Chasing Shadows

Hi, I’m Jane and I write books~

[jane-l-ohlson]

Happy Anniversary!

Today is a special day in the history of Chasing Shadows- it has been 13 months since I first started writing it! I was going to make a 1 year post, but I have been busy lately and so I pushed it to a year and a month. 

I wanted to do something special for the occasion, so I’ve made a compilation of the strangest and most drastic changes CS has gone through since its conception all that time ago. You can find it under the cut:

The Ending:

Rather than starting at the beginning, let’s start at the end! Chasing Shadows has had many endings over the months due to me changing a lot of my ideas about the central themes and characters. One of the first endings for the version of CS with a plot similar to the current one (the very first draft had a completely different plot- more on that later) involved a big battle in which M and a female character sort of like the girl role-wise defeat the Big Bad together and fall in love, having a happily ever after. An ending I was certain was going to be the one was planned some time after I realised how ridiculously cliché the first one would have been, and also ended up being partially scrapped. This one shares several details with the actual ending so I can’t reveal much, but I can say it contained a rather overdone trope involving a major character death. The current ending is less cliché (I hope) and wraps up everyone’s character arcs better. I’m not planning on a sequel, so I’ve tried to make this ending satisfying so you won’t be left wondering what happened to x, or why y did that, etc.

The Original Plot:

I like to write out a brief summary of what I’m going to write when I get an idea, but I don’t make plans until later on which is why the original plot summary is so different to the actual novel. Here is the original summary (paraphrased slightly due to awkward wording):

Plot idea- A girl with incredible magical powers but no ability to walk or talk (out loud) is carried around by her guardian angel, and angel who can’t fly and was kicked out of Heaven, in their quest to evade both the angels who want him dead and the wicked people who want to use her powers for their own good.

The unlikely duo end up disguised as human travellers and go on the adventure of a lifetime, finding themselves through each other over the course of a strange series of events.

And of course, it’s high fantasy with an epic, sweeping landscape for the characters to traverse through, and it probably has a happy ending!

You can still tell it’s the same novel, but there are many changes now. For example, M is not an angel and Heaven doesn’t exist in Penumbra. 

M and the Girl’s Relationship:

Despite the original plot summary, there were a few drafts of CS where I changed the girl’s character a lot. In one, she was an adult woman who became M’s love interest. I changed this after deciding it was too cliché (a lot of clichés existed at the beginning) and exploring a different type of relationship which isn’t often seen in fiction (especially high fantasy) might be more interesting. I made the girl into a child character again and gave her and M a shaky parent-child bond.

Another change to their relationship is more recent. In earlier drafts of CS, even from last summer, the girl and M had a lot of arguments and the former tended to be quite condescending towards the latter. I thought this wasn’t a very good portrayal of their close bond, so I made them have a more trusting, light-hearted relationship for the most part. I also made the girl look up to M more as she sees him as an older figure with much more knowledge and experience of the world than her.

Personality:

M and the girl initially had very similar personalities when I started writing CS. They were both strong, silent, serious types. I soon realised that two main characters with no names who didn’t show their emotions would make for a confusing and uninteresting story.

In later versions, I made the girl a little more serious than M, but with a lot of childlike innocence and curiosity. M had the most drastic personality change as he went from stoic, unfeeling and somewhat pessimistic to a kind, emotional, slightly immature man with an optimistic outlook on life. I also tried to make him more relatable by not having a solution to every problem and being kind of insecure at times.

I could go on about M for ages- as the girl’s backstory and character development is formed as the story goes on due to her age, his backstory was something I had to flesh out early on. Originally it was told through a series of flashbacks, but I thought that revealed too much too early so I cut them out. M’s backstory has actually barely changed since I started writing CS, as I was happy with it from the start. Anyway, having to get to know M as I wrote his character, basing his personality and reactions to the world around him on his backstory, I became quite attached. I love the girl too, but M is probably my favourite. Can a writer have a favourite character in her own novel?

