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@joelle-stone

Hi Joelle,

Whew! It has been a long and busy week.
Trying to catch up on responding to posts.

So, let me clarify a little.  These snippets of scenes are extracted from anywhere in a longer work, so they will often be introduced without context or backstory.  We are just looking at the intrinsic value of a single scene, which may cause some confusion, but the fact that it piques interest in what has gone before or will follow after is in itself a good sign.
Every element should evoke in a reader a hunger and desire to understand and want more information.  This is the mortar that connects each brick of a story to the next one and ultimately and collectively builds the complete structure.

Each part brings value to the whole.  These are flashes and glimpses.  A firework in the dark.

So, now that I have this scene put out there, and you graciously provided this valuable and golden feedback without any preconception, I can now freely speak to it.  This is one of the many powerful gifts that come out of this fun exercise.

My cast of characters, occupying the fantasy realm of the Mid-World in my WIP, is comprised of four groupings.

1. Mid-Worlders – those humans born in the Mid-World

2. Half-Men – a creature group of beings who are half-human and half of something else (animal, fish, insect, plant, or a combination of these subgroups)

3. Supernatural metaphysical beings born of ethereal fire rather than natural water.

4. Surface Worlders – human beings pulled out of Earth time and gathered together into a shared “Fellowship” to be part of a quest to bring about a prophecy and themselves be transformed by the journey.

The scene provided are characters from the fourth group.

The speaker, Main Character, is a broken man, who is called to lead this group of Surface Worlders to recover a lost stone that is part of the fulfillment of the quest they are called to.  He is a man of many secrets and is struggling with his own worthiness to be tapped to lead this group of newcomers into The Mid-World.  He is a much more humble man than he used to be, for he is the only one of the group of new arrivals that have been to the Mid-World before and joined a company to pursue the quest wonder a different leader. A man who he betrayed, and that broken trust led to the graver danger in the Mid-World’s overall present condition. Powerful enemies who rule the lands do not want the prophecy to be pursued that will uproot their strongly held control and reverse the balance of power.

This humbled and guilt-ridden man has learned the value of contrition and it has caused him to listen more to the personal stories of those he must lead, protect, inform, and guide through the dangers ahead he is partly responsible for.  He is a leader who holds tentatively to his calling.  He fears his own failure and fears what might happen to those he is given if they were to pursue their own agendas and distrust him, as he once did.

His name is Brian, because there is a great deal of my own personal real-life struggle of finding God’s will invested into this character.  It is a humbling experience to give a character your own name, and there is a vulnerability to that and risk of doing so, but I feel led to do this.  To be open and honest.  To show flaws that connect my own humanity to him.

There is another character in the story named Begglar, though that is not his given name as he once had it in the Surface World.  The man is fiercely Irish, though I too often render him in an English-sounding voice when reading his character’s dialogue.  His name “Begglar” comes from his son’s inability to pronounce his given name when the young lad was just learning how to talk.  Begglar was part of the prior quest that Brian caused to go awry, though he has forgiven him for it, he has not forgotten it entirely.  Begglar has his own secret betrayals that make him more understanding than most, and out of that, these two men have maintained a certain bonded friendship of mutual understanding.  It is to Begglar’s Inn that Brian leads the company, after their first-night camping (in ruins and a rocky grotto) in the Mid-World after leaving the mysterious Oculus portal (one of seven in the Mid-World) they all came through to the Mid-World’s sandy beach and its vast eastern sea.
Begglar refuses to call the main character “Brian” but rather insists on calling him “O’Brian” with such persistence that the others eventually do so as well, yet they call him “Mister O’Brian”.  There is a playfulness in this that “Brian” accepts as part of learning to be a little more tolerant and good-humored like Begglar is.  Begglar proves to me a stoic friend, that helps give “O’Brian” more confidence in his calling, rather than in his “fears of what if.”  Brian’s insecurities are made more clear in Chapter 1, so it would have been redundant to include them in this scene that needs to be focused on the young girl.  She is primary in this scene, so I did not want to detract from that.  Brian’s job was to listen, not judge, and let her express what fears and burdens she needed to in the privacy of their quiet conversation.  I deliberately avoided getting too much in his head.  The scene that follows this one, however, does provide his sad reflections on what she shared.  What the girl needed most, was what she was not often given back in her Surface World life–a listening ear.

Yes. That was a prior scene.  It happens during their (Surface Worlders)  first encounter when they approached the Inn owned by Begglar and his wife Nell.  Begglar has company in the dining hall, so Brian and the others wait to announce their arrival and try to see who the “company” might be, so they eavesdrop. Literally. Begglar had devised a “listening corner” to spy on the Xarmnian troops when they would commandeer his Inn and order him and Nell and their son out, for private meetings. Brian takes advantage of that secret and gains more info, but also spots a hidden Troll within the room, also gathering info on these “traveling strangers”, for more nefarious purposes.  Brian and company realize what is happening and that if that Troll escapes and gets back to whomever he reports too, if would put them all in grave danger, both to Begglar and his family, the strangers within, and to the plans for their taking up the quest again.  When the Troll attempts to escape the dining hall through a fireplace flue, Brian and the company must make a quick decision, and they do. They need to capture and subdue it before it goes into hiding.  That confrontation is where this girl finds out a nasty secret about Trolls in the mysterious Mid-World.  They have a way of seeing into a victim’s mind every lie that has been told to them and using these lies to assault them mentally until they back off.  This ability of the Troll’s dark nature (derived from what transformed them) can only occur through prolonged eye contact in which the Troll’s eyes turn black.  The only lies that work, however, are the lies a person secretly believes about themselves.

“Swag-ness” aside, I felt it might have been a distraction to shift focus to Brian, especially in such an emotionally intense scene.  It needed to be about her, not him.

Ha! Perfectly understand. Swords and fighting are coming though. Those are ahead, but I wanted to show an empathetic scene for the time being.  There is a character that actually says, “When do we get to fight?!” 😂 So I am building up that and teasing it out a little more.  There are violent scenes. Some I hesitate to share.  One of them is on a frozen lake, with bizarre monsters pincered into the ice…. [Well, that’s in book 2 (already written, but needs edits)]

There is a strange “Mid-Worldian” reason that full names of the Surface Worlders [only, except for Brian and little Miray] are not given up-front to Brian, in particular, that has to do with their tenuous presence there.

Two of the other Surface Worlders’ do give “Brian” their names.  One happens immediately after the Troll fight.  And the other is this girl, who finally does give her name in departing.  [I’m sorry it is not “Gwen”, though I have a precious cousin named “Gwen”].

If I can get at a few more others to participate in this “Audio Cinema” exercise, I might just be persuaded to post the very scene that reveals it. 😜

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