Tag: Ethan

Side Quests

September 16, 2021

Side Quests

Have you ever played those role playing video games (yes, I know they are called RPGs) where you are a character (or in the case of my personal favorite, Star Ocean, the Second Story, you are several characters)? Your job is to get from A to B solving stuff along the way so you can accomplish B successfully.

There are these fun little diversions called “Side Quests” that entice you to sidetrack. And yes, I do every side quest I can possibly do! I love these characters (I mean, seriously, who doesn’t love Dias’ tragic backstory and crazy loyalty?) and generally the side quests develop or highlight the character or relationship of one or more characters.

My mind does that to books too.

After watching “The Neverending Story”, I told my Daddy, “every story I like is neverending to me.” He laughed. But case and point: my girls and I are reading and/or listening to an engaging series by Flanagan called “The Ranger’s Apprentice.” I’m way ahead of them and dying trying to not give the story away!! We debate character, backstory, possible romantic interests, who will die, etc. In my head, I have taken bits of veiled hints and imagined child and teen escapades that Will and the other wards may have had. I dream of the life of Will’s parents. I wonder at Halt’s story. (Get to book 9 to answer part of that previous one.)

For me, “The Ranger’s Apprentice” is a neverending story.

Switch to writer brain…

Now, my uncanny love of fleshing out my characters with backstory and flashback experiences bombed when I had to cut more than 80% of “Web of Deception” during editing. While I perceived I was getting good at hinting instead of laying everything out, (aka learning to cut stuff) one of my proofreaders came up clutching the original first book in “Brantley Station Saga” and moaned, “what is the pirate baby story?“

…book one became book three because I needed to tell Ethan’s origin story in “Pirate Child” and “Little Thief.” It also gave me opportunity to build up and flesh out a secondary character in the series who becomes one of Ethan’s primary influencers.

A side quest turned into two additional books.

Now I’m constantly working on various huge books. One is codenamed “curse” and is actually an evil backstory. I have a spin-off of what may turn into actual books someday written to help me understand my characters better… All are backstory for one character in “curse.”

What side quests teach me about life is that often the character building moments in our lives come from what we perceive as inconsequential incidents. We may not understand at that moment that these side quests are really pivotal moments.

Anyway:

Enjoy life! With all of the bumps, dips, side quests, and shifts along the way.

Find your joy!

Thank you for reading!

Type at you later…

~Nancy Tart

Brantley Station Brain

October 19, 2020

Brantley Station Brain

You know, I’ve been a bit behind on posting blogs the past two weeks. This is because my brain has been in Brantley Station and Feli’tor and Devonia and Nilon. We just finished moving. I finally got my computer fixed after not having it for over a year and a half! (Writer in me dying because I have to borrow a computer and it’s never on my schedule!) The first weekend when we were done moving, I sat outside on the front porch watching Jillian, Lucas, and Thea play and wrote 5 pages in a notebook in my tiny, space-saving cursive with zero margins and front and back top to bottom. Louis came out and said, “you need a computer.”

It is also time.

While I was feeling dark, it was hard to write about happiness and peace. I did some freaky villain handiwork writing that almost freaked me out, but I couldn’t touch my children’s books that are bright and sunshine. I just couldn’t get back into their joyful world despite trying.

Now? I feel free again. I am finding joy everywhere. I am getting to play legos with Lucas and Thea, sit outside in the hot Florida wind and watch them play like the wild crazy children they are, read other authors, and build train tracks and work outside with my family.

Now my brain is back in my worlds.

I’m working on The Apprentice, which will be the fourth in the Brantley Station Saga following The Protector. In this book, Ethan will face another odd change and meet a new set of characters brought by the new cycle! I stepped back into Ethan’s shoes and wiggled my toes around. I’m so excited to introduce Makayla! (Sneak peek will come soon!) I put on Ethan’s determination to find positivity in every task. I looked at the new challenges through his perceptive logic. I felt his warmth at blooming friendships as he understands the connections he has never really noticed. The narrative shifts a little as Ethan begins to see his world just a little differently.

So I’m officially in Brantley Station Brain right now. My dreams are even about Ethan, Makayla, and Corey!

With so much flowing onto the keyboard (my keyboard! yippee!!), I’m hoping to have the final released just after Thanksgiving… in time for Christmas!

Got to go as my Brantley Station Brain is demanding I get back to the pilot barracks and finish Ethan’s next step!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you later!

