I Like Lawful Good Heroes

“You were supposed to stop them,” Uzzah said, almost hissing as he drew nose to nose with Thomas.

“No. I enforce the council’s ruling. You’ll find I have done so. To the letter.”

-- A brief exchange from my NaNoWriMo story. It captures the delicate balance in being lawful and good. Thomas wants to let his friends out to start on their quest. But, he also is hemmed in by exact words not to let them out. So, through a careful manipulation of the situation, he is able to effectively serve both the council and his own sense of right and wrong. This also helps us build up the tension between our heroes and Thomas.

Right now, they're uneasy allies, but could their alliance withstand a more direct order from the council? How much can they press Thomas before he can't bend the rules anymore without breaking them? Wrapped within this, we have jockeying for position among the various elders and scout masters. I actually like how the story is moving along, especially now that we should be relatively flashback free (except for one or two more), and the plot should now be able to take over. We've established our characters and made the conflicts. Now, it is time to bring it home with a set of action/questing pieces to collect the three artifacts and then return to the sky.

I'm actually falling more and more in love with this story the more I write of it, which is odd for me. Usually, I start out incredibly happy with the direction a story is going, then I feel like I lose the thread at some point. I had that feeling last week with this story. Around Thursday last week or so, though, I feel like I found the thread again. And all the other threads ever. The story started to tie itself together, I promoted a minor side character into the hero's new right-hand man and changed the dynamics between some of the other characters to help accommodate that shift.

If I can keep this energy up and finish strong, I may actually end up liking this story enough to do a serious bit of recursive editing and post the whole thing up sometime in December. Either or, I just doubled back in to add in a quick scene because I realized I skipped the part where the third part of our power trio gets accepted into joining the group.

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P.S.,

30,540 words.