A few new ideas about Amnar: The Awakening

Io: by me (2009 - Painter X)

“I’ve decided,” I said to my friend Fran while we were in her car. “I don’t think I have depression. I’m going to call it Boris Johnson.”

A few people have been in touch to remark that I don’t seem to have updated Amnar: The Inheritance on Podiobooks. All I’ve been able to do, for most of the last few months, is update the podcast on my own site, a task that takes ages simply because of the strange complications of my mind. I’ve been in a state, for ages, where big decisions are impossible. It can take hours to choose whether or not I want a cup of tea, or what to have for dinner. Bigger matters, such as going outside for anything, let alone big life choices, are impossible.

I’ve never actually been in such a state before. I move around and seem normal, but anybody who has been with me in an environment where I need to make a decision about anything, and I just freeze up. It means I struggle to be creative in any way whatsoever. Effectively, I have writing block. But because writing is like breathing to me, the solution has been to simply write about what I’m experiencing on my Holosync blog, Zen in Heels.

Very, very occasionally, a thin beam of light in the form of an idea comes to me. They flit about like moths, and disappear before they become clear, and long before I have a moment to make any use of them. Still, they are emerging and I’ve been considering them carefully. Because very gradually, while I’m unable to actually write Amnar, something new and possibly better than ever before is starting to develop.

For a while, I’ve had a sense that even as I was developing a better Io, there was still something missing. It’s been nagging at the back of my mind as I try to deal with everything else in my life. Very, very slowly, it is starting to emerge, however.

The Awakening plot basically deals with Io’s struggle to decide between the Amnari and the Tiomke. But although we see Io’s side of it, and the side of the Amnari trying to convince her not to side with a totalitarian dictatorship, we don’t see the perspective of the Tiomke, except through the eyes of the other two sides (either when Daar and Io meet Captain Vasha, or when Zoriel spies on Destorva and the senior officials in the Gap Chamber).

So I’ve been debating whether to either re-write or insert the view of the Tiomke, introduce Tiom himself, and guards who are trying to find Io. I think this might add a missing element to the whole story, although it will lengthen it.

Sometimes there are advantages to having writer’s block. Not being able to write at all has at least given me time to get some perspective on the story as a whole. Although I’ll probably annoy fans who have been through several versions of The Awakening, it is a development I’d like to explore, once my current situation improves.