~Nancy Tart

Meet Brummen

June 21, 2018

Meet Brummen

Chef Brummen of Brantley Station didn’t start life dreaming of being the head chef in a mining colony more than a mile below sea level.

He began as a simple Grenadan lad.

Brummen studied and worked hard as a child and joined the Grenadan Guards at the earliest age allowed; twelve.  Brummen steadily and slowly ascended in rank until he was twenty-eight.

One night, he and his fiancée attended a party with several other Guards.  A Guard with whom Brummen already had conflict, was thoroughly drunk and insulted his fiancée.  Brummen reacted in anger and punched him.  This strike resulted in the insulting Guard’s death.  Brummen sank into a depression which expressed itself in a growing narcissism.

Brummen was tried by court martial.  The result would have been execution except that one member, who had been mentoring Brummen and watching his career, suggested banishment instead.

A friend suggested that he apply for a position on the newly designed underwater mining colony as it would be under Guard regulation but was a Qualizidian operation.  Brummen’s fiancée spurned his invitation to join but Brummen was accepted as the head (and only) chef for Brantley Station.

Since his galley becomes the place unruly or disobedient Guards are sent, Brummen’s experience seems to prove his narcissistic view of humanity.  But when Brummen discovers a strange, oddly acting boy stealing from his galley, he finds himself drawn toward the child with feelings he had buried. Quickly, Brummen realizes Ethan is no pirate child thief, and instead of letting the world “follow its course” regarding the boy, Brummen intercedes to keep Ethan on Brantley Station.  He won’t admit it to anyone, but he even will try to claim the lonely child as his.

Learn more about Brummen and follow Ethan’s story in the Brantley Station Saga!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you later…

~Nancy Tart

Creating Characters : Brantley Station Saga

February 8, 2018

Creating Characters: Brantley Station Saga

One of the last set of characters I created were for a youth adventure series called “Brantley Station Saga.”  This entire set was built off of one comment by my Dad.  He was helping develop a website when he observed, “all of your series stuff is for girls.  Have you ever thought of writing for boys?”

Thought about it?  (Yes!  Web of Deception, The Living God, many other single stories, and most of my “in progress” works are aimed primarily at boys in middle and high school levels.)  However, he was right about one thing.  Outside of my rooster in the Adventures of Long Tail, there isn’t a main male character in the Ann, Mary, and Susan Mysteries or in Five Alive: Stories of the Funny Sisters.  Even in my Melacotia Saga books, although Jeremy Scott is a primary character, the books were written for my sisters to read and Sarah is the primary character.   

From there, I dove into the adventure world I’d dreamed of writing.  I developed Brantley Station using my futuristic model from the Melacotia Saga.  I created a narration storyline following an underappreciated unclaimed youth, Ethan.  (I started him at 14, with The Protector.  This changed when Rebeccah wanted the “Pirate Baby Story” in full.)

This jumping backwards did give me an opportunity to illustrate the origin and development of Ethan’s character.  (In these two first books, the spotlight is shared by Jamie, a young submersible pilot.)  Ethan is a shy boy who aims to please.  His melancholy personality pushes him to perfection, which makes him a good worker, and enables him to be content to be invisible.  Ethan’s goal through his life is to keep unnoticed.

I imagined this child whose traumatic early childhood is scarred with death of his mother and the distance in grief of his father.  He had a close cousin who tried to fill this gap and cheer him up, but only a few months afterward, Ethan is kidnapped by pirates.  He becomes essentially a slave.  Because of several injuries while he was fighting with his captors and Ethan’s shoving his “dream-memories” of his earlier life away as a coping measure, Ethan doesn’t remember anything before the  pirates.  He manages to live through this for a long unknown amount of time – a few years – until he’s trying to hide from an abusive pirate in the captain’s docking sub.  This providential hiding place sends him to Brantley Station.  Here he ends up trying to fit in because he has a primal desire for the deep.  He is scared by wild stories of “topside” by the military police at the station.  Ethan finds himself taking up the lowest position and hiding from most people by keeping himself busy with work.  He works diligently and easily learns new tedious tasks; by nature he hates disorder so many of his tasks end up being cleaning jobs.

