Krullus - A Short (?) Story

Firstly, there were no blog updates last week, but you probably noticed that - I could pretend that it was due to a lot of things - I was busy at work, I was writing, I was changing my ISP, my netbook crashed - but the real reason is that I went away for a few days to visit with family, and my netbook was left sitting at the end of the bed, all ready to go into the bag that it never went into.

With that out of the way, on with the topic at hand!

I started writing a short story the other day about one of the characters that is mentioned, albeit briefly, in Eria - Krullus. The only thing that anyone who has read Eria knows about Krullus is from the one line in the novel:

'Surely you recognize the Sword of Kings,' Bædyr said. 'The weapon wielded by my father, Zandor, and his father before him, bestowed by the ancient Kings of Eria, handed down to the first King, Krullus, by Pael himself!"

 It's not a lot to go on.

I know who Krullus is, and I thought I might write something so that everyone else could find out a bit more about him. So, I started writing a short story. And, as happens, Real Life reared its ugly head, and I had to put it on the shelf for a few days. At which point my subconscious decided that the story really needed another character added to it. I thought about it, and it made sense, so I thought about the implications of the re-write and what it'd do to the story, and it seemed okay, so I did what I normally do, and slept on it. The next day my subconscious decided that, instead of the one additional character, it really needed two. I thought about it some more, and realized that this was actually an even better idea. We'll see how it pans out, I suppose.

I love the way my subconscious does that - contributes to the writing process while I'm asleep. It keeps things fresh and flowing for me, even if it does result in several re-writes along the way.

So, the plan is for a short story, at the moment. I put it that way, because these things have a way of escalating - like going for "one beer" after work on a Friday sometimes results in you sneaking in at 6am on Saturday morning.

As to what to do with the short story, I'll throw it out onto Amazon for 99 cents, and see what happens. But I'll talk about that more on Friday!

Back Material

When I was writing Eria, I created a lot of back material for it. For the most part, this comes through as a name here and there, with nothing else mentioned about it, because, quite frankly, there was no need to mention anything else. It wasn't crucial to the story, and, at best, would serve as a distraction, a sidebar, or just something that the reader wouldn't be at all interested in at the time.

It's all there, though. If someone were to ask me "is XYZ 'real', or is it just something you threw in because it sounded cool?" I could say, "yes, it is 'real', and here's some more information...".

Of course 'real' here is a relative term. Like the difference between a real car and a toy car. Both are real, but there is a distinction to me made. You can't drive to the shops and put your groceries in a toy car, but it is real in the sense that it exists.

Likewise, the back material I use is real in the sense that it is written down somewhere for me to reference, change, and otherwise use, but, obviously, not real in the sense that we can go there, meet the people, and so forth, well, any more than we can with fictional material.

I didn't need to create the back material. I could have just 'winged it'. Nobody would really have noticed, known, or probably even cared if they did. I used to do it all the time when I was GMing RPGs, and at the end of the day people still had fun.

So, why didn't I?

The reasons are quite simple.

Firstly, I wanted to write back material. It was fun to do, and I wanted to know more about the characters, locations, and events that I mentioned, even just in passing.

Secondly, it gave me a sense of consistency. If I wanted to check on something, or mention it again, the material was already there, and close at hand.

Lastly, and most importantly, if I wanted to explore the world further, write more about it, and so forth, the material was there.

And, now that I do want to revisit the world of Eria, I'm glad that it is!