Tag: New Earth

Creativity Sessions writing process. Evening Satellite Publishing.

Character Sheet Template: My POV Character’s Details

On By Steven D'AdamoIn Fantasy, On StorytellingLeave a comment

Earlier the month, I discussed my current task to create character sheets for the main characters in my duology of novellas, Uprooted and New Earth. My goal with these is to fill out the flourishes of detail that I skimmed over when first writing these stories, to ensure my characters feel distinct from each other and can each be described consistently.

In that previous post, I listed what I thought would be useful details for me to pin down for each of my main characters. Because these stories deal with family trauma for a clan of extended family, there are a lot of characters. Not all of them will be as fleshed out as others, because some are more side characters.

What I ended up doing was using a basic character template for each member of the clan, and then trimmed it down based on how frequent or significant that character’s appearances are throughout the stories.

For today, I wanted to share the full character template for my primary, point-of-view character: Mikaela.

Character Sheet: Mikaela

Logline: “After her village is attacked, a woman must do everything she can to protect her family.”

Age: 29

Occupation/role: Herbalist and healer; Married to the clan leader with two children; caretaker for her mother-in-law

Physical: I actually don’t have a great description of Mikaela’s physical appearance, because she’s the POV character – it would be odd for her to describe herself, but I should be able to work in a few details naturally, such as the texture/length of her hair.

Clothing: A dagger made from a particular type of stone she wears around her neck tied with a leather cord. This was given to her by her husband as a wedding gift. This type of stone is rare, so this is a precious gift both in its value and its utility for Mikaela as an herbalist.

  • I’d also like to add one or two small details about the clothes Mikaela wears, so I will need to include those in my stories.

How Mikaela…

Thinks/feels about her life in her village: Mikaela likes her village, loves her clan relatives, and especially her clan-sisters, and believes they have everything they need to raise their children. She wishes she had some connection to her mother other than the herbalism Mikaela learned from her. She has not seen her own parents since she was married off to her husband and left the village she grew up in.

Gestures: sighs of exasperation; bites her bottom lip when deep in thought or anxious

What she wants: to raise her son to be a kind man like his father; to raise her daughter to be resilient and to pass her knowledge of herbs and healing onto her

What motivates her: Providing for her children and the rest of their family

What she fears: losing her family – Her husband or son getting killed in the hunt or a raid, her daughter being married off to a different village, never to see her mother again

Filling in the Gaps

As you can see, I have a couple of gaps to fill in for Mikaela’s character sheet, particularly in her clothing and appearance. Because she’s my main character, I wanted her character sheet to be the most detailed, but most of this information came naturally as I was writing.

I will not be going into this level of detail for every character. Even the four or five primary characters around Mikaela will not have this much detail, and the secondary and tertiary characters even less.

In any case, I’m looking forward to completing these and filling in the gaps in my writing as part of my ongoing revision process.

Let me know what you think. Would you take a different approach to character sheets?

Steve D

December Write Day: Finishing Slightly Stronger

On By Steven D'AdamoIn Fantasy, On PublishingLeave a comment

November was a long month, and only partially in a good way. Obviously, the start of the holidays and the chance to see some family was great. It was also very busy for me at work, which took a lot of the mental capacity I might have otherwise had to do things I’d like to do at home. Also, our entire family has been sick to some degree over the last three or four weeks.

So, as you may have been able to tell by the extra haiku I posted in November, rather than writing full posts, some of my goals went less than well.

Last Month’s Goals

  1. Read three books.
  2. Exercise every day and go to the gym twice per week.
  3. Write long-form at least 10 days.

Read three books?

Nope. I’ve finished one book and made progress on two others. I started listening to Black leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James on Audible, and it’s taking me longer to get into than I anticipated. I’m on chapter five, and I feel like I’m just beginning to understand what this story is actually like. I’m definitely going to continue reading it. It’s just taking me a bit longer to sink my teeth into.

I’ll probably end up picking away at other books during December in between chapters, just to stay on top of my reading goal. I need to finish one more book in December to meet my Goodreads goal of reading 26 books this year. I’m going to go out on a limb and say I will not finish Black leopard, Red Wolf this month, so I’ll finish something else to hit that mark.

Set my exercise/gym routine?

Also no. Again, busy month, and then getting sick did little to help my gym efforts. I feel like I’ve mostly been drained on energy the last few weeks, and I’m just now starting to feel normal again. I’m back on a more regular exercise routine now, but it’s been mostly yoga. I’m hoping to get back to the gym this week.

Write long-form at least 10 days?