I imagined how his character and personality, originally Melancholy-Phlegmatic, could have changed with experiences and time.  Was he distanced from people by his mother’s death when he felt his father’s dealing with grief by retreating?  How did he keep his people-pleasing, obedient, truthful, positive character amid the abuses of being held captive?  How does being forced to live in the guard barracks affect him?  Ethan chooses to stay honorable because of voices he hears from his past – he calls them “dream-memories.” I gave Ethan an inner strength that helps keep him grounded.

I created a memory that would connect him with his past – using a book read nightly by his older cousin from which Ethan recites passages and a song Ethan’s mother used to sing which the boys created their own new words for.

In creating Ethan, I wanted to craft a believable, dynamic character.  Each of the secondary characters like Bria Addison, Corey Skitter, Makayla Ervin, Chef Brummen, and Victor Potter are also carefully designed to be as realistic as possible.  You can read about these members of Brantley Station in the young adult series, Brantley Station Saga.

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

 

Meet Bria Addison

August 14, 2017

Meet Bria Addison

Today we get to meet Bria Addison, the eldest child of Dr. Drake and Dr. Alayna Addison.  Bria was born over a mile below sea level in the mining colony of Brantley Station.  Her father is the chief medical officer on Brantley Station.  Her mother is the chief Botanist.  Bria shares her mother’s passion for the flora and fauna of the station and is one of Dr. Alayna’s apprentices.

Bria has a younger brother named Benjamin.  Ben likes helping with plants and is in charge of one of the chicken flocks.  Bria’s youngest siblings are twins.  Kaya and Kevin act like their older siblings’ shadows!  Kaya usually follows Bria around and helps with the plants and animals.  Kevin usually follows Ben around; unless Ben is following Ethan.

Bria likes Ethan, who has always been nice to her.  She sometimes calls him her “big brother” though he isn’t.  Ethan treats her like a sister.  Often Ben and Bria seek out Ethan and help him clean something because he smiles a lot and knows a lot about the deep.  Bria loves to join Ethan at the Observation Deck to watch the Delivery Transport Shuttle arrive and depart every cycle.  She enjoys skating along the corridors afterward too.  Bria likes the way Ethan grins.

Bria is normally shy and reclusive.  She says little to those she doesn’t consider family.  Although she knows everyone on the Station, she avoids most places and tries to stay in the BioLabs.  Bria can be bold and is ferociously protective of her baby sister and brother.  She loves her underwater life!

You can read more about Bria and her family in the Brantley Station Saga books.  She is a baby in Pirate Child and Little Thief, but plays a much larger role in later books, starting with The Protector.

Thanks for reading!

Type at you later…

~Nancy Tart

Creating Darren

July 6, 2017

Creating Darren

One of the neatest parts about writing (for me, anyway) is creating people.  Maybe I take it too far, but I like to have elaborate backstories for everyone.  (For example: a character with a small part in “Web of Deception” has fifteen pages of notes on his family life, origin, habits, and history of how he rose to sit on the Myra’neen council!)  To give you some idea of how I create characters, I’ll give a simpler example:

Darren Blake is a member of the Grenadan Guards.  His parents own an inn in a small town two days’ travel from the capital.  His family consists of his father, mother, himself, and a set of twin brothers.  As toddlers, his brothers loved making muddy messes and rejected clean water.  Since his mother didn’t like mud in her inn, she would solicit Darren’s help in corralling and washing the twins every evening in the stable.  Darren hated this so much that when he left to join Guard service, he vowed he’d never wash a kid again.

Fast forward a few years.  Now Darren is a junior grade junior officer in the Guard ranks.  He is stationed at the underwater mining colony of Brantley Station.  He is low enough in rank to be unable to contest being placed “in charge” of Ethan when the pirate child is held in Guard custody until the council meeting.  Even though at first Darren appears just as callous as the majority of the Guards, his real character emerges as he realizes that Ethan is just as innocent as his own brothers.  Then Darren becomes Ethan’s guide, friend, and advocate.

I needed a character to bring the human side of the Grenadans into light.  This character needed to connect with Ethan despite being part of the Grenadan Guards.  In the long-term storyline, a positive connection early on was needed so that Ethan could reflect on at least one Grenadan as being good instead of evil.  As most of them, due to their militaristic viewpoint and cold, logical mindset, see orphans as weak links (unimportant, less than human) and are not in the least kind to Ethan.  In creating Darren, I had to take into account the lifestyles and culture of the Grenadans I’d created.  Darren would be, like all people, a product of his environment.

