I spent today designing my villain for the first novel. He's really just an element of a larger force, of course--the first book can't exactly reveal the full scale of the conflict--but that doesn't keep him from being pretty bad.
He's insane. He's an artist. He's brilliant and diabolical. He's possessed.
Altogether, I'm enjoying this artist side of him. There's something about aesthetic detachment--especially as I've studied James Joyce--that just seems pernicious in that it separates what is beautiful from what is moral. So he is the grand designer, artist, and orchestrator of the destruction of the world. Chaos and annihilation have their own brand of beauty, a darker shade of black and fire.
He does it because he enjoys it. It doesn't help that he's a demigod.
Playing around with multiple personalities is fun, too. You can never tell which side of him you're talking to--especially when the sides of him that aren't him are trying to manipulate you on several levels. This kind of thing is going to be fun to mess with.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Friday, March 2, 2012
Vaetkryter
I just came up with a religion.
This is after the fact that I've held two workshops in the past week for the Underground--Southern Virginia's creative writing club--and I've been feeling hungry for some good solid brainstorming of my own. So the thought came to me that my world needed more culture, and that the culture needed to be more fleshed out than simply nations, communities, and histories.
Essentially, I needed religion. I needed aesthetics and macro-level motivations. My world needed a reason to exist the way it does, and it needed to exist more vibrantly than it had been.
Enter the Vaetkryter.
The Vaetkryter believed in a god named Vaed, the god of the sky. At some point before the creation of the world, Vaed reached the end of his then-current life cycle, necessitating rebirth. He formed the world as a chrysalis or egg in preparation for rebirth. What he demands of his followers is that they help to free him by destroying the world, and he promises new powers of creation as he remakes all creation with his new degree of divinity.
So his followers turn out to be apocalyptic zealots who strive to physically destroy creation, waging international warfare and subterfuge. This plays a large role because there are certain key characters that hold (or held) to this religion, and it's going to drastically affect their actions throughout the book.
I rather like it, even if it's a bunch of nonsense. Vaed doesn't really exist--at the very least, not the way his followers think he does. He might actually exist in a different manner than previously thought... This actually ties in quite well with another event in the series.
This is after the fact that I've held two workshops in the past week for the Underground--Southern Virginia's creative writing club--and I've been feeling hungry for some good solid brainstorming of my own. So the thought came to me that my world needed more culture, and that the culture needed to be more fleshed out than simply nations, communities, and histories.
Essentially, I needed religion. I needed aesthetics and macro-level motivations. My world needed a reason to exist the way it does, and it needed to exist more vibrantly than it had been.
Enter the Vaetkryter.
The Vaetkryter believed in a god named Vaed, the god of the sky. At some point before the creation of the world, Vaed reached the end of his then-current life cycle, necessitating rebirth. He formed the world as a chrysalis or egg in preparation for rebirth. What he demands of his followers is that they help to free him by destroying the world, and he promises new powers of creation as he remakes all creation with his new degree of divinity.
So his followers turn out to be apocalyptic zealots who strive to physically destroy creation, waging international warfare and subterfuge. This plays a large role because there are certain key characters that hold (or held) to this religion, and it's going to drastically affect their actions throughout the book.
I rather like it, even if it's a bunch of nonsense. Vaed doesn't really exist--at the very least, not the way his followers think he does. He might actually exist in a different manner than previously thought... This actually ties in quite well with another event in the series.
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