In the Future:

So those are some of the most significant changes so far! I’m sure there will be many more to come. I’ve come up with a lot of ideas already for future chapters of CS. The whole plot is pretty much done now, but I like to come up with ideas about the world of Penumbra (such as its lunar cycle and calendar dates) as well as backstories of characters which won’t be explored in the novel. There’s a whole romance story between two married characters which won’t be in the novel whatsoever, but it’s very sweet and it was fun to think about how these two characters from very different backgrounds met and how they ended up where they are in the novel. Romance isn’t the main focus of CS, but a major character also has a romantic relationship which isn’t really mentioned or touched on in the novel. I have a plan for an epilogue which delves more into this relationship as well as other non-romantic relationships involving the same major character, but it’s the kind of epilogue which will turn into an unneeded sequel if I leave it for too long. Another major character has an after story which could easily be its own novel as well.

I might write these three stories as part of a collection of short stories related to Penumbra after publishing Chasing Shadows if my readers are interested enough to want to know more. I think it would be fun to write them out!

Finally, thank you again to all of my wonderful followers and real-world supporters. Let’s hope that by the time Chasing Shadows’ second anniversary comes around you’ll be able to read the book!

Stay tuned for more information, and see you soon.

-Jane.

[jane-l-ohlson]

Hello! I apologise for not posting in so long- I’ve been busy. Chasing Shadows is going well at the moment. I’ve finally reached Chapter 4 and I’m fast-approaching 25,000 words. I’m really excited for what’s to come, and I hope you will be too.

I’ve been working on this drawing for a while and I wanted to share it with you all. If you’ve seen some of my other art posts you’ll know I like to use a very simplistic style, but I think it works well with my world. The world has a name now, by the way: it’s called Penumbra, and it has three continents: Sélas, Imífos and Skótadi. CS is set in Imífos, the smallest of the three. In this drawing, I wanted to try a setting I haven’t drawn before so I ended up recreating the mountainous country of Cнегыама (pronounced sneg-yama). 

Technically M and the girl should look a little older in this drawing, but I drew them before I thought about the setting and the time period in which they’re travelling through this region, so please call it artistic license.

Thank you for supporting me in writing Chasing Shadows! Please stay tuned for more information- it’s still expected to be released in November if all goes well.

-Jane.

[jane-l-ohlson]

NaNoWriMo Day One.

I’m not officially signed up to NaNoWriMo as I’m already writing Chasing Shadows, but I have decided to write 50,000 words this month in order to finish my manuscript and get well on my way to publication.

Today, I started out at 19,305 words and ended up with 18,277. This seems like a loss, but I’m taking it as a win as I finally managed to cut down the 3,000 word long uncessary scene into something readable. As of tomorrow, I’m free to move onto the next chapter where the first major story arc begins, so I’m very excited!

Question- how do you feel about flashback scenes in a novel? I’ve written out several, but I don’t know whether it would be too boring for my readers to sit through them. Originally they were going to be spaced out through the novel, but now they’re nearer to the end and will probably be a single chapter (if I include them at all). Does that affect your opinion?

[jane-l-ohlson]

How I World-Build

Hello everyone! I’ve decided that since I’m not going to be finishing Chasing Shadows any time soon, I’m going to create a series of posts talking about its world and characters. I can’t reveal anything too spoiler-y, but there’s still a lot of trivia and interesting things I’d love to share with you! First of all, I’ll explain my process of world-building and how I came up with the crazy world of Chasing Shadows.

[WARNING- Long post ahead]

When I first started writing CS, I had no idea how I wanted the world to be. All I knew was I wanted a high fantasy world for my protagonists to traverse. I know this breaks most conventional rules of writing, but I’m not the kind of author who plans the story out first. I created my characters, wrote the first chapter, then built the world and story from what I’d written there. Because of this, I don’t think my writing process is exactly conventional. 

I tend to write whatever’s in my head at the time, then I’ll read it and go back to revise the entire thing. That sounds normal at first, but then it leads into ‘editing ruts’ where I get stuck for weeks at a time writing and rewriting what is essentially the same thing. I started CS in March (7 months prior to the time of writing this post), and I’m only just over 19K words in because of these ruts. I wanted to do what most authors do and edit after I’ve written the entire manuscript, but I make so many changes to the story that I’d have to rewrite the whole thing multiple times during my several rounds of editing, wasting even more time.

