Our town needs spatial storage to make harvest work. Where do they put everything? It’s usually shipped away so the elevators only need to hold a fraction of what’s harvested. If the local farmers are consolidating in the town, they’re leaving their silos behind.
Marcy is our promising young (sixteen) mage. For reasons, Bob is going to train her in a time dilated dungeon. She’s in there for three years while only one month passes outside.
Chapter 27 (and probably snippets in chapter 28) are from the outside. POV is our intrepid heroes, not Marcy. They do a number of Runs together. We see Tom and Luke training then doing the runs.
I’ve been thinking that Marcy’s story would make a good novella. I’m going on a road trip at the end of the month. What does one do at night? I can write – but in isolation on The Lair’s laptop.
I just outlined most of The Mage Tower, which is Marcy’s story. The chapters alternate between inside and outside. The outside content is the same as chapter 27. The inside content will be new. On the scale of three years, the 20 (or so) hours spent that way is basically nothing.
To make this novella, I need to keep it under 60K words for Marcy. My plan is to copy/paste the chapter 27 scenes into the outside chapters so that word count doesn’t count. It will be novel length with only a novella’s worth of new content (and priced accordingly). I would make that clear in the Forward (in the book description, too).
Intra-chapter breaks separate the chapter 27 scenes, now. I’m thinking subchapters. I’ve never seen anyone do it, but that would let me line things up. Chapter 27 subchapter 5 would be Chapter 5 of The Mage Tower. The main reason to do it would to make the (sub)chapter numbers and (sub)titles match. I can force that to work. Reading book one would be odd. Reading the novella would make it all clear.
If I leave the chapter 27 shared stuff out, or summarize, the bookness of it falls apart. I’m not sure solving it this way is a good idea. Anyone binge reading will be annoyed. However, if I clearly label the chapters (Outside 1, Outside 2, etc…) they are easy to skip over.
If Marcy’s story alternates inside/outside then chapter 27 (with subchapters) would need to break into alternating everything else and dungeon runs. Everything would line up. It’s very tempting.
I’m not sure about this composition plan. I can always try it and see how it looks and reads.
I am sure that I’m taking the outline (which was painful to build with all the cross references) on the road trip. I hope to fill it in. None of the chapter 27 dungeon scenes are written. That means I can write as much as I’d like on the Marcy side then go “backwards” and copy/paste from Marcy’s story into book one.
It’s going to be weird writing in plain text. The Laird’s computer is a Mac. Mine is Windows. We have no shared applications/programs. I’ll format it when we get back and I email it to myself.
We’ll see what happens. At the very least I need to figure out all her class, skill, and spell stuff, even if I don’t write her story.
If I do, I get to make more covers. How about 1000 of these:
girl, eighteen, long blonde hair, wearing leather armor, holding glowing staff, in front of tall stone tower in a forest, photo quality, fantasy
- Who wears a dress to a fight? On the other paw, covers are representative, not illustrative.
- “photo quality” is not having the desired effect. [anime], [cartoon] might help. That’s better.
- “tall tower” doesn’t mean the same thing to Stable Diffusion that it does to me. “ten story inhabitable tower” maybe?
- I’m still using the furry model. Switching back to the default might be better. Way too realistic looking.
girl, eighteen, long wavy blonde hair, realistic face, wearing leather armor, holding glowing staff, in front of 10 story, wide stone tower, fantasy, wide shot, forest
That’s close. I’ll bump the resolution and run off 1000 of them.
Featured image: One of the semi-reasonable 512×512 images that I used to test the prompts. The 1024×1440 (yes, width is before height) ones are not only larger, they also look much better.
