Hi Guys,
Hope you all had
a great Christmas and are enjoying the new year. Here in Rotorua it's been
strange – weather wise at least. We had days and days of rain, intermixed with
thunderstorms and endless grey skies which kept me locked inside a lot. But
just at the moment we seem to have been hit with a heatwave and I can't even
step outside without burning my feet off. So go figure!
Anyway all this
enforced home detention has been good for my writing, and a new book is now
about eighty percent complete. At this stage it has the working title of
“Fineas and Tusk – the Epic Journey of a Man and his Pig.” The scary thing is
that that may in fact remain the title – I haven't decided.
It's a slightly
different twist on my usual epic fantasy of a hero – or more often a reluctant
fool – setting out to save the world or at least some of it. In this story it
begins with our hero actually plummeting from an airship a league above the
ground, to land in a savage, magical land and then wanting to do nothing more than
make his way home to his pregnant wife, a thousand leagues away. And once on
the ground he encounters Tusk – a two hundred pound wild boar – who travels
with him. While Tusk might or might not be a familiar – I've called him a
companion which is simply an animal that those with magic are sometimes
accompanied by – he doesn't talk, or cast spells or do anything other than what
wild boars normally do. If he has a magical gift, it's eating and embarrassing
Fineas as he journeys east.
My main struggle
in writing Fineas and Tusk, has been in shaping the nature of Fineas. As many
of you will know, I normally spend a lot of time trying to get into the head
space of my main characters, and Fineas has been particularly difficult for me
in this regard. He's so close to the traditional good guy in many ways, but his
world view and beliefs are so different that often when he does things that
seem to be what a good guy should do – he does them for completely different
reasons. So if he steps into a battle where a woman is being attacked it's not
because of a sense of justice or fear for her safety – it's because of his
inbred need to act honourably. It would be shameful to let a woman be harmed.
He will walk into a war even when he's quaking with fear and show not a sign of
his terror, simply because he is a Lord and he can never fail in his duty or
show such emotions. And when things go wrong as they inevitably do, the true
destruction of his life isn't brought about by typical things like bankruptcy
or criminality. It is again the code of honour which lays him low as he is
shamed by the actions of others even when he has acted with nothing but
propriety.
As I say he is
close to being the generic good guy / hero, but when you cut to the heart of
what makes him tick, he's almost completely alien. Tusk on the other hand is
much simpler – it's always about the food!
Anyway, that's
been my January. And as I sit here writing and bathing in my own sweat, I hope
to have Fineas and Tusk and their epic journey off to the editor in February.
After that I suppose, I'll have to start searching out cover art – and
strangely there's a large dearth of covers out there depicting Lords walking
with wild boars through medieval worlds!
Cheers, Greg.