So with my out-of-order way of writing, how did I manage to build a world? Well, as I said earlier, I built up my world from the first chapter. In the very first sentence of Chasing Shadows, I described the landscape of Ilsina (which has its own post- in short, it’s an icy, mostly uninhabited country with multicoloured precipation which always turns lilac upon hitting the ground), a landscape I later turned into a country. In the next few scenes I place my characters in many different landscapes over the course of their adventures- a hill made of large slabs of metal and a forest of honey-coloured trees to name a couple- in order to establish a sense of what my world is like. Originally, there weren’t going to be any countries- everywhere M and the girl went would be another fantastical landscape. I later decided that was just lazy writing and designed a proper structure to the world.

My world contains three main continents and several vast archipelagos, but Chasing Shadows is set entirely in the smaller of the main continents and so I’ll discuss that one here. At the moment, my continents and the world itself don’t have names, so I’ll just refer to the setting of CS as ‘the world’ from now on.

The world of CS is made up of 7 countries, although other (non-human) species divide it up differently. These countries are Ilsina, Lukansos, Luxanh (spelt with a tilde over the ‘u’), Solítana, Raeshyn’a, Myrrhil, Snegyama (anglicised because it’s spelt in the Cyrillic alphabet usually) and a remote territory which is only technically a country, being uninhabited. The novel’s main plot begins in the outskirts of this remote territory, but as it’s a Walking the Earth style story, my protagonists don’t stay there long. 

As I developed M’s backstory (which is revealed late into the novel, so I can’t tell you about it here), I created a place I thought he might come from. He’s blond and had blue eyes in the first draft of the novel (they’re now hazel because almost no one in my world has blue eyes and I wanted him to look like a typical citizen for the most part), so a Scandinavian place came to mind. With that, Lukansos came into being! I named the country after a character from my other novel (which I’ll start writing as soon as CS comes out), Lukas, for reasons I won’t go into here. 

Once Lukansos was created, I chose to place it in the south of my continent because I wanted the world to be as different to ours as possible. Therefore, the hotter countries are in the north. I know Earth doesn’t exactly work like that (as the hot south, cold north rule only applies to the Northern Hemisphere), but  it does in my fictional world. This decision spawned Ilsina, which I based off the description in the first sentence of CS. I then created the other countries by choosing a biome (such as swamp, desert, grassland, savannah...) and building flora, fauna and human culture around how those things might adapt to their biome. There are different landscapes within each country, but they are predominantly based on the biomes I chose for them at the start.

The next stage of worldbuilding was how to make my world seem high fantasy. I did this by taking things normally seen on Earth and twisting them into something unusual. In the early stages of the novel, I mostly just changed the colours of things, but later on I started changing more than that. This led me on to thinking about the human side of things.

Since I based all of my countries on real-world places, I did the same for their respective cultures. While most cultures have the same two deities, I’ve tried to vary what exactly they believe about these deities and how they worship them from country to country. For example, in Lukansos they’re sisters, in Solìtana they’re rivals who were once friends and in Luxanh they’re lovers. Religious practices are based on real world religions too- as Raeshyn’a is based on the Middle East, which is predominantly Muslim, they have mosque-like temples and similar prayer methods while Myrrhil tends to have more Christian cathedrals and churches. I didn’t want to offend anyone by borrowing directly from their religions, so I only vaguely made these connections wherever religion is mentioned (not too often considering the story focuses on M, who is an atheist, and the girl, who doesn’t have any religious beliefs as she doesn’t really know much about the world or its deities). Those are just examples however- food, dialects, clothing and more are all based on the countries’ real world counterparts.

