merryriver

[merryriver]

Plot idea: Battle an Army of Giant Flying Praying Mantises

A sorceress’s village gets attacked by a swarm of giant flying praying mantises.

She is told by the elder sorceress as she dies to seek out the old queen of the sorcerers who vanished long ago.

The girl thinks that the queen might be her mother and is propelled onward by that hope.

As she tries to escape, an assassin overhears and kidnaps her so she can force her to take her to the old queen.

As they get to know one another and survive together from a terror stalking them along their path, they forge a bond that takes them from enemies to lovers.

When they find the sorcerer queen, she refuses to help them fight the Mantis Army. The Queen shows them the unstretched skin on her belly to prove she has never had a child.

The two girls don’t have long to be devastated before the terrifying Lich that had been chasing them since they left the village appears and carves the queen to pieces.

The undead figure reveals that she is the vanished queen, who went and killed the Lich King who had been making the Giant Mantis’. After she killed him she was possessed by the immortal souls of the Lich and fell into a trance with them fighting for dominance.

The battle that destroyed the village woke her, and she travelled there to survey its devastation. Fearing the worst, she tracked her daughter over her journey, only to keep scaring her off.

The other woman was a copy formed by the Lich King in order to use the queen’s reputation in a plot that tore the nations apart years earlier.

The real queen had died during the plot but was resurrected by one of her followers in secret. Once her undead form had been restored enough she left and killed the Lich King.

The two girls gently coax the Undead Lich Queen and companion spirits into helping them take down the current leader of the Mantis Army, whilst reminding the Lich not to take out all of humanity in the process.

As soon as she kills the Mantis Army leader the assassin stabs the Lich Queen in the back and declares herself the leader of the Mantis Army. The Lich Spirits go into the knife she killed her with, but she drops it before they can possess her.

The two girls engage in a heart-wrenching duel.

The assassin has a change of heart after delivering a fatal blow to the heroine, and grabs the knife to resurrect her as a Lich.

After she has revived, with the power continuing to pour into her, she states that she can feel herself losing control of her own soul. She begs the assassin to do something so she won’t end up sharing her mother’s fate.

The assassin stabs herself with the blade and absorbs the remaining half of the Lich spirits. With the power divided between them, they are both able to keep much more control over their own souls. They fly away into the night and become visible as a constellation of stars.

Verdict

Hmm. There’s lots of cool plot twists and room for dramatic emotions in this one, but I don’t know if I’m in love with it enough to keep fleshing it out. It could depend on the politics that the assassin, the Mantis Army, and the Order of Sorcerers are all caught up in to create an interesting backdrop to flesh out the character’s motivations.

[merryriver]

Wow, this is amazing advice. I'm going to have to try it

Tips for Writing a Difficult Scene

Every writer inevitably gets to that scene that just doesn't want to work. It doesn't flow, no matter how hard you try. Well, here are some things to try to get out of that rut:

1. Change the weather

I know this doesn't sound like it'll make much of a difference, but trust me when I say it does.

Every single time I've tried this, it worked and the scene flowed magically.

2. Change the POV

If your book has multiple POV characters, it might be a good idea to switch the scene to another character's perspective.

9/10 times, this will make the scene flow better.

3. Start the scene earlier/later

Oftentimes, a scene just doesn't work because you're not starting in the right place.

Perhaps you're starting too late and giving too little context. Perhaps some description or character introspection is needed before you dive in.

Alternatively, you may be taking too long to get to the actual point of the scene. Would it help to dive straight into the action without much ado?

4. Write only the dialogue

If your scene involves dialogue, it can help immensely to write only the spoken words the first time round.

It's even better if you highlight different characters' speech in different colors.

Then, later on, you can go back and fill in the dialogue tags, description etc.

5. Fuck it and use a placeholder

If nothing works, it's time to move on.

Rather than perpetually getting stuck on that one scene, use a placeholder. Something like: [they escape somehow] or [big emotional talk].

And then continue with the draft.

This'll help you keep momentum and, maybe, make the scene easier to write later on once you have a better grasp on the plot and characters.

Trust me, I do this all the time.

It can take some practice to get past your Type A brain screaming at you, but it's worth it.

So, those are some things to try when a scene is being difficult. I hope that these tips help :)

Reblog if you found this post useful. Comment with your own tips. Follow me for similar content.

