Registration documents from UEA have arrived

After months of hearing nothing from the university where I'll be studying, huge amounts of documents have appeared. I need to fill in about seven forms, including the registration document and the application form for my campus card. In addition, I need to work out how I'm going to pay for my accomodation--which has finally been allocated. Turns out I'm going to be staying in Suffolk Terrace for a few weeks, then I'll be moving to one of the new rooms in Paston House, which happens to be right next to a building site (but gets a discounted rate for the same reason).

The good news is that I will definitely have enough money for the first year. I might even have some left over for the year after. But I still haven't heard from the LEA--the board that organises student loans--so I don't know how much of the tuition fees the government pays in my case.

The moving-in process appears to be fiendishly complicated, and is just the start of a frenzied week of activity. I think it's only just begun to sink in: I'm going to university in Norwich, and aside from holidays and the occasional weekend at home, I'm going to be there for three years. This is going to be the biggest change in my life up to this point ... but I'm determined to enjoy it.

More plot elements come together

One of the main themes in this novel is going to be the quest for truth. This is made manifest in the form of a corrupted secret society, once sworn to protecting the secret of magic until the time was right to reveal it to the world. When the Secret Order begins its plan to take control of the government--still keeping magic secret--it becomes plain that the Order no longer cares about the common good, and has become a twisted, power-hungry entity.

The knowledge of magic is largely passed on by word of mouth, but there was a time when a collection of books of magic was stored in the library of Edgington Castle. This library was plundered by rebels within the Order some decades before, at the point when the then-Earl of Edgington, Branelm, was cast out of the Order. The rebels left only a letter explaining how the Order had unjustly wrested power away from the government of Westwintern (the Earls of Edgington originally developed magic). As retribution against casting him out, Earl Branelm made magic illegal, forcing the Order to go underground.

The rebels also collected a wealth of magical research that the Order proclaimed was heretical or against their philosophy. These books--some forty volumes in all--were hidden in a cave below the old keep of Duskgate, well within the "danger zone" of Horban's Night.

And so here we have the main aspect of the plot: the characters striving to bring magic out of the shadow of secrecy, and into public knowledge. The Order, corrupted by power, resists this. But one of the characters knows the location of the "Duskgate Library", and once Kylan, current Earl of Edgington, realises how his ancestor was duped by the Order, he pitches his lot in with this new band of rebel wizards. The plan is to recover the lost knowledge and use it against the Secret Order of Grey Knights.

Of course, there will have to be personal motives for each character. In the case of Dulais, this is quite clear: in his absence, his daughter Adelin is captured by the head of the Secret Order and tortured in an attempt to discover the extent of her instinctive magical abilities. This destroys any remaining trust Dulais had for the order, replacing it with anger and hatred. Kylan's motives lie in a sense of injustice at how the Order robbed him of his birthright. Rose has a (very) early mid-life crisis and realises that everything she has worked towards--becoming a world-famous musician through cheating with magic--is based on lies, and finds a powerful desire in herself for truth and honesty.

I'm beginning to get very enthusiastic about this plot. It seems to have everything: individual characters (I hope), a quest, and an enemy that's neither all-powerful nor inherently evil, but a potent force for the characters to overcome. I just hope all this planning will pay off in the long run.

The plot so far

I'm using this post to clarify my thoughts. Here's the skeleton plot of Warriors of the Duskmarch so far:

+ Some weeks before the book begins, ADAIRN, Earl of Edgington and father of KYLAN, dies. Kylan becomes the next Earl at the age of twenty. This also makes him Lord of the land of Westwintern.

+ The Secret Order of Grey Knights (a secret society of wizards) has long since been laying plans for taking control of the country. There was no chance of doing this whilst Adairn was in charge, but Kylan is young and--they think--impressionable. They decide to make their move while Kylan is still consolidating his position.

+ ROSE, a famous musician and gifted Adept within the Order, is given the task of getting close to Kylan. A concert is arranged in Edgington Castle. Rose will be leading in the performance of her mentor's latest composition, his 8th symphony, Belstrom the Spearman. Kylan attends the concert, and Rose uses her skill in emotional magic--always her speciality--to reach out and touch the hearts of everyone in the audience. Kylan is especially moved, both by Rose's beauty and by the perfection of her performance.

+ He invites Rose to have dinner with him. They meet several more times, and Rose uses all her guile and skilll to snare the young Earl. All proceeds to plan. Kylan becomes hopelessly smitten.

+ The next step is for Rose to gently break the idea of magic to Kylan. Magic is illegal in Westwintern--hence the Order has to remain underground--but Kylan is keenly aware of the danger that lurks just beyond the fortified frontier of the Duskmarch. In order to emphasize the threat, the Order manufactures a report stating that the fortress of Torcastle has come under attack from the Kriardyn.

