#i used to bring my friends over to my house and we'd carve swords in the basement out of scrap wood

[taz-writes]

WIP questions tag

i got tagged by @eff-writes and I haven’t actually participated in a tag game in like 10 years, so here we go!

1. What is the working title of your book?

Book 1 is called The Beginning. Boring, I know... The series as a whole is called Feilan! It used to be The Feilan Chronicles but then I decided that was stupid. 

(book 2 is The Queen of Feilan, book 3 is Storm and Shadow, book 4 is Liaea. 2 and 4 are literally perfect but 3 is Bad and needs replacing when I finish the manuscript.) 

2. Where did the idea for your book come from?

It’s based on a recess game I used to play with friends in elementary school. You know how basically everyone was involved in that stupid Boys Versus Girls war in first and/or second grade? I was the leader of my school’s stupid Boys Versus Girls war, it was centered around “Fairyland,” and my friends and I all had these overly complicated self insert characters that we LARPed as during recess. Over the years, the boys vs girls thing faded away, but we kept playing fairies and developing the ~lore.~ When I got to sixth grade, I decided to write it all down for posterity, and that’s when the first concept of Feilan came into being. I wrote the first legitimate draft in 9th grade, after spending a few years developing the characters and world into something that could exist without relying on bad self insert Mary Sue logic. 

There were a couple specific scenarios that we always wound up playing, and those are what the books’ core plots are about. Book 1 is the game we played at my house in the woods, usually searching for treasure. Book 2 is the ice skating rink game where we rescue Violet from the Frozen Isles, fused with the swimming pool game where we turn into mermaids. Book 3 is the one we played at my friend Emily’s house, where we built couch fort “prisons” and tried to escape without making enough noise to bother her dad. If we knocked too much stuff over, he’d come up and lecture us for interrupting his Warcraft game, so avoiding him became part of the LARP. Just typing this is bringing up vivid flashback-style memories. 

3. What genre is your current work in progress?

High/heroic fantasy, with a drop of genre de/reconstruction added in for fun :)

4. Choose the actors for your movie rendition.

Lucy Liu has to play Lilac Ravenhart. I don’t care about anything else but she has to be Lilac, it’s perfect. 

Honestly, if I got a movie, I’d want Sayara to be played by a total unknown because I feel like it fits her place in the story. She wants to be known as Sayara, the actor should want to be known as Sayara and not as whatever their last major role was. Plus I can’t think of any actresses who are short and buff enough. 

5. Give a one-sentence synopsis of your book. 

An ambitious illegitimate princess stumbles into a civil war and somehow manages to make herself a ~new legendary hero~, much to everyone else’s chagrin. 

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agent?

I’m not sure yet! It would be awesome to have an agent and be published with a legit publishing house, but self-publishing is faster and easier. Considering that I’ll be trying to market a debut novel with niche appeal and no romantic subplot to speak of, which also has three sequels.... self-pub seems more likely right now. 

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft?

The first first draft? I plugged that baby out in six months back in high school, because I didn’t have anything else to do with my life. It added up to over 150,000 words, so that was no small feat. It’s taken progressively longer to finish every new draft since. 

8. What other books would you compare your story to?

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh (frantic googling sounds) 

Honestly, I have no clue. I’ve read lots of books with similar concepts or characters, but I’ve never read another book that was enough like mine for me to want to make a comparison. I’ve taken some inspo from Game of Thrones, but deep worldbuilding lore and too many characters isn’t enough similarity to make a good comparison. Most of the fantasy I’ve read lately has been in a very different vein from what I write, because I’m trying to push my boundaries. 

9. Who or what inspired you to write the book?

I got into this a little with the “where’d the idea come from” question! But mostly, my inspiration was spite. 

The reason for making this particular recess game into a novel was, simply, that I couldn’t find a single book in YA fantasy that gave me what I wanted out of a story. I wanted strong female leads, who didn’t fall in love or have a LI, who saved the world without being questioned because of their gender or being outshone at the final hour by random boys. Do yall know how rare books like that were (and are) in YA fantasy? Full respect to paranormal romance writers, but your genre was the bane of my existence in high school, because the library would always label it as fantasy, and they always stocked twice as much of it as they did the actual fucking fantasy. Poor little naive Taz would pick up book after book about cool monsters and seemingly-intriguing plots, only for it to devolve into Edgy Boy Love Triangles. I didn’t care about the sexy demon/angel/whateverthefuck boys! I wanted to know how the girl who was supposedly the protagonist was gonna save the world! 

Also, I was really into fairies, but the only YA-ish author I could find who wrote about them was Holly Black. Who is a talented writer and I envy and respect her success, but that just wasn’t the kind of story I wanted to read, yknow? She’s too edgy, and the love interests are... that. 

I’d sat on “the fairy story” for years at that point, but this powerful rage was the kicker to actually get me started. I was bitter and salty and figured that if nobody would give me what I wanted then I’d just have to make it myself.  I already had this source material that was funny and weird and deep and (as far as I could tell) totally unique, so I took it and ran with it! My friends gave me a lot of inspiration, because a few of them still remembered the fairy game, and they wanted to know when their characters would show up. So I’d send them chapters as I finished them, and we’d all get excited about stupid inside jokes and goofy names. 

10. What else about your book might pique a reader’s interest?

I think the deconstructive elements are the core appeal in Feilan. I have a lot of the trappings of standard high fantasy--the lost princess, the return of the evil, the big war, the chosen one--but they’re used with the intent of picking them apart to see what makes them tick. None of the elements listed are played entirely straight. 

The main cast is made up of mostly royalty, and their positions have Actual Responsibilities that motivate the plot and their character development instead of just being set dressing.

Female friendships and relationships are really important to the story, no boys will ever appear to derail character arcs at any point. 

One of the main characters (Violet) is a trans girl and I know people appreciate queer content

(most of the main characters are actually under the queer umbrella but it doesn’t really come up in canon since i have a lot of plot to deal with)

Sayara is a relatively unconventional character type (especially for a female protagonist), she’s ambitious and mostly confident in herself, and her conflict comes from the way other people treat her more than how she treats other people. She’s not forced to learn “humility,” she’s not forced to give up on what she wants. Instead she learns how to handle responsibility and move past naivety to realistic optimism, and how to achieve her goals without hurting other people by it. I feel like that’s a theme that should be way more common in YA fiction than it is right now. teenage girls are right about things sometimes!

i have Deep Worldbuilding(tm)

The magic system has categories and you can sort yourself. because we all know what’s really important here. 

I’m not going to tag anyone new in this, because I’m tired and I don’t have the energy, but if you want to pass on the challenge then feel free to say I tagged you! :)

#taz talks #tag game #feilan #i spent like a half hour fondly reminiscing on the fairyland LARPs halfway through this #what a time that was #i used to bring my friends over to my house and we'd carve swords in the basement out of scrap wood #and give them super dramatic names #mine were nightshade and maximinimum #ngl though maximinimum has a certain ring to it #and then we'd go out back and hit vines with the swords and get really excited if we successfully cut something #sometimes we colored on the swords with magic markers #i still want to know why we spontaneously decided we hated emily's dad lmao #it's not like warcraft was the problem #emily also played warcraft #and we did get really loud and obnoxious #but oh well #The Characters In This Story Bear No Deliberate Resemblance To Any People Real Or Imagined #except amalie and melalina. amalie and melalina are valid and i got permission. #oh also the recess game thing is why there are so few male characters #all the heroes are girls because it started as girls vs boys #and then when i developed the villains i replaced a lot of boring 2D male characters with more interesting complicated women #leaving behind just the handful of men who remain