You may have noticed the Wolfbreed counter slowing down. (Only about 5000 words since the last post) This isn’t because I’ve slacked off… I just found the proper period in which to set my story, and I’m in the midst of re-writing. I can’t really put off the re-write, because of the way I work. While I’ve written some novels non-linearly, I’m most comfortable growing a story from the beginning, and making a discontinuous jump from one setting to the other in the middle of a draft just wouldn’t work for me. Not to mention I would more than likely in that case cram exposition into the latter part of the novel that rightly belongs in the first two or three chapters. (i.e. by 40K words in, the reader better have a good feeling for the setting, or I’ve screwed up royally.)
Oh, you’re probably curious where I chose to set it; Wolfbreed is now set in the mid-13th century in the beginning of the Baltic Crusades where the Teutonic Order is busy wiping pagan Prussia off the map. Don’t be embarrassed if you’re unfamiliar with the period. Most medieval history in English glosses over this bloody decades-long period of history something like this; “In 1225 Conrad of Masovia requested aid from the Teutonic Knights in Prussia. By 1291, after subjugating the population and turning Prussia into a monastic state directly under the authority of the Pope, the Teutonic Knights used it as a base of operations to launch attacks against pagan Lithuania.”
