Fornicating Badgers: How I Came To Re-Write Book the First Time

Hello again, friends!

This is the first part of my politics post-sorry it has taken me so long! In this post I will be mostly addressing my experience incorporating politics into the EBR, while in the next one I will share some general thoughts about politics in fantasy. So, if this sounds interesting to you...welcome aboard!

Before we get started I feel like I should probably 'fess up to something. Politics used to bore me to tears in both real life and literature. When I started reading fantasy I wanted quests, magic, and action. I'd skip over scenes that talked about political intrigue and strategy to find out what characters were doing. The first drafts of DragonTouched really reflected this attitude. I've said before that they were an amalgamation of what I love about fantasy and that's pretty accurate. They were fantasy's grab-bag, or perhaps more accurately, fantasy's junk drawer.

However, the one thing that I was not at all interested in including was politics. I wanted to focus on a main character (Wren) and her supporting cast of awesome (but not-as-awesome-as-the-central-Sue) characters. Kings and such were there for plot convenience. They were there to spawn “Secret Princes Raised As Farmboys” or to be fought against because they were Evil, or to knight the Sue for being such a “speshul snowflake”. Governments were there so I could have interesting names and cool cities to describe, not to actually do anything.

One day, after patiently listening to more babbling about all the super-cool things that Wren was going to do, Amelia asked me a really practical, cogent question about the governing bodies within the EBR (sorry, Amelia, I don't remember what it was but it came from you so I know it was practical and cogent). I was stumped. I had pretty much thought as far as “kings and queens are cool and get to wear crowns and stuff”. Amelia was very kind about my startling lack of knowledge about my own world and politely suggested that maybe I should think about some of these things.

I think I really got started addressing those issues one day when I was working on drawing maps of the EBR. It had taken me six or seven tries to actually get a map that I liked (and one that was geographically possible, for the most part), and I had gone and drawn two or three of them for different purposes. One was to sketch out borders, one was to hang on the wall so that I could easily reference it at all times, and one was to mark out the ranges of all my monsters so that I wouldn't have something really random like a fihuri popping up in Windajiona.

As I was working on the monster one map I started wondering how the presence of say, crop-eating unicorns would effect commerce in that part of the world, which led to larger questions about trade in general. I started drawing roads and trade routes and making lists of what the principal exports of each duchy would be. This, in turn, led to a lot of thoughts about politics. Why was the EBR structured the way that it was? Why duchies instead of kingdoms? What was the purpose of the titular “Overlord”? Were the Realms a peaceful place?

This was not a can of worms that I had opened. This was a Pandora's Box of relentlessly fornicating badgers: ornery, obnoxious, and determined to reproduce. Each question spawned more questions and, what was “worse” was that each question exposed the existing holes in the current story structure. Soon, book came to resemble a colander it was so full of holes. The only thing left was Wren, and that was because she was too big a sue to fit through any of them.

It was then that I knew what I had to do; scrap it and start all over. It was a harrowing decision because that was when the story was at its most WFSIMSS¹ stage. However, a really cool thing had started to happen as I asked myself all these questions. I found myself getting more and more interested in my world for its own sake and less for how it was my escape. Those of you who started reading my blog at the beginning know that the EBR started off as escapist writing for me in an effort to “deal with” my depression. I'm not ashamed of how it started, but I'm really glad that it took the turn that it did. It is a much more interesting story now and a lot of that is because I started looking at the political environments of the EBR and trying to treat them as “realistically” as I could.

All that being said about my own work, I do have some thoughts as to why politics are often structured the way they are in “traditional epic fantasy”. Please join me next time for what should be the last political post. :)

1Wish Fulfillment Self-Insert Mary Sue Story