+ Kylan reacts faster than the Order anticipated. Instead of panicking, he follows procedure and sends a warning to the communities close to Torcastle. Kylan forces himself to ignore Rose's hints and suggestions of "another way", and starts to re-arm his warriors.

This is as far as I've got. The Dulais / Adelin subplot has yet to be introduced, but it comes in not long after this point. And I've still got a lot of polishing to do on the material so far. Lots of work still has to be done before I can start writing it!

The British stereotypes ... according to Blogthings

This is a list entitled You Know You're From Britain When ... from www.blogthings.com. They're stereotypes, but the sad thing is, some of them are actually true.

You Know You're From Britain When...

You believe that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday are all good nights for drinking. Sunday day is also entirely reasonable. You're always a half an hour late to work ... no-one notices or cares. Coming to work with a hangover is entirely accepted and indeed expected at least once a week. You can actually give directions to some of those annoying tourists in Oxford Street! You step over a drunk in the tube station rather than offering to help them. You don't even bother looking out of the window when you get up in the morning to check what the day is like. You know it is overcast. You consider a suit to be normal attire for the pub. You expect men to actually cut, comb and style their hair (using hair products). And to wear decent clothes. You dissolve in laughter when listening to the funny accent of the Aussie international telephone operator (or on TV!). You think �40 for a haircut is quite reasonable. You can't remember what 'customer service' means. After a big night out you find yourself looking for a Curry house More than three hours sunlight on summer days seems excessive. You don't think twice about tipping your hairdresser You finish every sentence with 'Cheers' or 'Yeah'. You only just realise you have lost your sunnies, you left them in Greece 2 summers ago. You like English cuisine. I mean, it's hard to beat a full English breakfast. You are on to your 6th umbrella and your second overcoat... this year You've bought a disposable baby BBQ from Tesco. A day at the beach means wearing the warmest clothes you own while standing on golf ball-size pebbles and the thought of swimming doesn't even enter your head. You always call soccer football and you have a team and it's not Manchester United. You don't think twice about buying a packaged sandwich. A sunny lunchtime means searching for a patch of grass and stripping off practically down to your underwear You've accepted queuing as a way of life. You believe that every American is a fatass addicted to hamburgers and hotdogs. You despise the French (but then, who doesn't?). You actually get these jokes and pass them on to other friends from Britan.

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Word count

It's official: I have now written 23,000 words of worldbuilding and prewriting for Warriors of the Duskmarch to date. Considering I wrote less than 5,000 words of worldbuilding for my first novel--and that took over a year--this is very encouraging! What's more, I'm confident that most of this material is actually useful, as opposed to useless fluff, which tends to accumulate as soon as I lose focus. But I believe I'm tightly focused on the story here, which is good.

The other good news is that I've started another critique for a full novel, which should help me to get back into the writing gear pretty quickly.

Two characters completed

Two characters, Dulais and Adelin, have now been fully outlined for Warriors of the Duskmarch. As it turns out, these characters will work better if they're father and daughter. Both are now pretty well fleshed out, and their own unique problems give them clear parts in the story. Their plotline has many of the characteristics of a subplot, but at the same time their story will influence the outcome of the novel as a whole. Isn't that always the most desirable thing for a subplot to do?

In this case, I have my themes firmly nailed down. For almost all the characters concerned, the story will be a quest for truth and honesty--things that are either absent from their own lives, or that they feel are absent in the world around them. In the case of Rose and Dulais, the two members of the magical secret society of Grey Knights, they become disenchanted with the rotten and corrupt principles that have infiltrated the Order. Ultimately they join up with the one they had been ordered to destroy, and try to find new meanings to old questions.

Adelin, Dulais' daughter and the servant girl, becomes the catalyst. When her previously unsuspected magical powers become clear, the senior members of the Secret Order capture her and begin performing experiments on her to find out what makes her tick. This is that point at which Dulais finally realises that he has pledged his life to an organisation that no longer knows the meaning of honour.

This novel's going to be about people trying to do the best they can in a dangerous world, and against ruthless enemies. In the end, even the antagonists--with the exception of the evil Master Knights, of course--will redeem themselves and earn the reader's trust. If it works out in practice, this is going to be something totally new for me. I've never handled a plot quite like this before.

Other things

I've only been back from Wales for a couple of weeks, and already I'm missing the mountains. For a while we've been playing aorund with the idea of winter mountaineering in the Lakes--you know, ice axes, crampons and so on--but when I actually figured out how much all this extra gear would cost, I started to think that maybe it wasn't such a good plan after all.

At the moment, the best compromise seems to be Easter. I get a long holiday home from Uni, the mountains will still look their winter best, and although there's a high likelihood of snow, the winter permafrost will have melted by then. All we'll need in the way of new gear is 3-season sleeping bags, maybe new boots, and maybe some more robust waterproof coats.