Finally, the time period. You’d imagine this to be one of the first things I thought of, but nope! I knew even in the early stages of worldbuilding that I didn’t want a classic Medieval European world, so I tried my hardest to have a diverse, multi-cultural world in a different time period. Suddenly, the idea of trains came to me. I didn’t want trains to be in CS, but I wanted the world’s people to be on the cusp of inventing them (the reasons for this are spoilery I’m afraid). Therefore, I chose the 19th century for my time period and based the world’s technology around that. This decision was made during the writing of Chapter 3.

As for society, I didn’t want the same prejudices as in the real world, so all genders are on equal standing (except in Luxanh, a matriarchal society where men are deemed inferior due to the goddesses being female). Sexual identity doesn’t exist within my world, as most people are attracted to both genders. There are very few heterosexuals and homosexuals, but there are quite a few ace people (including a character I haven’t introduced to you yet...). Prejudice against different sexual orientations isn’t a problem in my world, and the same applies to gender for the most part as people (apart from in Luxanh) don’t really see gender identity as important. 

However, there is prejudice against other things in my world. Some species often see others as inferior due to the Hierarchy of Species (which I’ll explain in another post), and relationships between different species are typically deemed taboo. This means subspecies which are genetically a mixture of two other species (such as shamans) are typically shunned by most. Magic is a frequent subject for discrimination as well (between who uses it and who doesn’t), while racism is ocassionally prevalent in countries such as Snegyama, which is split in two due to a civil race war. 

Basically, the world of Chasing Shadows was created in a weird way and is quite a weird world in itself, but I’m still proud of how it turned out and I hope you’ll like it too.

[jane-l-ohlson]

[ANNOUNCEMENT]

Hello everyone! It’s been a while since I last posted on here, so I apologise for that. I’ve been very busy these past few months with all sorts of things- including Chasing Shadows. I’m very close to hitting the 20,000 word mark and am currently writing Chapter 4. 

Chasing Shadows is what my announcement is about, actually. As I said, it’s been a hectic few months and the next few aren’t going to be any easier. Although I’ve finished planning out the entire novel from start to finish and have managed to work out many kinks in the plot, what I’ve written so far has a lot of inaccuracies and concepts I’ve now changed or removed which I need to get rid of. For example, the first two chapters reveal a lot about my protagonists’ pasts which I’d rather have revealed later- otherwise you wouldn’t have anything to look forward to in the coming chapters.

There are a lot of things I need to revise and improve in my current draft, as well as many more issues which will come up as I keep writing. I want this novel to be the best it can possibly be, and I hope you will understand that I’d rather have a better quality novel that comes out in a year than a poorly written novel which comes out in two months.

Therefore, as you may have guessed, I am pushing the estimated publication date of Chasing Shadows to November 2019. There is a high probability that I will finish it and have it published before that date, but this gives me plenty of time to ensure it’s perfect first.

Thank you for reading and please stay tuned for more updates and information in the near future.

[mienar]

a fantasy

[jane-l-ohlson]

I’ve returned to drawing landscapes for a while. I love experimenting with different brushes and colours! This is the country of Ilsina, located in the South-West of the continent Chasing Shadows is set in. It’s a very remote, icy country and because of this it has a low population. Those who do live there are quite spread out across the country, often living in tiny villages or hamlets if not alone. The culture is based off of Inuit and primitive Scandinavian cultures, although it’s not developing very quickly due to both the lack of citizens and the war brewing in the North of the country, where there is a section of mountains which are disputed territory. The one thing Ilsina is famous for is its weird weather. It is either raining or snowing there for around 90% of the year, with many of the typical day/night cycle features of real-world northern countries (midnight suns in summer, 24-hour darkness in winter, aurora borealis, etc). However, the famous part is actually the colour of the precipitation- as it falls it appears to be like a rainbow, with rain and snow appearing in a variety of different colours across the light spectrum. Even more strangely, it always hits the ground as lilac no matter what. Ilsina’s hostile environment coupled with the lack of progress in science across the world mean little research has been done into why the precipitation acts like this. The global development in humans is roughly at the stage it was in the 19th century in real life. I judged this in individual countries based on what the real-world cultures they were inspired by were doing at that time. You’ll be able to see more of the world and its many strange countries by reading the book. Ilsina is only really touched upon at the start, but it may be included nearer to the end as well. Chasing Shadows is due to be released by January 2019 at the latest.

