The book gets written, scene by scene and moment by moment. I’ve taken to getting up early and really working at it. I don’t edit as I go any more. Getting the first draft out is more important. I’ll worry about the spelling and the grammar later. I’m a plotter too. Through and through.

The scene below is inconsequential really except for an exchange with Gadrial, the Gypsy who’s about to sneak up on our poor bard below and scare the living daylights out of him. Kenrati, is a difficult character to write as I don’t like him. He whines and he’s a coward. But I do understand him, he’s arrogant and self obsessed and difficult. People don’t listen to him because he bores them. His heart is empty. It makes him a pretty rubbish bard but actually a really interesting character to write.

I guess not all characters are heroic types. You have to have some balance, the world is full of a myriad of different souls and who would believe if they were all the same?

So here’s a scene, we’re at chapter 12 here I think. As always it’s a first draft.

Campfires and hot salty broth have caused Kenrati’s delicate disposition to want to rid himself of the food in the most expedient way. He’s wandered some way from the camp not wanting the others to hear the noises his arse is sure to be making, a dead weight laying on his stomach.

He makes his way through the trees. Damn gypsy talking about the world like he owned it. Kenrati is not a warrior or a scholar but he knows the teachings of the Chantry and he’s studied in the old archives with the original scripts from just a thousand years after the cataclism. Who did that old man think he was. Everyone knew the gypsies were not to be trusted. Possessed by Demons half of them, probably. They wouldn’t submit to giving up their children if they had talent like all the others. He is unsure why the Chantry tolerates it. Something about laws made when the Elanati had assisted in a war some thousands of years ago. They were left to manage their own when it came to the talents.

The world is changing, he smiles to himself and wonders how long before the Chantry manages to overturn the old laws. It’s said that the Gypsies are spreading some sort of plague because of their contact with demons as the talented have no watchers. He stubs a toe on a branch and curses under his breath. He giggles, now the language he just used wasn’t exactly fit for the Chantry either. He looks up between the branches of the trees’ in the clearing and looks for the constellations he learnt at Black Rock. Master Briggs, had hit their hands with a birch cane if they’d got even one stars name wrong. His memory hadn’t made him popular with the masters or the other students. He’d been hit with that birch cane across his hands and back a few times too, even though he’d never got a single test wrong. Something about teaching him humility. He’d never really been sure why those monks had hit him. Whatever they’d been trying to teach, he could never remember. He shivered lightly. He’d been eight when his parents had left him there. They’d thought him possessed by a Demon, his memory was so good he could remember everything he read and anything that was said with perfect clarity. It was the headaches that made them fearful and then the terrible fits.

He hadn’t been a popular child, he’d been fat and preferred the books in his father’s library, to playing with the other children.

For fates sake, the Easenters may use slaves but at least they gave their children up. Make sure the world remained safe from the underworld. His thoughts have taken him a little further than he’d like but there was nothing for it. He unlaced his trousers pulling at the string fastening, once loose he pushed the soft moleskin fabric down over his thighs and as he crouched he felt his bowels loosen, not a moment too soon, he thought.

Related articles

• Sam Lee: ‘There is a difference in the songs Gypsies sing’ (guardian.co.uk)
• Chapter Twelve: Conflict (allthemagick.wordpress.com)
• Look of the Day: Fun Gypsy (fabsugar.com)