No, and honestly, this goal was partially hurt by me not having the time/energy to write long-form blogs for a couple weeks. I definitely didn’t spend enough time revising New Earth, but I also just didn’t spend enough time writing or reading period in November.

I’m now nearly finished with this round of revisions for New Earth, and I’d like to have more specific goals for my revisions going forward. I’ll expand on that next.

Goals for December

  1. Read three books. Probably in the form of shorter novels.
  2. Exercise at least every other day and go to the gym more than once per week. I’m backing off last month’s goal a bit just to give myself some space during the holidays. Note that I’m saying go to the gym more than once per week. This basically means I want to average more than one gym trip per week. If it ends up only being six total, that’s still a win.
  3. Finish current round of revisions for New Earth. This should be doable, since I only have 15 pages or so to go.
  4. Create character sheets with physical descriptions/clothes for main characters. This applies to both Uprooted and New Earth, which effectively have the same primary characters. I’ve tried to incorporate this tuff organically in my revisions, but I don’t want it to feel forced, and I don’t want it to be inconsistent. So I’m going to create character sheets based on what I have so far, expand on them, and then use those to inform how I describe these characters throughout both stories.
  5. Outline New Earth for chapter structure. This is something I did with Uprooted that helped me understand the overall plot flow better, and restructure chapters in ways that made sense for the story. I’ll do the same with New Earth.

Note that I’m not focused on writing a certain number of days this month. I have specific tasks I want to achieve, and everything else is bonus. It may be that this is still too much for me to achieve in one month, but it’s just a different tack. We’ll see how it goes.

Steve D

The Herb Witch Tales – A Work in Progress Update

On By Steven D'AdamoIn On PublishingLeave a comment

It has been quite some time since I’ve spoken in any detail about my current works-in-progress on the story front. Part of the reason is likely that I’ve been preoccupied with other things in life over the past couple of months. Between travel, work, family time, and the most socialization I’ve had since the pandemic, I’ve been pretty busy.

And yet, here I have these two stories, nearing completion of their second drafts.

The Herb Witch Tales parts 1 and 2

For longer than I’d like to admit, I’ve been working on a two-part novel. Really, it’s two novellas that I will publish separately in ebook and together in one hardcopy volume. The reasoning there has more to do with marketing than anything else — people are more likely to read an ebook if it’s not too much of a commitment. It will also cost less to publish 90,000 words as one volume versus two separate volumes of 45,000 words each.

In any case, that’s what I’ve been aiming for.

Uprooted, The Herb Witch Tales #1 has been sitting in its third draft form for a few months at 48,000 words. I rewrote it mostly from scratch earlier this year, so it definitely needs some fine-tuning.

New Earth, The Herb Witch Tales #2 is in its second draft at 41,000 words. Achieving my word count goal for June would put me just shy of 50,000 words for this one. It also needs a healthy dose of fine-tuning.

So in the near future I’ll have two novellas just under 50k words each, and I’ll have a few large wrinkles to work out:

  • Add some more description to individual characters. I left out a lot of physical descriptions – quite unlike me – to expedite the writing process, but I recognize now that it makes some characters more difficult to distinguish, and now it may be difficult for me to go back and add those details in without sounding out of place in the narrative.
  • Ensure that specific details – like the style of dress for my characters’ culture – are referred to consistently.
  • Pacing. My overhaul of part 1 caused a similar overhaul of part 2, so I need to make sure their plots make sense independently of each other. If someone were to read only part 1, would the story and ending make sense to them without reading part 2?

I have a lot of work cut out for myself for these stories, but I’m pleased at how close I am to finishing the drafting process. From here, it will be revisions of each story individually and of the 1+2 volume in total.

Next, Next Steps

It’s been difficult for me not to think about my next full-length novel. The Warden of Everfeld: Legacy will be the sequel to my first (and so far, only) published novel, The Warden of Everfeld: Memento. I had written about 60,000 words of a first draft a couple years ago before shifting focus to what I had hoped would be a much quicker writing process for The Herb Witch Tales.

Turns out I can’t write and publish a full-length story every year. Oh well. I am definitely excited to return to Legacy and my favorite character I’ve created. But I want to finish what’s in front of me first.

So, my medium-term goal, say, through the end of this year, is to get The Herb Witch Tales #1 and #2 into a publishable state. Not to publish them, mind you. I just want to have polished drafts that I can consider publishing in the longer term, perhaps once I’ve really picked up and made new progress on Legacy.

We’ll see. I’m excited, and also just enjoying the grind, for once.

Steve D