With Pride by Megan Derr, Guest Post, Review & Giveaway!

Less Than Three Press bannerplain
OH MY GOD, oh my god!! Hey guys! Look, look we have Megan Derr… I know MEGAN DERR *fans self* Megan has blessed our site with her incredible, new release With Pride which is from her brilliant series Princes of the Blood *squee* (okay let me just calm down *deep breath*). Megan tells us not only how Princes of the Blood began but also how they went from ficbit to an epic high fantasy and she has a incredible giveaway where one of you lucky readers will win a copy of With Pride. So I will let you have a look at what Megan has to say, have a look at my review and don’t you dare forget to leave a comment for a chance to win this brilliant book! 😉 ~Pixie~

Megan Derr:   

Expanding a Story.

As previously stated, Princes of the Blood actually began as a couple of really short ficbits I posted to my LJ and later moved to my website (one of them, anyway. Dalibor’s never got moved; I no longer remember why).  So how does a 3700 word ficbit turn into a trilogy totaling 188,000 words?

Lots of caffeine and alcohol to start.

But the first part is figuring out if there’s more story to tell. Luckily for me that question already had a firm yes.

From there, it’s time to cannibalize the original 3700 words to figure out what can be kept and transformed and what will have to go because it worked in short form but will not hold together in long form.

Kristof and Håkon not getting along? Kept. That was the easiest part in the end.

Other bits had to go:  Kristof not understanding how the Princes work mostly had to go, though a small element was retained. Elements of the marriage and why Kristof was marrying him had to change. Hackle got changed to Håkon because Hackle didn’t quit fit anymore.

Pieces retained and fleshed out:  the concept of Håkon needing special blood, that he’s at least in part a demon. There were other things discarded or kept, but that would be spoilery.

So, roughly decided upon what is getting kept, it’s time to move on to expanding those bits.

Most obviously were Kristof and Håkon’s roles. One a paladin, the other royalty. That was changed. Princes of the Blood aren’t royalty, merely the most powerful figures in the Legion. The Legion was the next thing to come, built out from the way I designed the Princes, the way they need pure blood, etc.

A lot of world building elements are thought of all at once. Laying it out makes it look all 1,2,3,4 but really it’s more like 1T56WX3AB9CDG2.

As all of that got sorted out, I had to build the rest of the world: religion, magic system, other bits of the culture. Given they live in the fallout of an ugly war, and everything is shaped very sharply around surviving all the nightmares that plague them, this made for a lot of fun. People are slaughtered by the hundreds, even thousands, often, so keeping the population up is extremely important. You don’t see a lot of women and children (sadly) because they’re kept locked away and safe. Polyamorous marriages are fairly standard (in the beginning of OLR, Raffé is engaged to a man who already has two wives and is hoping that he’ll get along with all of them; Korin is married to Telmé, but they’re good friends with the woman with whom Korin had a daughter; the kings always have 2-3 wives).

Little things matter too. This world tells time in minutes and hours, but they mark the hours with names. Only a few of them are mentioned in the books, but I have the full list. I know the crest and colors of every force within the Legion, and all the Houses.

And all the demons etc. that come into play aren’t entirely made up, either. I spent a lot of time picking out the demons upon which to base various Princes. I drew a map, I worked out the Reaches, I figured out how they survive when pure blood is so hard to come by and people die frequently and often.

After all the little pieces were fleshed out, and I had a rough outline, laying the story out was easy. The original ficbit for Håkon and Kristof was really only the end of their story. So going back to the start, figuring out how they met and what happened from there … expanding the story really wasn’t hard.

If anything, the hardest part of doing something like this is realizing that no story is set in stone. Be it editing, rewriting, or expanding, a story is not a static thing, set down once and never allowed to change. Some of my stories I’m content to leave as they are, but I have no doubt that somebody read it and went ‘I could do this better’ or ‘yeah, but what if I did it this way’.

And they definitely should.

Other stories are like The Lost Prince. Fun as it is, once I said ‘let’s see what else you got,’ it turned into Princes of the Blood and gave me 188,000 words.

As ever, writing is less doing and more doing as one is told.

Much love to everyone for reading my ramblings.

Megan Derr - With Pride

With Pride comes out April 16th from Less Than Three Press (third party vendors will follow after about 24 hours).

Of Last Resort can be found all over. In Despair comes out July 9th.

Continue reading “With Pride by Megan Derr, Guest Post, Review & Giveaway!”