Vence hires a mercenary

Another meta writing post. Yesterday I finally finished a scene between Vence, Ril, and Ali inside the castle. I know you don’t know who those people are, but I’ll get back to them. Chronologically, it is the most recent part of the story, but I kept stopping in the middle and going back to write other scenes, because frankly I’m not precisely sure how all these pieces are going to fit together so that Elenora can retake the castle. (This despite having written a nice outline for the whole story, which has been utterly useless after I passed the halfway point.) Anyway that was about 500 words, which I wrote in bits and pieces during the day.

The rest of my writing time went into another scene fairly early in the story, which I’ve had on my todo list for a while. Remember I mentioned Elenora’s mercenaries last time? Very early in the story, Elenora went to her old friend Vence Rollo and asked him to hire a mercenary force for her (because Vence is a bit of a rogue-ish character who has the connections for that kind of things).

The scene was from Vence’s POV, where he found and hired a man named Benton to put together and lead Elenora’s mercenaries. Chronologically it’s Vence’s first POV scene, and the introduction to Captain Benton, who has a relatively major role later in the story. (He’s one of those unplanned characters that just pops up out of nowhere.)

So I was thinking about how I could possibly make this scene even remotely interesting, because let’s face it, two people talking in a tavern is just not exciting. Excitement comes from conflict, and the only conflict I could think of was some kind of past history between these two. And since Vence has sort of a womanizing reputation, it had to be a woman, whose name was Hilena (or maybe it was Helina, I can’t remember). I didn’t go into many details about what happened, because it doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this story. I just put in enough for the reader to know it was an awkward situation, and that it left enough of a scar on Benton that he still remembers it.

During the scene I also discovered more about the mercenaries, who have been sort of nameless, faceless bodies up until now. Most of them come from a company who calls themselves the Fireswarm, and they are skilled veterans who would be no match for any of the city guards, who Benton called “just kids.” (Knowing that little detail means I will  need to revise a later scene where the mercenaries get roflstomped.)

Overall I wrote around 1,900 words, and even finished before 9:00, so it was a pretty good writing day.

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• Meta Writing