[jane-l-ohlson]

Another drawing of the girl from Chasing Shadows, but digital this time. In this drawing, she’s probably about 9 or 10. I’m not great at drawing people on my tablet (or on paper for that matter), but I’m getting better I hope! I’m best at eyes on digital art, but if the whole thing looks bad it’s just because I’m still practising. Even though M’s my favourite out of the CS cast, I still really like the girl (she doesn’t have a name- or at least not one I can tell you about). She comes across as mature and fairly apathetic because she frequently suppresses her emotions and lacks the innocence and naivety of most children. Despite this, there’s a childlike wonder about her which I like to touch on when I’m writing scenes involving her and M reaching new places. A little progress update on this novel- I’m currently revising a key scene from Chapter 2 and writing new scenes in Chapter 3, which is a little time-consuming because whenever I change the key scene in Chapter 2, I have to revise Chapter 3 so it makes sense. Once I’ve gotten past this block, it should be plain sailing into Chapter 4. From there, there should be less major delays unless I really mess something up later on. I’m still aiming to get Chasing Shadows out by November, but my hard deadline is January 2019 if that doesn’t work out. Please feel free to check it out when it’s released!

[jane-l-ohlson]

Concept art for Chasing Shadows! When I’m bored I tend to doodle my characters, which is why the art’s really messy. I still thought the designs were interesting, so I posted them here. These designs are for the characters nearer to the end of the novel, so there are a few spoilers dotted around that I had to blot out. Sorry about that! Onto the characters themselves. Due to the nature of my novel, I can’t reveal anything at all to you about the woman with the green visor because pretty much everything about her is a huge spoiler for the end of the novel. The things I blotted out on her design are all names for stuff that have to be revealed later on. As for the brunette with terribly drawn arms, she’s one of the novel’s protagonists, the unnamed girl who travels alongside M. She’s an adult here, but she looks younger because of my art style. I was throwing around ideas for her outfit, which is why I drew her, and came up with that after a bit of deliberation. It’s inspired by Yuelia’s outfit from the video game Fantasy Life, although I changed the white of her dress to grey after drawing it and deciding it looked better that way. The big spoiler to her right is actually another design, which I was originally going to show you before realising that would spoil things. Again, I can’t reveal anything because it might ruin the story. The design to her left, however, I can talk about. It’s a prototype design for M’s sword, which he uses throughout the novel in combat amongst other things. I have a few sword designs actually- I think the final design will probably be a combination of this one and another. As these were just doodles, I’ll probably change things later, especially as I’ve drastically changed the ending of the novel several times already. For example, I already feel like the Yuelia-style outfit has to go, and not just for copyright reasons- it’s unsuitable for the type of setting the ending scene will be in. Please make sure to check out Chasing Shadows when it comes out! I’m still aiming for November if possible, but the hard deadline is January 2019 if I need extra time.

[thesesummersonspoet]

WRITER ARCHETYPES:

anxious bean

the bard

swamp witch

the rare professional

procrastinator extraordinaire 

tag yourself!

[jane-l-ohlson]

I’ve been working on some art for various locations mentioned in Chasing Shadows! It’s a little hobby of mine to help me visualise places better and to motivate me through the long periods of redrafting older content when I’d much rather be writing new scenes.

The above drawing was a pain to finish because I was an idiot and did the whole thing on one layer with no option to use the fill tool (it wasn’t working on my drawing app for some reason?). Regardless of that, I think it turned out pretty well!

This scene is taken from the country of Raeshyn’a (pronounced ray-shee-ny-ah), a country almost entirely covered in desert. I took inspiration from real deserts for this scene, so the background contains a lot of mesas (the tall reddish structures) and pedestal rocks (the tree-like things at the very back) as well as the typical sand dunes. As for the country itself, I drew inspiration from Middle Eastern, Egyptian and Indian cultures to create my own culture for this place. I don’t want to spoil the book, so I won’t mention anything else here ;-)

Please make sure to check out Chasing Shadows when it comes out! The deadline I’m aiming for is January 2019, although I’d love to get it done for NaNoWriMo if possible.

