Timelining Act I

[shadesong]

eyes_of_cyrene is reading back through tagged Shayara entries, and this reminded me how infernally difficult it probably is to try to keep my world straight from my little snippets here and there. The snippets don't come out of me in order. And very few people outside my head know the full outline of the story in any precise detail.

I started timelining in JavaMoonkey last week - had to stop when I got all agitated. (Yeah. That was *that* day.) And it struck me as funny that I had this:

Creation
The Fall (preceded by this)
The diaspora (outlined in intro story on the website)
Establishment of the Sanctuary
Creation of [character]
The stirrings of the call to return (also outlined in intro story)
Establishment of the Council
Creation of the Hounds
Birth of Alanna
Dissolution of the Talthar Kithrayna
Formation of the Kirayth
Julia's activation (seen in Shooting Star Comics Anthology #6)
The Purges

And then Our Story Begins... Yes. Millenia of Stuff. That's ignoring whole chunks of story - this is 100% bare-bones. All of that. Oh, and then Our Story Begins. *headdesk*

And the reason I'm all floofy about timelining snippets I post is that I'm just playing; most of this stuff won't make it into the comic. A lot of it happens before Our Story Begins. It's just background. This needs to have happened to Fenris, or Jeramie, or Jessamyn, in order for events to be as they are when Our Story Begins. Never mind that you'll never meet Jessamyn. Things that happened to her as a teenager shape Fenris and the core of Kirayth, shape Jeramie, shape Capri... and I like to know.

So. That all happened before the story began.

Want to tag more, but Memories are down. Again. *eyeroll*

What comes next?

As Our Story Begins, the Talthar Kithrayna meets in secret, at the prompting of Kieran (see intro story on website). He pushes through a vote to search for a girl who may or may not exist - Julia ni'Tamra, fourth daughter of Katrina Stone and Stephen ni'Tamra, presumed stillborn until that flare four years ago. Because hard evidence that Alanna is the Lishaya is in very short supply - and if there is a Lishaya, Julia is the best candidate.

Mission goes to Tessa and her crew of nomads, who take on the job on their way to pick up a profoundly damaged young Dasaroi girl who will soon be calling herself Lyric.

And that's most of Act I: Split between Shayara itself and the escalating situation there, getting to know those characters, and Tessa and her crew on the road - particularly the developing bond between Napalm and Lyric.

And I don't think I'll be spoiling anything to say that the very last event of Act I = them finding Julia.

And I'll be closing the first TPB on a hell of a cliffhanger there.

But. Does that help any? What can I add?

Comments

[zarhooie.livejournal.com]

I was a man and read through the entire LJ. *nods* just need to get the rest of the stuff back to you...

[phinnia.livejournal.com]

Totally nothing to do with anything except to say that I am SO GLAD I am not the only obsessive backstory-outliner out there. I have the lineage of some characters traced back about four generations, and they're all incredibly /real/ - but the actual honest-to-god story is only a small part of it all. But the whole 'x needs to happen to shape y and z' thing makes total sense from this corner.
(It's also sociologically/culturally fascinating to read all about someone else's world when it's in that level of detail. But I'm a total backstory whore.)

[cyber-pagan.livejournal.com]

gee, Tolkien had that back story bug too, ended up being published as The Silmarillion, and another book of shorter tales. The back story was longer than the four he intended to publish, and most of it was barely mentioned in the Hobbit and LOTR Trilogy, but he had to know what happened then so he could tell the story of what happens next. Your in very good company, and hopefully it won't be your estate that publishes these things :)