Synopsis
Writ in Blood is a fantasy novel about a world where poetry is magic. When the power source of that magical Poetry—the Writ—is stolen, martial law takes over.
Nicomachus is a Poet (one who can control matter by the use of magical Poetry) who returns to his home of Coratha to attend his father’s funeral. Once there, he is sucked into the politics he despises while also learning that the Writ's theft is related to his father's unnatural death.
As Nicomachus tries to unearth the truth, his wife—whom he thought was dead—returns. She runs from him, leaving Nicomachus confused and frustrated. Soon, the country's slaves begin to revolt, chaos rules the streets, spies from other countries interfere, and Nicomachus has to somehow avert the pending disaster.
Fortunately for him, Nicomachus is not alone in his fight. New, unexpected allies arrive, though each comes with their own problems and deadly pasts haunting—and hunting—them. In Coratha, however, nothing happens without a purpose, and it soon becomes clear that more than just Corathan politics is at play and the alliance forged will rewrite the history of the country—a history wrought in violence and writ in blood.
Nicomachus is a Poet (one who can control matter by the use of magical Poetry) who returns to his home of Coratha to attend his father’s funeral. Once there, he is sucked into the politics he despises while also learning that the Writ's theft is related to his father's unnatural death.
As Nicomachus tries to unearth the truth, his wife—whom he thought was dead—returns. She runs from him, leaving Nicomachus confused and frustrated. Soon, the country's slaves begin to revolt, chaos rules the streets, spies from other countries interfere, and Nicomachus has to somehow avert the pending disaster.
Fortunately for him, Nicomachus is not alone in his fight. New, unexpected allies arrive, though each comes with their own problems and deadly pasts haunting—and hunting—them. In Coratha, however, nothing happens without a purpose, and it soon becomes clear that more than just Corathan politics is at play and the alliance forged will rewrite the history of the country—a history wrought in violence and writ in blood.
Background
I wrote a really horrible book. It's called Tales of the Flame and it's one of my greatest embarrassments of a story. However, from that experience I got the flavor of writing in slightly elevated language--and once I started, I really liked it.
See, I'm a Bardolator (a devotee of William Shakespeare, the Bard), and so I decided to bring some of my passion for his ornate way with words into a novel. The most natural way of incorporating my two loves of Shakespeare and fantasy was to build the magic system around poetry.
This ended up being a significantly bigger project than I had ever anticipated. I started when my second child was born, and now that he's five, I'm still not finished with it. I'm putting additional touches to it, trying to refine it, and shop it around. It has been a long, difficult slog to get to this point, and I still don't think I'm close to getting it published.
In a pique of narcissism, I actually documented my experience writing the first draft. It's part of the "Story Journal" tag on my blog. (Here.) I guess I was hoping that it would be instructive to someone as to how my writing process worked, as well as recording the height of my effort (and hubris).
So far as I know, about three people have read any of them. Oh well. It was a good exercise.
In terms of the plot structure, I was studying the Cold War when I started the book, and I wanted something that had the same tension as that time period. To facilitate that, I broke the main continent on which the action happened into three, then gave each a type of magical parity that, upon its disintegration, the world would be threatened.
Cold War + Shakespeare = Writ in Blood.
See, I'm a Bardolator (a devotee of William Shakespeare, the Bard), and so I decided to bring some of my passion for his ornate way with words into a novel. The most natural way of incorporating my two loves of Shakespeare and fantasy was to build the magic system around poetry.
This ended up being a significantly bigger project than I had ever anticipated. I started when my second child was born, and now that he's five, I'm still not finished with it. I'm putting additional touches to it, trying to refine it, and shop it around. It has been a long, difficult slog to get to this point, and I still don't think I'm close to getting it published.
In a pique of narcissism, I actually documented my experience writing the first draft. It's part of the "Story Journal" tag on my blog. (Here.) I guess I was hoping that it would be instructive to someone as to how my writing process worked, as well as recording the height of my effort (and hubris).
So far as I know, about three people have read any of them. Oh well. It was a good exercise.
In terms of the plot structure, I was studying the Cold War when I started the book, and I wanted something that had the same tension as that time period. To facilitate that, I broke the main continent on which the action happened into three, then gave each a type of magical parity that, upon its disintegration, the world would be threatened.
Cold War + Shakespeare = Writ in Blood.
Magic System
Knowing that not everyone is a big fan of poetry, crafting the entire story with poetry front and center was a difficult choice. In the early planning stages, I made it a point to have a particular Effect (yes, capitalized because it's fantasy and it actually helps when one's reading it) with each aspect of real-life poetry. Iambic structures create different Effects than, say, trochaic.
Because most readers probably wouldn't have a how-to guide on poetry on hand as they read, I had to disguise the actual poetical techniques I was using. This worked for me, because as far as poetry goes, I'm okay at it. My characters, of course, are superb--so the narrative tells us, anyway. Rather than trying to write poetry with the same power as what was being described in the narrative, I fudged it and told the reader that the poem was powerful.
That isn't to say that everything is straightforward. The main character, Nicomachus, is a Poet who has a penchant for speaking differently. I didn't, for example, use any contractions whenever he spoke or I wrote in his voice. He also used "Formal" language when he was using Poetry. This was frustrating to me because "Formal" language in the book is the use of "thee, thou, thy", which is actually informal structures in English. I knew, though, that we Anglophones don't really know that, so I decided to take major poetic license (see what I did there?) and call informal English Formal poetry.
This works for the book, I think. There are entire passages of surprisingly dense wordplay and imagery that I found really fulfilling. Brandon Sanderson (yes, I'm name dropping) read the first couple of pages and found them "dense" but he couldn't see much that should change.
He then advised me to write another book.
So I did.
Because most readers probably wouldn't have a how-to guide on poetry on hand as they read, I had to disguise the actual poetical techniques I was using. This worked for me, because as far as poetry goes, I'm okay at it. My characters, of course, are superb--so the narrative tells us, anyway. Rather than trying to write poetry with the same power as what was being described in the narrative, I fudged it and told the reader that the poem was powerful.
That isn't to say that everything is straightforward. The main character, Nicomachus, is a Poet who has a penchant for speaking differently. I didn't, for example, use any contractions whenever he spoke or I wrote in his voice. He also used "Formal" language when he was using Poetry. This was frustrating to me because "Formal" language in the book is the use of "thee, thou, thy", which is actually informal structures in English. I knew, though, that we Anglophones don't really know that, so I decided to take major poetic license (see what I did there?) and call informal English Formal poetry.
This works for the book, I think. There are entire passages of surprisingly dense wordplay and imagery that I found really fulfilling. Brandon Sanderson (yes, I'm name dropping) read the first couple of pages and found them "dense" but he couldn't see much that should change.
He then advised me to write another book.
So I did.