I’ve been working on this story - I say story, but what I mean is epic fantasy - for many years. My kids have heard bits and pieces, probably heard it so much they either want me to stop talking about it and just write it.
So a couple weeks ago, I sat down and started writing. It has been transformative. My intention was to just write and see where I ended up, but in the process I started pulling all of those ruminations over the years into a cohesive story.
The first problem I ran into was where do I start. A common problem. The story is potentially massive, in some optimistic moments I’ve thought it could be as large as 10 books. It doesn’t really matter how big it could be if I can’t get it written, so I needed a place to start.
Where to start
The realization I came to was I needed a smaller story to start with, a miniature story that would introduce the characters, the world, the magic, and everything else without trying to tackle the epic.
This is where I started developing the story Twelve Bells. This story takes place between the first and second trilogies, the main characters are Beatrix Silk and her son, Gavan Grant. Beatrix is the main character of the first trilogy and Gavan is the main character for the second trilogy.
Initially, when I first sat down to write, I didn’t think I had enough for a full book, I was shooting for a novella. So I was quite surprised when things started coming together and I realized I have enough for a novel. As I started having to solve problems for this little story it forced me to think through the world-building exercises, it allowed me to introduce more characters, and all that ruminating I’d done in the past came together into a cohesive and complete plot that I think is totally marketable.
It will be a lot of work, but I’m going to do it.
The Pitch
When you start thinking about marketing your book and getting others to read it - beta readers, agents, and editors - you need a way to present the idea in a compact, concise manner. There are multiple levels of these and they break down as follows:
- Logline - Basically a single sentence to describe your entire story.
- Elevator Pitch - this is more like a paragraph, maybe five sentences
- Synopsis - this is the full synopsis of the book, it should be a complete representation of the book, including twists and spoilers.
I’m going to do the first one and put it here so that I can refer back to it when I’m talking to people about what I’m working on. I will probably add the elevator pitch at some point the future but I just don’t know the right way to write it. Yet. I’m not going to do the last one because I don’t want to share the twists publicly.
I may - probably will - update them over time, but I thought it was worth going through the exercise.
Logline
might be pushing the length, hard to pack an entire story into a single sentence
A leader of the underworld has a rule that no one may be used as leverage against another, the king and his council vote to kidnap her son to make her do as they say, she sends her assassin to vehemently object.
Elevator Pitch
TBD