Introduction

We're well over 100 000 words for Act 2 and we are moving through a major transition area at roughly the same time. So, let's have a quick chat... similar to what I did in Act 1.

Now I don't have anything specific planned for this interlude - I wanted to share a long overdue picture of Clive that I had made, but it's not entirely done and so I was on the fence about sharing... and ended up chickening out  :P

Instead I'm going to share the original image that inspired Clive. I can already hear him talking shit and complaining about being a backpack and not a bag.

There are a few specific things writing wise and story wise that I'll discuss in the Author thoughts once we wrap up Act 2, but let's touch on a few broader topics:

Labels, Tags and Tropes

This has been both an amusing and an utterly infuriating part of writing:

1) How to classify the book in terms of categories?

2) How to communicate to the reader what they may expect (without making it spoilers)?

The spoiler part in particular has been a challenge. Categories such as dark fantasy, swords and sorcery, as well as action/adventure - fortunately don't give away too much and do set a good expectation. But, as with most things nowadays, these things can be interpreted in different ways. Such that Swords & Sorcery has a legacy connotation to the silly ideas of 'big brutish males to save the damsel in distress, who cannot help herself'. Modern usage is starting to change this and when I think of Swords & Sorcery (because I do not have preconceived notions due to its legacy status) I envision discovery, adventure, magic and battles to be central to the story - converting this to the 'fantasy' version of 'action/adventure'.

Dark fantasy is fairly well established, there can be a bit of blur into Grimdark, which is more dystopian/hopelessness themed - but from my perspective dark fantasy introduces a certain sense of realism into the 'heroic quest' in which we can see how the journey affects the characters not only from an 'external perspective', but from an internal one (i.e. deep PoV) as well. I personally like to not only 'see' the emotions of the characters, but I want to glimpse their inner thought processes as well (which simply has to go into exposition more often than not).

Some authors tend to subtext too much of this and abstract motivations so far away that I often don't understand *why* a character is doing what they are doing... Now, the reasons don't need to hit me over the head or be given to me immediately but I am a 'why' person and things need to make sense to some degree - even if I don't relate or agree, I generally try to understand why someone else approaches a situation in a given way.

Then we get to romance in fantasy. *Sighs heavily.* This one is a doozy. Generally speaking, fantasy, especially if we talk about the founding writers in the genre, was about the worldbuilding, magic, adventure and battles - that sense of awe and otherworldliness. Romance was either wholly lacking, limited or pushed into the background somewhere - you get additional complexity in the romance aspect inherently because it is within a fantasy context - when taking battles and danger into account.

The 'outdated' ways of viewing this were to 'transpose' our society's traditional gender-based roles onto characters in fantasy, which was in essence a reflection of what we know/perceive as normal at that time, but it was limiting in exploring what else it could be. Fantasy worlds do not need to reflect reality in a direct 1:1 - fortunately, many books have been braking away from this and I've been thrilled to read more female protagonists who are not 'the damsel in distress' or 'the doormat love interest'. This is where BG3 shines; it did away with many gender stereotypes and allowed the romance to reflect what the player wants... Once we're done with Act 3 I'd like to discuss more on this 'doing away with gender stereotypes' and having more nuance discussion around this.

The overlap of genres meant that fantasy was starting to gain elements from other genres. This influence remained on a very large sliding scale. For instance, if we focus on how romance has permeated fantasy we have 'Epic Fantasy' on one end with limited romance, and 'Romantasy' at the other stuffed with tropes, labels and tags. And for the time being it seems like when you want romance in your fantasy, the scales are tipped to Romantasy - which I've previously commented on is weird to me and I personally do not want to read these, neither write it.

What other people read/write is not for me to judge, but I was worried about this trend for a good long time. Because it seemed like if you don't tropify your story then it won't get read - and that concerned me and made me a bit sad even, because the berth of stories are suppose to cater to everyone and exclusive pigeonhole 'Romantasy' does not. It almost seemed as though there were two options for me to get readers (especially thinking forward to my own stories): Either no-romance fantasy, or the non-relatable tropy stuff.

Fortunately, I started actively 'looking' for 'my tribe' or 'my audience', since I'm surely not the only one who'd want something more in the middle - a good solid dose of fantasy paired with romance that fits within the context of the story and characters (without making everything about tropes). I want to get into the messiness of storytelling things, explore different themes in both a fantasy and character sense while having the romance there to support many of these or even give access to themes that otherwise would have remained untapped.

My first search lead to YouTube reviews about tropy books, and I was relieved to not only find large reading channels dedicated to recommending books that are not trophy, but also discussing how they themselves were also looking for 'the middle'. The comment sections were also filled with similar sentiment - so I at least felt like there was a place and a potential audience for 'my version' of these stories.

But I suck at marketing - I really do... and simply posting 'here is my book' on social media is akin to throwing it into the void. Then comes the infuriating tags - because there aint no tag for the 'high fantasy with a subplot of decent romance' that fits, my best approximation is 'Fantasy Romance', but that could easily be confused with 'Romantasy'. Thus, I've decided to look for places where my audience would hang out and perhaps I can stick my stories under their noses at some point. After that it would be patience. Lots and lots of patience for my stories to slow ooze through the internet. LOL!

Modernism and Anachronistic phrases

Let's start with what these are: the use of modern words, phrases and/or sayings that are more at home in present day fiction than the setting/time period of your book. A stark example that comes to mind was the use of 'okay' in Amazon's Rings of Power... The word 'okay' originated as a joke between newspapers in 1839, which is far more modern than the setting of Tolkien's Middle Earth. This results in a large contradiction between what the reader/viewer expected and the tone of the writing and may lead to readers being taken out of the story.

