UPDATE: The story has decided, as stories are wont to do, that it wants to be told in the first-person, as an epistle Shevatas writes on the road to Kuthchemes. It is addressed to a nameless woman of Shadizar. Kind of like Mary Renault’s The Praise Singer, but with blood and sorcery . . .
It is curious, is it not? Some say I have gained immortality already. Some say that, even without the conquest of the Bane of Thieves, the deeds of Shevatas of Zamora will be remembered in songs and poems for a thousand years.
But some men are liars.
If I fail, upon the morrow, I will become naught but a footnote in the tales of lesser men. A bit player, a sinister clown who seizes the imagination of the crowd for a moment, only to trip upon exeunt. Laugh, for I know you will, but this is the truth of the world. We are never more than our last theft.
Thus does the corner become a wide-open field. Thanks for the input, Gentle Readers!
This is the part where I should be telling you how my Hyborian Age novel, Shevatas, is coming along. Where I should be making excuses for not being finished yet, or where I declare I have this much left to write on it.
Yeah, that would be so much better than this post.
Let’s be honest: I’m not Freddy Fast-Fingers when it comes to writing. But, once I get going, I can get it done faster than GRRM or Rothfuss — which ain’t saying much. When all my creative ducks are in a row — when I know where I’m going and for what reason — I can write 60K words in about two months. Friends, Shevatas has no ducks. Those ducks ambled off and likely got hit by a car. I’ve started this rough beast 6 times, now. Started, stopped, trailed off muttering into my beard, shook my fist at the heavens, cried a bit, and started anew. “What’s the problem?” you ask. I mean, how hard can it be to turn a few facts in the opening chapter of “Black Colossus” into a 90K word novel? Right?
The problem is this: we know where and how Shevatas dies. That means there’s zero sense of dramatic tension in anything I might show him doing previously. His ultimate fate is a known quantity, and because of that little nugget of biographical information, the time and place of his death, we, the readers, know he's going to waltz through the fiend-haunted swamps of Zingara; we know he’s going to steal or acquire the iron-bound books of Vathelos the Blind. And we already know he’s going to crack the secret of the tomb of Thugra Khotan in Kuthchemes. In prose terms, this translates into a story with absolutely no tangible stakes. No mystery. His success in all of this is already a given and set in stone. Sure, he didn’t see that whole “not quite dead dead sorcerer” bit coming, but that has no bearing on our story.
For me, the writer, all of this conjures very intense feelings of meh. Regardless of how badass an opening chapter I write, or how much set-piece action I plot out, the end result is the same: the character dies at the culmination of his quest, and we already know he survives the trials leading up to that point. So, all that action is pointless verbiage.
But . . . But, what if there were a workaround? No, not changing anything canonical. Shevatas of Zamora still dies on the threshold of Thugra Khotan’s tomb, right as he sees his ambition realized. But what if the story I tell takes place after?
“Wait, what?”
Yes. After. Shevatas himself appears in epistolary fashion, in the form of a testament written while making that last journey to Kuthchemes. But, the primary character is his mentor, an old thief on his last mission, still a dangerous man — like a wolf grown long in the tooth; this heist, though, is to retrieve the body of his famed pupil, slain in the commission of the greatest heist of all, to crack the Bane of Thieves, the tomb of Thugra Khotan. Like The Hour of the Dragon, it can have elements of a travel story, down through Zamora and into Khoraja, where he sees the aftermath of the Battle of the Pass of Shamla; a cameo by Conan; warring factions of Zuagirs, cultists, and adventurers fighting over the treasure, the looming threat of a greater force as a Turanian squadron takes an interest in the gold, as does a Stygian princess (Kutamun’s sister). And him, trying to get Shevatas’s remains and get them home for a proper burial, one befitting the bastard son of Bel. ALL OF THIS framed by the last testament of Shevatas . . .
Not what Titan had in mind, but far better than a pointless, pre-ordained romp through three sentences culled from "Black Colossus".
Weigh in, Gentle Readers, and let me know your thoughts.
I said this on Discord, but you ought to trust your gut.
Feel strongly about this course and think it'll be the best way to tell a compelling story? Then bloody go for it!
Sounds like a great read