My Writing Journey: "Payidzos", Part 2

For the longest time, I was having trouble making progress in this story. The story is divided into five parts, and after breezing through Part 1, I faltered in Part 2.

I think my problems stemmed from a feeling of lack of action. My heroes had finally stepped into Payidzos, and it felt like immediately, the set up of the story should end and the action should begin in earnest. It felt like the heroes should immediately be fighting for their lives.

But that didn't really work well with the story. In terms of word count, I was still only about 14000 words in at the beginning of Part 2. The story needed time to build the tension before the actual fear-for-your-life action started (although, to be honest, I don't think I've done a good job yet either building up the tension, or outlining the fear-for-your-life action).

So that meant that I was stuck in Payidzos, trying to figure out how to move the story forward in an interesting way. I wanted to incorporate Mo Sior Lop and the lop-garôs, but they weren't really in danger. I wanted to incorporate the three witches, but there's certainly something that feels unnecessary about Lena's trip to Sarviri to steal from them. But I wrote it anyway, made it through, and now, finally, the interesting part starts.

The next two parts are the parts I'm most excited about. Part 3 takes the heroes through Tèrra-Nêre to face lo Cremoclo, a figure from the lore that genuinely scares me (despite not being a miner). And if the heroes make it past him, they next meet Renet, the trickster fox who makes appearances all across French folklore.

And in Part 4, the heroes finally confront the gods. While I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to write that confrontation, I know the general idea, and I know how that part ends, and that excites me.

Then we get to Part 5. You'd think I'd be more excited about the climax, the final battle, and the conclusion, but I actually don't really know how that one will go. I have a general idea, of course, but specifics? No clue. There's a big battle. But how is the battle going to play out? It's especially hard as I don't really know how to write good battle scenes, or at least not epic ones like the last battle has to be.

And I really don't know how the story concludes. What happens after the battle? There are a few ways that could go, and I don't have any preference. I'd even go so far as to say that I don't actually like any of the ideas I've come up with so far.

So we'll see how that goes in probably a few months (if not more), but for now I'm just so happy to finally have entered Part 3.