Becoming School of the Legends

(see previous SOTL blogs)

The rest of the story I will have to be vague just so I can avoid spoilers.

In high school, I managed to smooth over some rough edges on my idea for M.A.G.I.C.. I'd pretty much scrapped the idea I'd had completely, and instead decided to start from scratch.

Like I said last blog post, I kept the concept of an international school, so I could keep a culturally diverse cast of characters with names that had some sort of meaning behind them connecting them to the fairy tale. Sometimes I would keep the name of the character from the actual fairy tale, but most of the time I did not.

I changed the school's name to Madame Goossens' School for the Majicked, Gifted, and Cursed, kind of in the fashion of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, and a pretty on-the-nose reference to Mother Goose, but I'm not supposed to be subtle in this. It was now a high school specifically for enhanced teens from around the world, with a specialized curriculum that accommodated for both basic knowledge and controlling of one's powers. Gifted refers to people who were born with their powers via a genetic mutation, majicked refers to a talent that one can learn and pick up, and cursed refers to people whose enhancements were inflicted by another source.

One thing I decided on early on was that this series was going to have four books: one for each year at the high school.

The first character I decided on was my Jack--he was going to be a combination of pretty much every popular Jack in folklore. But currently, I have about 20 pages dedicated to a list of characters of varying importance that will be some sort of fairy tale, legend, folk, etc. character.

I am still in the early stages of planning for the most part, but I have a vague outline of what I want to happen in each of the four books, as well as the development and personalities of the characters I have.

I also decided very early on that regardless of how many of the characters I actually decide to focus on, this series was going to be in third person. The Secret Portal is in first person with multiple perspectives, and I have been working around the clock for the past year to develop everyone I focus on to ensure that they have a distinct voice and relevance to the story. This has been exhausting, and I've pretty much decided once and for all that I'm never doing something like this again. The only reason I haven't converted The Secret Portal to third person is because of how intensely personal the story and themes are. It wouldn't work if it was in third person, and it wouldn't work if the perspective was confined to one or even two people.

So, from now on, I'm likely going to stick to third person, but I will use first person if I write an extremely introspective story again, although I will try to stick to only one perspective. And I have a book planned to be just like that.

I decided on the title School of the Legends as a placeholder until I came up with something better. However, it stuck, and I can't think of anything better. It's like The Secret Portal all over again.

It took me a while to get stuff actually on paper. I wrote a romantic short story about my "Beauty and the Beast" characters for a creative writing assignment my senior high school year, so that actually got a few ideas beginning to form. However, in another class I had the creative writing prompt, "Once upon a time, the sky was blue..." I got a few more ideas on paper, and now School of the Legends has five chapters, at a total of about fifteen thousand words. And I am proud of it so far.

It has taken a backseat so I can focus on The Secret Portal more, but I have been taken the steps to begin seriously planning for it. It's going to take a lot of synthesizing public domain stories together into one, but I think it will be worth it in the end.

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