it. I'm working this all out by hand for now!

Found one more paragraph that needed minor modifications to make it fit the new backstory.

I mentioned before I'm trying to improve the thinking/planning process of my writing whilst still keeping the great points of seat-of-the-pants writing.
The first picture shows a set of scene headings with yellow backgrounds, Blue letters showing the ideas as explained in the outline, Orange backgrounds for hooks (defined as questions I want to put into the reader's heads that (hopefully) they will want answers to, and character traits I want to highlight in that section. I added a placeholder to show where I would start writing the actual text of the story.

I created styles for each of these items. That means I can change their visual appearance just by changing the style. I could set the style's font to very small and the background and letter colors to white, which means these outline elements would (mostly) disappear if I wanted to just read the book text and not see the outline, which would also be useful for sending out to a reader for their comments. (Now that I think about it, if I put the book text first and the outline second, the reader could tell me if the text they just read matched my intent. Hmmm...)


The next picture shows a custom MS Word table of contents. I have it set to show the Title, Headings 1-4, Scene Headings, Hooks, Magic Tracking, and Character Traits. (Ignore the word "Chapter" at the start of many chapters, that's just needed to quickly use some features of AutoCrit.com.)
It gives me the ability to see the structure of the story at a glance and hopefully will continue to prompt more good ideas, weed out bad ones, and successfully cover the various points I think I want covered. And of course, I can change the custom table of contents very quickly.

Comments or suggestions????

No suggestions, myself, but I'm intrigued by these story hooks. Definitely makes me want to read more and find out what happens to this character. Kind of reminds me of Túrin's story in terms of its tragedy and grimness.

WatcherWraith said:

No suggestions, myself, but I'm intrigued by these story hooks. Definitely makes me want to read more and find out what happens to this character. Kind of reminds me of Túrin's story in terms of its tragedy and grimness.

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That means the hooks will do their job if I write them well! Hooray!

Finished the first draft of a chapter today! I think it will be really good when I polish it up a bit!

I didn't have the ProWritingAid tool back when I finished (so I thought!) writing Volume IV, Lorien in the War of the Ring.

So, when I added a new story into the appendices that covers when, where, and why the bad guy's backstory ended up in good gal hands, I ran the ProWritingAid tool.

I made the mistake of running a report on the full book instead of just the new entry.

Well, golly, that was discouraging. Around 6,700 items pop up in the writing style check report in a book with 160,000 words. Now, not all of them will be genuine problems, but a veritable host of them will be.

So, I copied the new story over to a blank document and ran the same report. Less than 50 items out of 2,000 words. The book is 80 times bigger than the story, so 80 times 50 = 4,000 issues, not 6,700. That's a serious improvement in my writing quality over the last year! That's encouraging!

So, the good news is I **am** definitely getting more skilled at writing as I work on it, and the practice of cleaning up the issues en masses means my new writing will have even fewer problems to clean up. That makes me mighty happy!

Not a proper book illustration yet, just a concept sketch. I still need to work out the perspective issues in the drawing before I do a real book illustration.

This is a concept of Herulin, the Lord of Song, a harp fashioned like a dragon eating its tale.

That is a wonderful design! Fabulous :}

Looking for some advice. Remember the linnyd, the 2 line linnod poems I posted awhile back? For a photo, I'm thinking of placing them individually on small bits of paper and showing a pile of them as "evidence" of the original source material. I'll age the paper and ink so they won't look as pristine as in these sample photos. Remember, paper was handmade back in the day. It wasn't to be wasted, and my idea is that the author uses bits of unused paper that was left over from a used sheet to write her poems on. (Kind of like Tolkien using the backs of exam papers his students turned in to write his draft versions, as paper was rationed and expensive.)

So, which of these two paper shapes do you like best? (PS - ignore the actual writing, it's gibberish. The finished illustration will use properly translated and lettered poems. And, because I suspect some of the words in my poems may not exist in the Sindarin dictionaries, I'm planning to have those parts obscured by other poems.)

david_wendelken said:

So, which of these two paper shapes do you like best?

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Personally, I prefer the first one. Even if the poems are written on pieces of used paper, I would think the writer would try and keep them looking as neat as possible.

I suppose what I would think about is this: what happened to the paper to make it look the way it does? What damaged the edges? There would be more wear on a frequently handled page, but the paper would not be equally worn down all the way around the whole thing (as it is in the second image). I think the second image looks a bit too purposefully torn to me, instead of just worn out. I don't know if that's what you were going for, however.

