All right. How long have I been away? Months. My last post here was from December 8. Well, in the meantime things have changed and I’m back. I’ve been in a bad chape back then I know. I just came to realise that this story feeps so personal because I have a werewolf personality in me. I’ve come to terms with that very quickly. But back in December I had an extremely tight schedule in my private life, which was going to stay that way until the end of the semester, end of January. So I made a deal with my werewolf: he will let me deal with my private life until I’m done with the exams and then I’ll let him do whatever he wants. And here I am. Since my holidays started in February, my creativity boomed.
What are my achievements so far? No, I’m not writing every day. For that the plot isn’t ready in my mind yet, so I’m working in my thoughts mostly. But:
- I’ve made and printed the character description tables for the most of my important characters. Now they hang on my “working wall” over my computer.
- I’ve printed the map of the area where my story takes place and marked on it all the important places. It also hangs on the working wall.
- I’ve made a time-line. The main time line is the plot line in the Jean Grenier story, which I’ve placed neatly into the year 1603. My other plot lines are partly in this time line already or will be added as I work my way through them. It’s not hard because it all is simply an ordered chaos of post-its on my working wall.
I’ve been updating a bit about my success in my personal blog, so there are a few detailed things in there that I can’t be bothered reposting here. But here’s the result of my story work. (No, I haven’t only been printing stuff and pinning paper to my walls)
Mostly I’ve been working on my main character, André Bisson. He – like every other character in this story - has a last name now. So André becomes the scrivener at the parliament of Bordeaux around the beginning of my story, which is January 1603. Not long after that he meets a girl, Francoise de Bontecou. She is the daughter of one of the parliament councellors and a very lively girl, interested in what her father is doing, so she visits him in the parliament. That is where André and Francoise meet. And I’ve been working my way through this love story, just to get myself in the mood to write the whole story itself. I started writing a scene about them. Story goes that for a while André simply is in love with her form a distance, only seeing her when she visits her father. But one day he decides that there is no reason why he shouldn’t get closer, so he changes into the wolf and runs across town to her house. There he hides on her balcony and observes her as she has a fight with her mother and goes to sleep. That is when he for the first time discovers that she is interested in books about witches, demons and such. The girl shows a surprisingly sensitive side of her right away because she notices that someone’s watching her. He would be coming to her balcony in his wolf form often from then on and she would always be able to tell when she’s being watched. I wrote that first little scene and went on to the second significant scene. Yes, I just jumped around through the story like that, it was only a first try anyway. The next significant thing is that one night, when he is there, she comes out to the balcony and says somehting like “I know you’re here. I wish you’d show yourself to me. And I really wish you’d stop torturing me like that, André.” He is flummoxed that she says his name like that out of blue, which obviously means that she’s thinking of him, so right there he changes back into the human form (naked much, don’t forget) and shows himself to her. That’s the first night the two spend together, first of many. Now that is where I skipped again and kept the rest of my story in mind: André’s father dies, then the Jean Grenier process happens, then his mother dies giving birth to his little brother and tells him the truth about the baby’s blood heritage. Then Anouk is killed and Olivier with her, which all disturbs André very much, so that he decides to leave Bordeaux and live with the pack again, taking care of his brother and protecting the baby from the pack. Half-bloods are usually killed, that’s why he needs to protect the baby. So the day after the baby is born he goes to Bordeaux for the last time and asks Francoise to meet him. She – in worry about his absense lately – rushes to him. And there they have what HE thinks is their final talk. He needs to break up with her. She is nobility anyway, there is no way he can ever legally marry her. Plus he can never allow her get pregnant from him, he can’t produce a half-blood that would be in danger form the pack. But she doesn’t know that he is a werewolf, so he has difficulties explaining to her why exactly they can’t be together. At first Francoise is angry and says she won’t leave him no matter where he goes, so he gets angry and is about to leave. She calms down a little and pretends to say her last goodbye to him. She lets him go. He’s all heartbroken, takes the baby and leaves. She has a plan meanwhile. She has her servant follow him, while she packs a few things from home and follows the servant.
All this comes down to the last showdown scene. The werewolf pack has its own meeting place in the forest by the ruins of an old temple. There are also some witches there, who have their own meeting place there too. Witches and werewolves are more or less allies here. So it’s the night of a big meeting when the pack has to decide several very important things that has to do with the rest of the story. André brings the baby there and has to fight (probably more with words than physically) for its right to live. The servant had followed him to the village, but had lost him when the pack went to the forest. So Francoise decides to search for André in the forest and accidentally stumbles into the meeting. Which means: she steps unknowingly into the meeting of a whole pack of REALLY angry and REALLY anxious werewolves. She realises what he is, what’s going on, and he has to protect her against the pack with his life again. The scene goes on and on – I’ll be writing it when the time comes, but in the course of it they discover that Francoise is a witch herself, has that power in her. Other witches present agree to teach her how to deal with the power. The question that she asks André now is if a child of a werewolf and a witch is just as dangerous as a child of awerewolf and a normal human. He doesn’t know that, because there’s too little information on such things. So the two of them decide to find it out. He will write a book, which will contain all the things to know about werewolves that he discovers, and it’s the first real book about werewolves that’s gonna stay in the archives. This is where I come back to the VERY original plot I had a year ago. So this love story ends well, even if there is a lot of death and the pack would never be the same.
There are other story lines as well. But I’m not gonna unfold them all here right now. What I want to do now is to start writing the first draft. I’ve already had the very first chapter since September, I think, and today I wrote a half-page which follows it, starring Jean Grenier for the first time. It went quite well, too. Maybe I’ll just be able to stay with it and write a little every day and some day this year finish that book, too. Finish the first draft, that is. And I’m working, which is a great feeling. I’m really working on it.