[merryriver]

Villianess Origin Story Idea

I saw a video on Tictok about someone talking how they'd love to read a villianess origin story. It got me thinking and I came up with an initial idea for a novel. I'm not sure if I can pull off someone who is truly evil, but complex, messy and dark here we go:

Using the snowflake method, here's a one-sentence summary:

A young priestess discovers the true nature of her violent war-god's religion and proceeds to leave it and burn it all down.

One paragraph summary:

A young priestess discovers the true nature of her violent war-god's religion and decides to leave. She tries to persuade her lover to leave with her but he refuses. She discovers a plot to kill him hatched by the other priests from her old cult and tries to save him, but he dies. Driven mad, she assembles an army and burns her old temple to the ground.

And here's the four paragraph summary (I'm supposed to do a paragraph for each major character first but shhh I'll do that next):

A young priestess discovers she was actually taken to live at the temple because she had been offered as a sacrifice to their god in excange for victory on the battlefield. Her life had only been spared because some of the priests had scrambled and found a loophole where she could remain an umarried priestess her whole life instead. She discovers that in order to use magic everyone has been trading pieces of their soul to their god, and that his promise of immorality is a fate worse than death. Mourning the loss of her magic, the emptyness in her soul, and what she thought was immortality, she tries to convince the young man she's fallen in love with to leave with her. He refuses, and she spirals into a mess of grief and rage. She falls in with a band of others who have abandoned their god and they try to convince her to lead an attack on the temple to slaughter all priests and wipe the religion out. She is not keen on being so violent and learns that the priests are planning to kill her lover as substitute sacrifice. She sneaks back into the temple to try to save him and persuade him of the truth one more time. She fails and her lover dies. Driven mad with grief, she gathers all who will listen into an army and storms the palace and the temple. Destroying all the sacred artefacts that allow the priests to commune with the War-god, she cuts off the source of their magic and demands the remaining ones surrender. In the process she also tries to resssurect her lover whose ghost returns long enough to whisper a sentence and give her some closure. Newly crowned the queen, she stares out into the horizon wondering how she can possibly rebuild the ashes of her kingdom on her own.

If there's a sequel it'll be her floundering around doing exactly that, with whispers of the War-god and others much more terrible returning...

[merryriver]

Whale vs Meteor

Priestess Jana strode through the temple ruins. The power that lay here was the only hope of protection from the meteor hurtling towards earth. She could see it approaching from the sky, the glowing tail stretched out behind it. Breathing deep, she approached the stone altar in the center of the temple.

She knew calling forth magic like this took a sacrifice of a hundred cows. Unfortunately she didn’t have the time to hunt down and butcher that many animals.

Waving her hand, she levitated the whale carcass she had killed and retrieved from the ocean. She hoped one animal the size of a hundred cows worked instead.

Moving it forward, she lowered it until it was touching the top of the altar. She kept the rest suspended in her grip, so she didn’t crush the altar from the weight.

Jana closed her eyes and murmured an ancient prayer of her people. At once tongues of purple and magenta fire erupted from the altar and enveloped the whale.

Not wanting to touch the whale carcass herself, she used her abilities and manoeuvred it up into the air. Mentally calculating the right trajectory, she launched it towards the meteor.

Permanent telekinesis had been a nice side effect of touching the last offering she made. But magnifying the force of anything she struck by a thousand-fold could stay on the whale.

Holding her breath, she watched them collide.

The magic from the altar fizzled out.

She looked up at the sky again with dawning horror. The meteor had blasted clean through the whale and was continuing towards Earth. The burning orange tail was now laced with purple.

“You’re an idiot,” she gasped. The destructive magic on the whale had transferred from the carcass onto the meteor. Before, the blast would have taken out her entire country. Now, the magic amplifying the blast would be catastrophic for the entire planet.

Jana flung every scrap of her telekinesis into stopping the meteor itself. She screamed as the size and sheer momentum of it was too much. There was nothing left to do other than brace for impact.

Civilisation was at an end.

Notes

Ok, we’re in a temple, we have an altar, we probably need some kind of sacrifice to save the planet from the meteor…

—> Prompt: Include a whale

💡 The whale can be the sacrifice

Ok, we’ve got our super-charged magic-whale-missile on its way to stop the meteor from hitting earth, we got this…

—> Prompt: Civilisation has come to an end

😢 Guess the meteor wins

(I used Taleforge to write this which gives you prompts as you go, instead of all of them at the start)

Anyway, I thought this scene was so bizarre I had to make a little cartoon to go with it. I hope you liked it!

Prompts

Location: A temple

Event: A meteor approaches Earth

Prop: Include a whale

Sentence: “You’re an idiot.”

Event: Civilisation has come to an end