#wardbreaker

[maramahan]

🖊!

Here’s a fun tidbit about Brysson’s Secret Backstory!

I think he mentioned in Wardbreaker how he used to be a mercenary in the Outlands of the Shattered World?

Well

Brysson was raised by his older brother in an outlands village overgrown with roses. He was always a bit of a wild kid and his brother was always a bit overprotective, so that led to them butting heads Rather A Lot

And, well, one evening they got into a bit of an argument, and, y’know, two flaring tempers stuck in a room together plus fire magic equals a Problem

And One house on fire very quickly becomes Everyone’s problem!!

It was an accident, but that didn’t really make things much better

Brysson hit the road pretty soon after that

[vale-reads]

New Books!

[tropesanddreams]

Some work by @honeyjarr! Some of my old characters from a now defunct MMO, made lovely.

[maramahan]

🖊️ + the character you last wrote for

That would be Kyrin!

Kyrin is such a disaster I love him

He’s pretentious and arrogant and insecure and angsty as heck and honestly wouldn’t know a healthy coping mechanism if it walked up and gave him a warm hug, but

Well

The kid tries so dang hard

Beneath his (eggshell thin) Toughguy Facade, he’s just a neurodivergent teen in a rough spot who’s doing his best to deal with a world that can’t be bothered to deal with him

And I love writing him because I love exploring the dissonant vibes between the person he is and the person he thinks he wants to be — and I love watching him grow as his situation changes

(Also he’s fun to poke and I enjoy throwing him into silly Fantasy Nonsense)

So yeah. Kyrin’s a mess, but (I hope) in the fun way where it’s nice to watch him get better ♡

[maramahan]

The rules of writing and the rules of math aren’t super good friends

I say this because I once outlined a book with 10 chapters, subtracted 1, and ended up with 12

[maramahan]

Every so often it hits me...

I’m sitting here, wearing sunglasses to protect my eyes from shaded windows, hiding away from the ear-scraping AC and the all-consuming flood of endless TV chatter....

I didn’t do it on purpose — I wrote Wardbreaker before I was diagnosed, before I even knew that my sensory reality wasn’t what some might call “normal” — but....

I wrote a book about a kid whose life is shaped by a disability he can’t name, who struggles to do things others find easy as breathing, who gets overwhelmed by ‘invisible’ noises other people tune out too well to hear — a kid who defines himself by his studied passions even as the world defines him by standards he can’t meet — who struggles and struggles to make himself understood, even as he struggles to understand why he’s different

and...

...well, sometimes I think about that.

I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t realize that my headaches were migraines and my fatigue was sensory overload. I didn’t know that other people don’t always hurt the way I hurt — I thought other people were just better at living with it

And now that I know it’s a Thing, every so often it hits me:

I didn’t intend to represent myself in Wardbreaker. Honestly, in most ways, Kyrin is nothing at all like me

But art imitates life, I guess, and you write what you know (and you write what you need) whether you intended or not

[maramahan]

Wardbreaker/Spellcrafter characters as Troubled Birds:

Brysson:

Tryn:

Briea:

Sal:

Dain:

And finally, Kyrin:

[maramahan]

The Shattered World Tarot — Card 1

The Magician is a card of ambition, of potential, of drive and determination. With your hard-earned skills and the tools in your hands, you have everything you need to work your will upon the world.

(It’s a little ironic ‘cause Kyrin’s whole deal is that he’s the only guy in Alinor who can’t use magic, but the Magician’s meaning was too perfect not to match him so I went for it anyway)