A More Thorough Introductory Post:
Hello, friends, and welcome to our semi-official P&K content blog. I'm @smzeszikorova, and I'm working with @adrielcastlyre on a series of four books, currently titled Pemoki & Kenacia, though that name may be subject to change. We've spent about ten years world-building and character-building. Not an ideal timeline, but I regret nothing. The joy's in the process.
We've laid out the foundations for all four of our books—made the transition from pantsers to planners. The outline's all there, and though there's a few important details to work out, we know what direction we're taking. Phase one's complete. Once I've submitted my thesis (UPDATE: SUCCESS) , we'll be set to hammer out our drafts.
For newcomers:
Pemoki & Kenacia's a bit ambiguous, genre-wise. The closest thing to it's probably hard fantasy. As for our target audience, I'd go with "adult". our POV characters' age range is pretty broad, and their interests and concerns vary accordingly, but they're written with adult readers in mind. I'm cautious to reduce P&K to a string of TikTok tropes. That said, here are some things you can expect to find here:
Multiple protagonists. Our cast is large. We've got approximately 90 named characters in-universe whose appearances in the end product are more or less guaranteed. Granted, most of these aren't central to the plot. But our main cast is on the large side. Each book generally has one to two protagonists; they change from book to book.
Multiple POVs. And to ensure that each character's arc comes to a satisfying conclusion, I switch between points of view somewhat regularly. (My tendency's to head-hop. For college degree reasons, I read a lot of old-timey Russian literature in the vein of Anna Karenina, and it influences my style, but I know head-hopping's a bit of a controversial writing choice these days. Whether we'll try to shift toward a purely omniscient style is currently under debate. Regardless, expect to get to know a lot of characters.)
War and international conflict. Our story's very concerned with the personal struggles of our characters—familial conflict, romance, friendship, betrayal, etc.—but it all takes place within the broader backdrop of these warring countries we've invented. And the war takes center stage often.
Deep worldbuilding. This universe is large—well suited for such a large cast. Currently, it involves five multinational regions, eleven countries, and nineteen cities. With limited space to explore all these places, we highlight what's essential and let the rest inform the narrative in subtler ways.
More reality than fantasy. People who’ve had a look at our works in progress say that we’re pretty grounded in reality for a couple of fantasy writers. All our main characters are human. Magic is a genetically-inherited phenomenon with rules loosely based in science. And while none of our fantasy regions, ethnicities, or religions are meant to be read as directly analogous to any real-world ones, they do draw influence from the real world at times. I’m sure you’ll notice this in the Russian-based languages of the Sitrii Elariny, the English-based language of Kenacia, and the language of Qhiron, which draws from both but perhaps not quite so obviously. In our worldbuilding, we make a point to give our invented nations believable complexity, heterogeneity, and political and economic motivations. We’re not too big on the “This region is inhabited by the stouthearted, down-to-earth Welverpeople who universally prefer farming tools to swords, are warm and inviting to outsiders, practice simple domestic magic, and make for extremely loyal allies” vibe.
Conlang. Fairly self-explanatory. Usually I'll just say, "[Insert sentence here]," Character X said in Pemokese. But now and again, when I feel it enhances the narrative, I'll leave it in my invented language and let readers draw their conclusions about the meaning.
Problematic characters, dark topics, and complex, incomplete redemptions. It's very important to us that we approach our darker topics with caution and sensitivity, but we're not writing Aesop's fables. Don't expect comfortable, obvious answers to the ethical questions we pose. Folks looking for escapism or retributive justice narratives should probably look elsewhere.
Queerness; disability; ethnic, racial, and religious diversity. Our story isn't really about these elements, per se, but our characters come from a variety of backgrounds, both real and invented, and it does inform the story. (We're both white and culturally Christian, and in terms of our relationships with queerness and disability, we'd both make for lousy representation, so we're operating with the understanding that we're gonna need hella beta reading once all this is done.) And on a similar note . . .
We take some unusual liberties with our world. Fake religions (Dzulyan, Kvotian, etc.) coexist with real ones. And though our languages and cultures are obviously influenced by the real world, they're all explicitly invented. We're not too concerned with making our universe consistent with real-world history, so while we do touch on issues related to queerness, ethnicity, etc., we don't go out of our way to align the experiences of our cast with those of people living within a certain real-world time period. When we decide what scientific knowledge and technology to include, our key is internal consistency. We'll guide you through the rules of this universe as needed, but if at any point you find yourself wondering what time period we're supposed to be in, just know that the answer is "none of the above".
Now, with all that said...
What are you likely to find on this blog?
Updates. If you want to know how P&K's coming along, here's where we'll ramble about the process.
Art or other related side projects.
Requests for beta readers, once we get to that stage.
This blog's a writeblr of sorts, but we won't discuss anything unrelated to P&K here. My coauthor's not very involved with social media in general, and I'm in and out of the writers' community on this site. So if you're here for tag games, community events, etc., @smzeszikorova's where you'll find all that. This blog's essentially a dumping ground for P&K materials. I can't imagine it'll be too effective as a hype builder, but once our books are released, everything we post here will be available for our readers to see. And on the off chance that our books get big (which I'm not counting on, but it'd be pretty cool), those of you who join in the fun now will have special clout. "We were here from the beginning." Do with that what you will.
We take asks! If you're interested in putting our characters in (non-erotic) situations, feel free to send in an art prompt.
As for the books themselves, I've tried to be sparing about plot reveals. (That'll be truer from here on out than it was on my other blog. Current mutuals, I swear I'm not kidding when I say all those art posts, quotes, and snippets I used to post are basically void. That's how much we've changed over the past few months. But the first book's premise remains the same:
As the threat of war looms on the horizon, Catherine Leures, an impoverished Kenacian woman living in the north of Pemoki, enlists in an effort to pull her family from the depths of financial ruin.
(I think I'll hold off on descriptions of the other books for now. They'd be pretty spoilery. But I'll post more thorough blurbs as I start getting these published. We do have titles for the second, third, and fourth books: Fledgling's Descent, Stirrings of a Silent War, and The Fallen Star of Thaeryvon.)
What do I mean when I say everything's changed, then?
I mean the process of filling plot holes, removing extraneous plotlines, and accounting for sensitivity in our characterization has resulted in a good number of our characters' personalities, relationships, and arcs being completely revamped. Lucky you! Aside from knowing the names, national and moral alignments, and general appearances of most of the first book's main cast, you'll be on about the same page as new readers if/when P&K gets published.
Before I go, a couple updates about P&K:
Since I started writing my thesis, my writing style has changed significantly. We've been making stylistic revisions to our original draft. Thankfully for our future editors, our first draft's gotten a lot more concise.
All the canon events are essentially set. The "outline" I did for my thesis is basically one long synopsis. All that's left for our first draft is to fill everything out with dialogue and detail. (Easier said than done, but I'm excited anyway.)
My coauthor and I have been playing with the idea of a character narrator: someone with a personal investment in the story. We're not sure yet, but it's a fun experiment.
If you've gotten this far, thanks so much for reading this incredibly long post.