Wed, Feb 20, 2008
Ashihara
Posted to Creative Work category
I woke up at 2AM knowing that the sequel to Twilight Rising is 'about becoming human'.
Don't ask me what that means yet.
But I'm pretty sure the Prince doesn't get viewpoint in this one, which seems fair since he achieved apotheosis in volume 1. I suspect that the main viewpoint characters are Chancellor Tajima, the Dragon Princess, and one of the Bugs.
I really need to figure out actual names for some of the Bugs. 'Robert the Devil', 'William the Bastard' and 'Hrolf Gangr' are handy placeholders, but not really appropriate references in context. But first I need to figure out more about how the Bug culture(s?) works. I need to find my notes about the biker Bugs, if they still exist someplace. I think I had begun to figure out castes and naming, and how things worked in the old world.
And if/when I rewrite the Kurowa stories as an actual novel with less ... ahem ... repetition, it needs Bugs in it early on, because it is historically later in what feels like the same world. Writing two worlds with the same magic system would just get confusing.
The sensible guard in that initial search party could be a Bug. And some of Hiro's retainers need to be Bugs.
I need to figure out the post-Twilight relations between Bugs and Mages, too. Are the magical 'group-marriages' segregated by species? If so, is that part of what needs to change to fix the energetic structure of the world?
It will be interesting to see if I can write something other than the Broken Land's King plot, now that is has been 15 to 20 years since I worked on Twilight Rising and the Kurowa stories.
By the time I get Twilight Rising reformatted for the website, I should be back in that world's head-space enough to start to see where I'm going.