NanoWrimo 2013, A Recap

I did, one day last week, go back into the story and sketched out another 600 words of storyline that had come to me, but I spent the end of November happily not thinking about much relating to Spencer, Kath, Aniste or any of the others inhabiting the world that I had created.

But one thing did come to me.

Ecila.

Ecila is the daughter of Enna and the Foxen.  She is created and born in the short story Letters From the Desert, the sequel to A Study in Shade and Shadow. 

I began the story of Spencer at its end.  He returns from where he's been, eight years older, experienced, jaded, heartbroken.  He is dropped onto a planet he recognizes but cannot immediately place and before he has breathed a dozen breaths of this air he is recognized by someone.  Someone who was not even born before he disappeared, 12 years ago, on this side.

It's Ecila.  And much in the manner of her mother she talks for the entire beginning of the story.  She tells him why she recognizes him (he looks like his mother, Carrie Jo), she explains to him how long he's been gone (the 12 years, and not the 20+ that are evidenced by her own appearance), and also introduces her backstory and situation.  A demigod whose father is the chosen mate of her aunt, not her mother.

She even points out to him that they were both created for evil, she by Svanir, he by Turinax, but that they were broken free of those bonds and are now able to do good instead.  Spencer is skeptical about this, what good he could have done on that other, diseased world.  But Ecila is young and naïve and hopeful.

And then... Ecila disappears.  In the 28,000 words I wrote, she doesn't come up again.

But why?

I mean, I introduce these two characters together.  They open the story up together and lead us into Spencer's sadness and Ecila's hope.  She can't mean nothing to this story, but in all of November I never knew what her part in the tale was.

I still don't.

But I think that may be the problem as to why I couldn't finish, I couldn't find the rest of the words to put down for Nano.  Half of the story has to be hers.  And I think it's obvious by the way Spencer's story was progressing as well.  He is there for eight years, but only the first and the last have any real meaning.  For the six years in the middle he is simply living as a Junker with the other boys on the Elsinore complex, falling in love with Kath, losing his dreams, grasping at his fading memories of home, wondering why it is that he was there.

Not a lot of story.  Just stasis.  So... what has Ecila been doing?  how does she fit in and fill in?

That's what needs to be considered from here on out, to finish this story...