Dragon's Grail: Escape from Ice Mountain
New Serial Launch Announcement!!!!
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
I can't believe that it's come time for me to announce the start of Dragon's Grail, my next epic serial story! After watching me dilly-dally for months, my friend Gina Hogan Edwards finally told me it was time to make a deadline already!
Launching February 1st, 2024 on Ream!
Dragon’s Grail: Arc 1 - Escape from Ice Mountain
The tranquil solitude of Astra's monastic life is shattered in an instant when a brutal assault destroys the only home she has ever known. Thrown into the untamed, wild magic of the outside world, she must rely on an uneasy alliance: a charismatic thief, a suspicious warrior, an injured dragon, and two demonic dogs. Is her secret and reviled ability to communicate with the dead the key to their survival?
This is a story that I originally came up with about eight years ago and tentatively tried to push out into the world in 2018. Nothing ever went right with that story, even as I got over 100k words in, and I eventually realized that I had been trying to chase a genre/category which I was not personally interested in. Fantasy? Yes! Female lead? Yes! Dragon side-kick? Hell yes! “New Adult” demographic? …uhmmmm.
Writing in a genre you are not too familiar with and don’t care much for is a classic newbie mistake for genre writers, and one I’m embarrassed to admit. Yes, I was chasing the trends, but I thought that at least I was interested enough that I could make a go of the story. But I wasn't, so I didn't.
It has sat on the back-burner ever since.
Late last year, while I was rereading it in order to figure out how to save it, I finally realized that there were two elements to the story that I had completely overlooked, but are actually crucial for me as the writer:
The age of the main characters being believable (to me).
The love triad element.
When I first dreamed of the main character, Astraka, she appeared to me with an indeterminate age so it didn't feel like a betrayal to make her only about twenty-five years old. Likewise, I had made the relationships between her and the two other main characters very friendly/sibling-like (in the original story, she was set to meet her love interest further along in the tale). Both choices doomed the story.
First off, I realized I put Astraka in a position of authority in her community that was very implausible for anyone of twenty-five years old to pull off. It’s like those stories where the character is twenty-three years old and has two PhDs and is a fully tenured professor. You just know that if they did not start college when they were twelve, that simply would never happen. It takes time to do some things, even for the most gifted people, and I had put her in a position that made no sense for her to be in. Even in a made up fantasy world, you must have some kind of internal logic, and I had failed at that, to my character’s disadvantage.
When I aged her up to be in her mid 40s, everything fell into place.
The next insight came when I looked at the three main leads and realized this was another MMF (male/male/female) polyamorous love triad story, along the lines of The Queen’s Aerie and Wolves of Harmony Heights. Oh, wait, I have a pattern????!?! I seem to have fallen into my category without noticing it!
So in the rewrite, I've embraced these elements. Astraka is forty-five years old, a senior member of her reclusive religious order, and a head librarian. She's always wanted to live a life of adventure, but because of her “curse” knew that she could never leave the sacred grounds where she had been raised.
What she doesn't know is it the powers of a necromancer stretch much farther than just the ability to talk to the dead!
Yay!!!!
Congratulations! And yes to middle-aged female MCs!