This is delayed as I was more excited about finishing November and the word count I had achieved.  However, it’s worth looking back like I did with the End of War series and consider what went well and what didn’t.  Earlier posts certainly touched on some of the struggles I experienced getting through Crossing the Halls of Falden.  While there was difficulties imposed by life that impacted my writing, at the end of the day there were simply parts of the story I wasn’t always in the mood to tell.

What was interesting to realize though was that not wanting to write those smaller parts conflicted with me wanting to write the story in its entirety.

I worried when I was struggling to write parts of Halls of Falden that I was writing a story that wasn’t worth telling.  However, the tale of Quartes and his struggles while underneath the Hendarks I think is really important for the character.  The flashbacks to his time with Elhandriel were not something I originally intended to write, and watching Quartes struggle with solitude, paranoia via sleep and sensory deprivation, and his own regrets was a challenge and but interesting for better defining the character.  On the more world building side, the Hall of Serijo and the effect of its loss of illithimar making the low gravity realm, and then designing a dragon that would embody the twisted nature of that hall was fun (even if I do still tend to want to avoid battle scenes).  The fight helped me define the strengths of the Shards of Lehn, and also Quartes where he doesn’t have a straight up advantage as he often would against mortals or lesser dragonkin.  Meaning the fight had value beyond just spectacle.

It has also been a long time since I’ve done a solo Quartes story.  While I very much like my Fey, his stoic nature and strength inherent with his role in the Cycles has long had me convinced that he doesn’t make a very interesting character on his own.  In fact, I first paired him with Keto because I figure the dichotomy between the two would be interesting (and we’ve seen where that has led me).  Halls of Falden proved to me there is a way to tell interesting stories with just Quartes (though not that I plan to do many of them).  There is at the end of the day a certain brokenness to the Last Landian and a story showing his struggle to deal with that, and how his general failure there will put him in dangerous situations, does create a lot of friction that helps to give him interesting stories to tell on his own.  It’s a good lesson about telling stories that work best for your characters.

Ultimately, I will say that Halls of Falden is certainly not my best writing.  There’s certainly pacing issues but, as I noted while working on it, it taught me a lot about pushing through and also bore a lot of fruit for helping me to expand out my setting (both apparent and for future use).  Given time I think it’s a story that could be polished to be a work I’d be very happy with, and so I am happy that I wrote it.  It gives me faith for pushing through on even longer and more complex stories (like say something novel length) but I’m also looking to spending some time with some simpler stories with the Fey and Bard for a little bit.

Let me know your thoughts if you have a moment, or even something you’d be interested to see in the future.

Go forth and do good things,

Sean