The Falcon's Claw - A Side-Project

The Falcon's Claw - A Serialized Fantasy Book Side Project

A while back I mentioned on social media that I was working on two new projects in addition to my already impossible backlog of over 30 projects. Why do I do this to myself? Because I have too many ideas buzzing around in my head, and I need to get them down on paper - and because I'm a perfectionist, so whatever I start, I have to make as good as it possibly can become. That sometimes means that I take an idea that's meant to be short and turn it into something much, much bigger. 

For my February writing challenge, I wanted to write one story for every day of February - or at the very least, one snippet. It started out strong! I wrote three stories in 3 days. Then the fourth day... the story didn't turn out how I wanted it, so I scrapped it after taking a long time trying to figure out how to make it work. And that same story gave me a couple other ideas - a bit more long-form, granted, but both something that I had been excited to work on for a while!

One of those projects has been my GameLit/LitRPG fantasy, in which a young woman finds a strange foreigner passed out in the woods while on the run from dangerous people who want a dangerous artifact that just so happens to be in her possession... because she stole it from them. She decides to help the man, who knows nothing of the game-like world he awakens to find himself in, but the two of them soon realize that there's something very off about his stats - and his origins.

I haven't named that one yet, and suspect that when I do decide on a name that I like, that's when I'll decide to start serializing the book online.

The second one is the one I want to introduce in this blog post. It's tentatively called The Falcon's Claw. 

 

The story follows the daughter of a disgraced and exiled family that was once a well-respected and powerful house in the Kingdom of Sustavia. The last survivor of her house, Neska is surprisingly granted royal pardon and invited to the King's Court - an invitation she finds suspicious. Her arrival at court coincides with a string of murders, and suspicion turns to her. 

Only, while members of the Court may look upon Neska as naive and inexperienced, she isn't quite as helpless as she seems, and she most certainly doesn't believe in coincidence.

Readers will follow Neska through various episodes, each one revealing more and more about the members of the King's Court, the plots and conspiracies taking place in the background, and Neska's place in this interconnected web of lies and deceit.

I wanted to write The Falcon's Claw as an experiment in two things. 

1. I want to write serialized fiction that keeps the reader hooked. I view this story almost like a TV show, and I want it to keep readers coming back for more. I'm working on creating episode-like chapters that end with cliffhangers and revelations, and a strong set of characters that are complex, devious, and intriguing.
2. I want to try my hand at writing a story that features a complex web, with different characters carrying out their own plots, cementing separate alliances, working against one another -- all the while having a small handful of highly intelligent characters that are playing everyone else like marionettes through their masterful strategic skills, and then pitting them against one another to see who comes up on top! Like a game of professional chess...
   

If that sounds interesting, you can check out more posts about it by exploring its label here on my blog!