T. K. Arispe

Today's writing notes

Working on: revisions to Worth Searching For

Swords make me ridiculously giddy. I'm so glad I got to cram this story so full of nerdily-detailed swordplay. Also I realize I have not used a zweihander yet in a story and I need to fix this. (Hyren's/Isengrim's faerie sword is a claymore, not a zweihander.) #SwordNerd 

I think one of the toughest things about this story is that Isengrim's personality in it is a tough, tough balancing act. He goes through such a drastic character arc that I've found it tricky to get his evolving dynamic with Terra (and the rest of the world, really) right while still staying true to his core personality. He's an extremely complex person, especially in this story where he undergoes so much change, so I'm hoping my edits will help solidify and clarify the many layers of his personality. 

It doesn't really help that the first time I wrote this story, I gave Isengrim a vastly different personality that did not work at all and didn't mesh well with how I wrote him in subsequent stories. I had to do a lot of retooling during my next round of edits to make his character work, and looking at it now I'm still seeing some bumps that need fixing. What I'm trying to get across is that Isengrim is not a sociopath like Dr. Sloth, but he's really angry at his creator, the outside world, and life in general--but once he finds himself with an owner again, he can't shake an innate drive to be nice to her and take care of her, because deep down that's the sort of person he really is. And Terra is brave, kind, and patient, all traits that Isengrim's creator lacked, so he can't get himself to be angry with her despite his trust issues. He experiences a great deal of inner conflict from the time they re-unite to when they reconcile the next day, so I hope I've done an okay job explaining his erratic behavior during that time span.

Also, I had a lot of fun coming up with the chapter titles in Brightvale, a Complete History. My headcanon is that the War of the Typefaces was a major armed conflict between schools of type designers who had differing opinions about what typefaces looked better. Serif or sans serif--pick a side! And don't even get them started on glyph width!

I hope other people enjoy these strange nerdy tidbits I keep throwing into my writing.