[novelatte]

[karkkidoeswriting]

World Building Advice

I’ve been doing so much world building at this point, I think I have discovered things throughout my process that might help someone. So I decided to do a post about it and I really hope someone will find this helpful. I’ve never written scifi (yet), but things that applies in fantasy, can be applied to that as well. I’m not specifically going to speak about building world in story that sets in real life, but it naturally needs world building too, just maybe not that much.

This is Bear Castle from my high fantasy WIP Fall and Rise of cor Mantgamia. It was the home of the protagonists.

When building a fictional world immersion is important (arguably the most important thing). You may have things in your world that everyone will know are not possible, yet you have to make your readers believe that the world is real. To do that you will need consistency. If you have logic behind your world, no matter how unrealistic the logic is, but you follow that logic in every situation, you will create the immersion. Including familial elements from our real world is a good idea, especially if you have a lot of magical or otherwise unreal elements. That makes it easier to sympathize for readers. For example in Altered Carbon (the TV show) the world is very different for ours (rich can buy immortality, people can change bodies, humans are interplanetary species etc.) but our worlds nationalities and religions are still there (though in a different form).

Elements of a World

I’m going to list here some things to consider. You definitely don’t have to (and shouldn’t) include every little thing a world could consist of in your world. The thing is to concentrate on the things that interests you and supports your story and themes. You have to chose your battles. Also this is not an all including list, just the things that popped in my mind. That said here’s the list in no particular order:

geography

culture

politics

history

climate

finance

military

laws

religion

ideology 

social classes

technology

education

science/research

food

laws of physics

genders

languages

mythology

races

medicine

taboos

I feel like especially fantasy doesn’t live up to it’s potential. Only very little change has been since Tolkien did The Lord of the Rings. Most of the fantasy worlds are still basically medieval Europe with dragons when there is countless more time periods and cultures to inspire from. Also the focus is mostly on same things: history, mythology, culture, politics and religion. And if there is races they are some variation of Tolkien’s races. And even mythology is usually derived from Scandinavia or Celts, sometimes both like Tolkien did. Using these things is definitely not a bad thing (my world is partially based on European cultures, and it sure has a lot of the usual elements), it’s just easy to forget what else a fantasy world can be, when reading fantasy. It literally can be anything, so don’t limit yourself unconsciously.

For example imagine a fantasy world where financial system is based on selling souls and some renovated witch manages to create artificial souls and the market crashes. Or imagine a wizard school, not based on English boarding schools, but ancient Greek schools where great wizards just invent new arts of magic, take young people as their disciples and quarrel with other teachers about what is the right way to understand magic. Or - I don’t know, imagine yourself!

When you start the world building, do research. Reality is usually stranger than fiction and you might get inspired by things in the real world. That will also help you to make the world look your own, as your only inspiration is not other fictional worlds. Also knowing how things work in real life will help you to create your own logic to the things in fictional world. The rule of thumb of arts works here too: You have to know the rules first to know how to brake them.

Now go forth and make an epic world! Good luck!

[jane-l-ohlson]

Thank you so much for this! It’s very helpful :-)

[cinemagorgeous]

By artist Christian Jank (1833 – 1888).

[jane-l-ohlson]

Hello!

I’m Jane, and I’m a new author! I created this tumblr to share with the world the trials and tribulations of writing a book, as well as to gain some new perspectives from other people and to fish for novel ideas in the void.

My favourite genres for writing are fantasy and romance (the latter I’m admittedly not great at), but I love lots of other genres too! As a reader, I like these genres but am also a fan of sci-fi, psychological horror and anything with strong characters and an interesting plot.

Unsurprisingly, my first novel is high fantasy and my (planned) second is both high fantasy and romance. It’s been quite a ride so far, and I’m excited to share the rest of it with anyone willing to listen.

As well as writing, I dabble in art from time to time so you may see some of that from me. My header image and icon are both my own art at the time of writing, so you can see kind of what my style is like.

See you soon!