Now, I myself have used 'okay' in this fanfiction for Karlach, and I was wondering whether it was appropriate to use or not. But given that BG3 has fairly modern concepts like advanced medical diagnoses of 'ceremorphosis' and plane jumping spaceships known as spell jammers (of which Nautiloids are an example of one) - I don't think it would be too out of place to use something like 'okay'.

The other problem is that you can drive yourself crazy with these things, for instance the word 'scientist' isn't much older than our friend 'okay', being coined a mere 5 years earlier in 1834... So being a purist about these things doesn't make sense unless you don't want your books to be read because you're writing in ye olden English and having your characters speak Shakespearian.

However, there are certain words and phrases I will most definitely not be using like 'yolo' and 'yeet' - even if it would be highly amusing to do so: Astarion vigorously yeeted the leech into the distance with an angry snarl on his face  :D

At the end of the day its about creating balance, and more importantly using language that suits the characters. Finding this balance is tricky, which leads me to the next topic.

Show vs Tell

This has been on my mind for a few days now, especially after doing another round of 'reading research' and studying how other fantasy authors portray their worlds and characters. Upon re-evaluating my own writing I think that I tend to be more fluid between the two - partly because of my earlier comments in Act 1 about having effective descriptions and also because I'm trying to judge at any given scene how much detail is required to convey what I want to get across without impacting the flow of the writing.

'Show don't tell' is very good advice, don't get me wrong and one should err on the showing rather than telling side but sometimes (or more often in books) I think writers tend to lean into it too heavily. Some descriptions are so long and have so much detail that I'm either sitting there going 'alright I get the message' or my eyes start rolling into the back of my head with boredom. And that would be the last thing I'd want for my writing!

I also realized that excessive descriptions are an 'easy' way of padding your books with words. Yes, you may end up 'showing' the reader plenty but not end up 'saying' much at all... So generally I end up asking myself "would additional 'showing' here impart (1) any new information about either the world, the character or (2) assist with reader immersion?"

If it is not a resounding "yes", then the description should be shortened or I simply switch to telling: 'Nyx picked up the bow' instead of 'Nyx stooped, her knees popped, complaining at the movement. She gripped the bow, her fingers sliding over the textured wood grain .... blah blah blah'

I think I'll be foaming at the mouth if I had to write the bulk of my lines in such a way.

I feel like there is a time and a place for each during the scene. For instance, I like to slow down the pace and be more detailed during scenes with high emotion, especially between characters (again focusing on the emotion part without describing every facial tick) and forgoing details during high action scenes (like battles). I'm still trying to find the better balance between dialogue and body language though... I think I sometimes over rely on dialogue tags in lieu of (once again) trying to avoid describing the minute facial/body language differences between various levels of angry... which tend to all look the same physically (externally, i.e., show) but emotionally (internally, i.e., telling) they are not. Like trying to figure out how to set the emotional tone of the dialogue scene without being overly detailed, because only using 'said' reads like the characters are standing around making neutral statements about everything...

Another thing I noticed was how we can differently interpret these things if we rely too heavily on 'showing'. I was watching a YouTube video where one writer was editing another writer's work to illustrate how to make the writing stronger. For the most part, the writing was stronger except for one key sentence. What effectively happened is that instead of us getting the character's interpretation of the scene (1, Laughter from the guests were insincere) it was changed to (2, Laughter too bright, too loud. She clenched her fist)... Now to me these are two very different interpretations:

(1) We get the character's opinion on the matter (some say you're 'leading' the reader this way, telling them what they should feel. But to me this is the character's opinion, and they are allowed to have one...) which is that the guests are acting fake.

(2) We get a reaction, something that I (without knowing point 1) would assume she had because she didn't like the noise (because *I* don't like loud crowds and noises). Effectively "my (i.e., the readers') default reaction" is being superimposed on the character and the message is lost (that the guests are being performative for whatever reason).

As someone with a fair amount of technical writing background I'm also very aware of reader fatigue, such that I don't want you to be doing all kinds of mental gymnastics to keep up with my writing instead of enjoying the story.

Last ramblings

I'd like to talk about a handful of observations I've made getting to the ~2/3 of the 'book' once more.

At this point I was starting to get bored and annoyed - it happened in Act 1 as well, which leads me to getting impatient and then wanting to simply move on to the next Act...

In an attempt to counter this and prevent me from writing a one chapter summary for the rest of the Act out of pure frustration (which would be tragic LOL), I've decided: let me change things up as much as I can without impacting the plot - I'm hoping this sparks some new interest for me; enough to do a proper job all the way through. I've already applied some of that to the previous chapter and it got me out of its rut, so results have been promising.

I've also seen other authors and writers use 'mood boards' for a myriad of different things, from character creation to environments. I've done something similar way back for my 'Act 2 plotting' - but not to the extent I've seen some other authors do - thus I'm going to try that for this last bit of Act 2 as well and see whether that also get's the writing gears going again... Pinterest has been a huge help here, however it gets disturbing and creepy rather quickly when one starts down the monster rabbit hole...

Lastly, I think as authors/writers we have such great resources to pull from in comparison to those who came before. I mean, it's not like Tolkien had Pinterest back in the day - or YouTube videos to teach him how to write... But on the flip side, it also feels like there is an overload of ideas and being 'truly' original becomes futile. However, a reductionist view would recommend that as long as the plot is solid, the characters are interesting (with emotion) and events usher everyone along - the story should be fine...

Bag of Holding source: DnDBeyond @ https://www.dndbeyond.com/magic-items/4581-bag-of-holding