Which mountains will we climb? James wants to have a bash at the Wasdale fells, which are undeniably superb. But Helvellyn and the Fairfield fells have caught my eye recently, especially the classic arête of Striding Edge on Helvellyn. Maybe Glenridding would be a good base camp? I'll research it closer to the time.

In any case, I suspect that mountaineering is something I'll be doing every year from now on. I seem to have become addicted.

More terrorist attacks in London

In an eerie re-play of the events exactly two weeks ago, four bombs went off in London this afternoon, three in tube trains and one on a bus. Fortunately the explosions were very small and only one person was injured, but the incident has caused chaos in the public transport systems, and for a while there were fears of a biological or chemical attack. Here's the link to the story on BBC.

Does this herald another phase of terrorist bombings in London? Suicide bombings are far, far more difficult to prevent than the atrocities perpetrated by the IRA. One hesitates to lay blame at a time like this, but I can't help feeling that if we hadn't have helped invade Afghanistan and Iraq on what now seem to be false charges (what WMDs??), this would never have happened. The bombers seem to be religious fanatics with links to Al-Qaeda.

Even so, the spirit of the good ol' Londoners is hard to squash. It's heartwarming to see people going about their daily business without fear. If the terrorists are counting on making people afraid and paranoid, they're going to have their work cut out.

Review

OPINEL
No.7 VRN

Description: Folding lock knife with wooden handle

Ever since I can remember, my father has always carried an Opinel knife with him, largely for whittling or a thousand minor cutting tasks. My first Opinel knife was presented to me as a Christmas present about four years ago: a No.6, the slightly smaller version, but no less robust.

It lasted until about five months ago, when the blade broke (I was stupidly using the thing as a screwdriver). I bought myself a No.7 as a replacement. They only cost about £6, but boy are they good. The handle is made from a single piece of carved wood, comfortable to hold, with the 3" blade recessed in a groove down one side. The locking mechanism is simple--a rotating section of stamped steel--and the blade is without a spring. Importantly, the knife is sharp right out of the box.

Opinels come in a range starting at No.1 (keyring size) to No.13 (nine-inch blade). The No.7 is a good middle ground: not too small for heavy cutting tasks, but not too large and heavy either.

In use, the knife is comfortable to hold, thanks to the gracefully curved handgrip, and has a pleasing balance in the palm. The sharp curve at the tip of the blade is ideal for carving small, delicate objects. The flat section of the blade is easy to keep sharp, thanks to a high carbon content in the steel and an ideal pitch to the edge. Through normal use, the blade evetually aquires a blackened, weathered appearance that looks quite attractive (this is a coating of trace compounds, largely oxides and carbonates, produced from contact with green wood).

It is worth remembering that the blade is not made from stainless steel, so it will rust if not properly cared for.

Things I love about this product

The quality; the rugged look the knife aquires over time; the way you can lock the blade shut as well as open.

Suggested improvements

The ordinary carbon-steel version of the Opinel is fine for many tasks, but I would like to see a seperate stainless steel version.

Verdict

A high quality camping, fishing or hunting knife at an attractive price. The traditional look and feel is a refreshing change from the increasingly technical world of outdoor gear.

Contact

Opinel No.7 VRN

Photo album has been posted

You can see 45 pictures from our recent trek in North Wales by clicking on the link to the right (just below Gable Cam). The link is North Wales.

Characterisation has begun

I've begun to outline the main characters for Warriors of the Duskmarch. The cast is a surprisingly mixed one: the lonely, unhappy Earl of Edgington; a beautiful actress who's also an undercover agent for the Secret Order of Grey Knights; a wandering warrior who hides his fear of darkness by fighting it; and a servant girl who is captured and tortured because of her magical talents.

In the past, my works of fantasy have generally had an upbeat, carefree feeling--a sense of hopefulness. I don't think this one will. Most of the characters are unhappy or have great problems they have to overcome. This novel will contain treachery and betrayal ... particularly on a personal level. These characters are going to do a lot of nasty things to each other before the plot is at an end.

That said, I really like what I'm coming up with. Each character is unique, and as far as I can tell, as original as anyone I've created in the past. I especially like the character of Rose Arwood, the actress with royal blood who turns to magic to bring her wealth and prestige. Her job is to seduce Earl Kylan of Edgington--a young and very lonely man--and tempt him with the power magic can bring him. The Secret Order of Grey Knights, sole channel through which magic is practiced in Westwintern, wants to control the government. They believe that the best way to control the country is to control its ruler, and to that end they apply Rose's charms to the vulnurable Earl. But Kylan turns out to be of tougher stuff than they realised.

As for Rose, she ultimately discovers that honesty and love are more important than power.