Darren appears only in the last half of Pirate Child and in the first chapter of Little Thief.  His character was also created to be temporary.  He is in Ethan’s life for less than two months.  Although his time spent is small, his impact on the way Ethan views the station is large.  This part of fiction is just as in real life.  Sometimes our connections with others may be very small (a nurse in an ER, a man on a bus, someone we stand in line with at a park, or a passing stranger who smiles at us when we are sad) but we remember them forever.

Be sure to check out Ethan’s story in the Brantley Station Saga and keep your eyes open for one short-term character named Darren Blake.  Ethan remembers him forever.

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

 

Capturing Places

June 24, 2017

Captured Places

Have you ever walked through a place you loved so much you drew scale drawings of it and built models?  I love architecture.  I plan each building and area – in most of my stories, even down to the plants and what color flowers are in season!

Once, I walked through a house with my parents.  This house was three levels with huge seat windows in every upstairs bedroom – the architecture of its large, open, bright rooms inspired the castle rooms in The Princess and the Swans.

The drab gray stone buildings in the K’vell training complex in Web of Deception came straight from a series of compact, functional, barracks-style buildings on an old property we explored once.

The Ann, Mary, and Susan Mysteries take place in my second-favorite childhood home.  The inside of that house is exactly as it is in real life – including the wrap-around second-floor deck and the loft-lookout bedroom on the third floor.  I added the aviaries, fields, and barn the way I wanted them (the only real-life outdoor structures in the stories are the dilapidated pool and the little next-door house) but even most of the bushes the girls hide in are on the real-life property.

In the Adventures of Long Tail, the chicken yard is exactly as we had it in the house Kimberly and Lucas were born in. (But the time stamped in those books is just before Jaquline was born.) Even the hen house is set up exactly as we had ours with the 4-level biddie brooder and incubator on top.

For me, it helps to visually see places in my worlds.  Lego bricks are great for scale buildings!  I even make maps and blueprints for most worlds and buildings so I never mess up my directions as I bounce from one storyland to another.  Continuity is very important to me (my perfectionist nature, I guess, but seriously… if Long Tail’s hen house was different each time, or if Ethan went down a different corridor each time to get to the Observation Deck, wouldn’t that be odd?)

Writing also helps me capture the best of places I remember (or dream up).  If I love a house, shed, barn, park, or yard layout, it will be in a book someday!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

Please Write More!

May 21, 2017

Please Write More About Ethan! (Brantley Station Saga)

      One of the issues with writing and being a perfectionist is this: I never view anything as complete!  I have hundreds of half-finished manuscripts in various sizes littering my “stories” folder.  Because I proof myself better in print than on a computer, I also literally litter the house with story proofs.  Sometimes the girls pick them up and read them.

“MOM!” I hear Rebeccah shriek.  I’m working on business finances and I know the little ones are asleep.  (PLEASE don’t wake the baby!) But I just answer “what?” and keep working.

There she stands, that eager, excited look with her pixie-look haircut (long in the back, feathered up front, but in a ponytail it looks like she’s got short hair) and big, pleading brown eyes imploring my soul.  She’s clutching my proof clipboard and begs, “Mom, you have to write more about Ethan!”

I sigh.  I’m busy.  I’m working on business.  Writing is just a hobby.  All the excuses I can think up die as she begins chatting away about the story and wants to know the “Pirate Baby Story” in detail.

I love to see her lit up over a book like that!  I LOVE books.  I LOVE reading.  I considered Nancy Drew and Tyce Sanders to be intimate friends!  Christina had that love of books.  She was always lost in books. (Like the house could burn down around her and she’d never know it.)  It is an integral part of self-learning to discover a love of reading.  I wanted to keep this flame burning for Rebeccah.

So, I agreed to work on Brantley Station Saga. (aka Ethan) But my child knows me well.  She wasn’t interested in me working on it later.  She came back after every phone call that interrupted my financial work.  She wanted to watch me write about Ethan.

Because of Rebeccah’s desire to know the backstory in more depth, Ethan’s story starts with Pirate Child and Little Thief instead of at The Protector where I had started it.  Jamie (per Rebeccah, I just had to write more about him too) played a bigger role than I had originally planned and we introduced Mary – a character Rebeccah and Christina created!

I’m so grateful for my children being my biggest encouragers!  Many things I’ve written are just there because they wanted them on paper instead of told from my head.

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~ Nancy Tart

 

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