The story of Madelen Penn was born three years ago as a simple character construction concept: base character personalities on the tasting notes of wines. The structure was all there for something like a fantasy story. You could have a deep, brooding character with a dry tone and dark traits who takes a while to open up, and someone light and bubbly with a bright, unserious attitude (for my wine friends, I will let you decide which of those are which in your minds). There were prebuilt regions, rivalries, and “families,” so to speak. Old ties to certain geography, techniques, and orders. It seemed perfect.
Three years ago, though, the ability to write a story like that felt different, and almost impossible. I had just ended a long-term relationship and moved from North Carolina back to New Hampshire to begin a new job. I was living at home again, adjusting to being back and throwing myself into my work. The first of Telgora’s books were beginning their run. I was personally in a period of deep struggle and mental reevaluation of a vast array of things. All of this contributed to a certain sense of being unable to write what was forming around me in exactly the way I wanted to.
Namely, I felt I wasn’t a strong enough writer for the story taking shape.
But that didn’t stop me from beginning to shape it. Worldbuilding is one of my greatest passions. There would be those rival families, based on the grapes of Bordeaux against those of Burgundy and Champagne, the Rhone, and the Loire. The villains, I said, would be the Bordelais led by a character based on Cabernet Sauvignon, and our hero would be the youngest of the Burgundian faction, a character based on Pinot Meunier. Between them would stand the families of the Rhone and Provence, led by Syrah/Shiraz, and the Loire Valley, led by Muscadet.
It was not a perfect one to one, nor was it a perfect story yet. Certain elements felt disjointed. It was broadly French inspired by the names varied considerably.
We got Madelen Penn, first. Originally the youngest and often forgotten child of her family, led by her father Neera Penn and her mother Sharen Penn (nee Dant). Light, quiet, often in the background and rarely acknowledged. Her time would come upon the death of her elder brother, Balen Penn, which would result in the complex struggle for succession and revenge that would see her rise to the throne or die trying.
Revenge, succession, familial plots, murder, royal aesthetic.
We needed magic, and I had my share of pyromancers in various other works at the time… so Madelen and her family became gifted with plant magic.
Their rivals, then, got metal.
Enter the steely, dark, dry Kebet Sabor and his family, the Bordeaux-inspired ones. They were allies through marriage to the family based on the Loire, led by one Det Nessca.
That left the wildcard family the one based on the Rhone, in the original concept unstably split between rival twins Shirin and Syrin Kyera (Vacqueyras has to be one of my favorite words in wine and needed its time in the naming sun.)
So we’ve our players and basic plot, and so it sat slowly being fleshed out in all the worldbuilding ways I adore. A year spent drawing and redrawing maps, naming increasingly tenuous familial relations and rival minor families, not to mention creating names for some hundred-plus subregions, castles, rivers, duchies and lordships. All the while the characters stewed in the back and, somewhere along the line, changed.
Madelen Penn changed dramatically, and with her so the entire story fell into place. I like writing what I call “test-shot” scenes while brainstorming stories. These are short scenes or sometimes whole chapters with two characters interacting or one character being themselves. However they take shape, they’re a way to get a feel for the world and the story as it forms. Sometimes the scenes work their way into the final product, other times they merely inform what’s coming. In Madelen’s case both happened. The idea originated from a way of identifying this royal plant family, and so I adapted the imagery of a crown of thorns literally created out of their magic. In doing so I gave Madelen a weapon, and in doing so wrote a scene of her describing how she uses it to one of her friends.
Over the course of a three-thousand word experiment, this formerly quiet forgotten Princess character turned into a dark, playfully sadistic girl more than willing to use her powers to exact her rather specific brand of justice. She had her motive, her needs and her wants, her powers and a world for her to play in, and she was ready for it. After two years of planning, a story was born.
But inspiration hits at occasionally inconvenient times. It is up to us to adapt to the call, though, and ride those currents of inspired thought wherever they may take us and whenever they come. All the pieces of Madelen’s story fell together, one way or another, in the first or second week of NaNoWriMo 2021. It was a difficult time to embrace a new story. I was on the one hand waiting for progress on a project I had previously been incredibly excited for but losing hope in, and on the other pouring myself into my first large non-fantasy work. But, as my writing friends at the time would oft hear my complain, I had never run into a main character quite as jealous as Madelen Penn.
She insisted. So, I finished NaNo, and alongside wrote the first ten or so thousand words of Madelen’s story. The winter of 2021 ended and the spring of 2022 dawned with the release of Another Time’s first parts, the publication of my first short story, and the constant hum in the background of something else on the way.
The dim candlelit conversations of illicit partners.
Night markets, perfumed hotels, old forests.
Crowns of thorns and capes of quicksilver.
The cold, impassive eyes of a new heir to the throne.
Commanding, flirtatious comments out the side of constantly smirking mouths.
A hundred and twenty-seven thousand words later, and I stared down the first draft of a story that three years ago I had been too scared to write. The story of Madelen Penn and the courts of Vertet wrapped in a seductive mystery of murder and succession. The work begins months from now, after I give it time to rest and begin the task of editing and aligning everything.
But I am thrilled beyond measure, happy to see it over for now and ready to give it the kind of life and polish it needs to thrive.
I am beyond happy to watch it continue to grow, because her story is not over yet.