Dulais Belstorm, an errant warrior of the Grey Knights, is going to fit into this plot somewhere, but I can't think where just yet. His character is too good to waste. After training for six years in the Duskmarch Garrison at Torcastle, he joined the Secret Order and learned the illegal ways of magic. Thirteen years down the line, he's now a Senior Adept but refuses to partake in the twisted politics and rituals that lie at the rotten core of the Order. Instead, he roams the Duskmarch that stand between Westwintern and the waste of Horban's Night, hunting down and slaying the creatures that slip through the defences. His reasons for this are personal: not least the fact that his family was killed and he blames himself for their deaths. He sees his life of exile as a form of penance for failing them. He also has a deep fear of the dark, and he fights this fear by facing it with sword and shield. I'm pretty sure that Dulais will turn out to be the voice of honour and integrity among the magic-users in this book.

As you can see, I'm working fast. But I keep telling myself that there's no pressure on this one. If I get lots of work done quickly, wonderful: that's because I'm enjoying it. But any time my enthusiasm starts to fade, I'll step away. I'm using this novel--the prewriting for it, at least--as a kind of therapy. Thankfully, I just can't resist the call of new characters and a new plot to plan.

New sidebar elements!

Thanks to the good ol' Ordnance Survey's Get-A-Map service, I can now provide small, online maps of various places through hyperlinks. You'll find them in the "Ordnance Survey Maps" section in the sidebar to the right. Here are the maps I currently have uploaded:

+ My home village: This is a 25K scale map of Sudbourne, my current village of residence. Note the huge surround of forest. This is a very cool place to live if you enjoy hiking.

+ Coastal Suffolk: A smaller scale map of this entire area, known locally as the Sandlings. Prominent on this map is the expanse of Tunstall Forest, as well as the bizarre coastal landform of Orfordness (which will be well-known to readers of Cold Witness). Orford, the local town, is also shown.

+ Ogwen Valley, North Wales: A mid-scale map of the most mountainous valley in Wales. This was our base camp during the last trek. Glyder Fawr, Glyder Fach and Carnedd Dafydd are all prominently shown. Most of the lesser peaks are not named on this chart.

+ Wasdale, Cumbria: Simply the best base camp for mountaineers in Britain. From Wasdale Head, many of the finest peaks in England can be reached within half an hour's walk. Of the marked mountains, I have climbed Scafell Pike, Scafell, Great Gable, Pillar, Scoat Fell and Lingmell.

Please also note the additional copyright notice at the bottom of the sidebar.

Progress report

Worldbuilding for Westwintern is very nearly completed--as completed, at least, as it needs to be. I am simply burning to be writing again. I want, crave, need, the sense of being poised at the start of a new and exciting novel. No matter how successful or "publishable" the idea is, I have to write it. I'm sick of letting time slip by and wishing I was writing again.

The time for thinking is over. The time for writing is here.

And so I give you my very first genuinely no-strings-attached project: Warriors of the Duskmarch. If it works, great, but if not, I'll shrug and pick Cold Witness up again from where I left it off. This one's down to fate.

My mind is bursting at the seams with ideas. I have three or four characters already running around in my head and begging to be outlined. The idea of a plot--a big, excitingly dynamic plot--is haunting me, tugging at the edges of my dreams.

Whether it works or not, I'm determined that this one is going to be fun.

I'm back!

Back from North Wales after a week of successful mountaineering. Due to adverse weather--first very cold then very hot--we were forced to miss out Carnedd Dafydd, Glyder Fawr and the sub-3000 foot hills, but we still climbed four of the highest mountains in Wales, and completed all of our major objectives. The hills we climbed were Y Garn (947m), Glyder Fach (994m), Pen Yr Ole Wen (978m), and Tryfan (915m).

All of these ascents were longer, higher and tougher than anything I've achieved before: Wales is more rugged than England. All ascents involved some scrambling, particularly Tryfan. I chose the most challenging route, going straight up the Alpine-like North Ridge, which is the finest and most popular Grade 1 scramble in the world. It gives a sense of true mountaineering--perhaps more so than a hill of "merely" 3,000 feet deserves.

I've beaten my personal altitude record of 978m, and added four of the 15 Welsh 3000ers to my list of mountains climbed. James fell slightly ill on the last day, making an assault on Glyder Fawr impossible, but the trip was still a great success and tremendously enjoyable. Scrambling on famous mountains is a great ego-booster!

Here are a couple of photos. Click on the thumbnail for a larger image. I'll post a full .Mac photo album next week.

This is the East Face of Tryfan, from the path linking Gwern Gof Uchaf with Capel Curig.



And this is me standing on the famous Cannon Stone, halfway up Tryfan's North Ridge.



Photos (C) Alex and James Roddie 2005