How carefully were these old pieces of paper stored?

Old pages (such as those in medieval manuscripts) can remain in quite good condition, if they are treated and stored with care.

Thanks @Server Room Gremlin ! My plan was to have the writing be on thicker paper and use a deckled edge on three sides (that man-made paper would tend to have ) and have the 4th side where it was torn from a bigger sheet with a straight edge. So the paper won't look quite so gnarly, but neither would it look like I took it out of a modern printer.

Got some good news today. I listen to an old folk song sung by a group called Steeleye Span in 1970. It's called The Lowlands of Holland. Youtube link is
I used the words as inspiration for a song composed by our bardic heroine and changed those that needed changing to fit the story and circumstances.

The problem with putting song lyrics that are under copyright into your work is that those words belong to the copyright holder and they will want money for them. I just tracked back a version of the song to 1788 and the lyrics are pretty much identical (other than the spelling has changed over the centuries). That means those lyrics are no longer in copyright!


I've just gone thru the old lyrics and independently translated the portions I want into modern English. Woot! Copyright free!!!

Attached file shows the original lyrics from back in the day:

Below are my lyrics. I'm hoping to hire a skilled music composer to record a version with my words. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. If you use the Steeleye Span tune for inspiration you won't go wrong. My version of the song is my character saying "I'm mad as hell and protesting about this!" It's not a sad and mournful, pity-me kind of song, as some modern versions are rendered. (I have no idea what the original tune sounds like, if someone does, I would be very thankful for a sound file!)

By the way, the Irish word Sidhe is pronounced "Shee", not like the English word side.)

The Love That I Have Chosen

The Love that I have chosen
and therewith be content,
and the salt sea shall be frozen
before that I repent.

Repent it shall I never
until the day I die;
but through the fears of princes
my Love can’t marry me.



My Love wars in the shadows
while I sit with the Sidhe,
‘tis enough to break a young thing’s heart
wha’ was to be a bride.

Wha’ was to be a bonny bride
with pleasure in her een;
but through the fears of princes
my Love can’t marry me.



My Love, he built a bower fine,
all for our wedding night,
and though I’ve never seen it, yet;
Oh, how can that be right?

Lo, a thousand years are wasted
and more to come I fear;
and through the fears of princes
my Love can’t marry me.



My Love has built another life
of lonely warring strife
and braved uncounted dangers there
all for to make me wife.

But I fear that only mortal wounds
will satisfy their fears.
Oh Varda! Can’t they understand
my heart’s blood flows in tears?



And shall neither smile come on my face
nor comb come in my hair,
then shall neither star nor candlelight
shine in my bower there

And neither will I marry
until the day I’m free,
for I’ve never had a love but one,
and he can’t marry me.



Oh, hold your tongue, o maiden dear,
be still and be content.
There’s men enough in elf-land fair,
ye need not sore lament.

Oh, there’s men enough in elf-land fair,
alas, there’s none for me!
For I never had a Love but one,
and he can’t marry me.

A couple more mock-ups of the love poem sheets. I just used a photo of some handmade paper with flower and leaf inclusions, then put text on top of it and saved it as an image. Ignore the actual words, they are gibberish in a font, just to play around with how it might look if I make the pages for real. Ditto for the harp "signature", but I didn't bother to do a great job of making it have a transparent background, so the white shows thru between the harpstrings. If I do this, I'll fix that in the "real" illustrations.

One is a tengwar font, the other is a sarati eldamar font. Not sure of the story behind that one, but if there's no tolkien lore about it, it will be fun to have elvish transcripted into a far southern script that the humans in the area use. And since her husband is from that area, it makes sense to write him love poems in his native script. Just an idea that needs more research. If I use the sarati font, I'll need to include a transposition diagram like the elvish ones in the LOTR appendices.

Are any of these ideas neat enough to pursue, or just me being overly nerdy?

PS - I just had an idea. The harp signature could have subtle changes in it from one document to another. The dragon's mouth might be closed, partly open, or wide open, might or might not show a hint of fire, the number or distance between strings could vary, the final curve of the tail could be more or less curled, etc.
The idea is that it would be a code that signified whether the note was written under duress or a forgery, and key points in the message (perhaps 3rd letter in message and first in name of recipient) , the paper characteristcs, position of the harp and the features on it would vary to match. So if someone sent a forged message in her name, key recipients would know it's a forgery.