#NaNoWriMo Day 17, Dwarves deserve love too, y’know, and the stabbing finally happened

That awful moment when your writing programme freezes and you know you’re about to loose a whole paragraph of beautiful words:

*le sigh* The trials of life. Well, I’ve personally found this week to be an up hill (mountain) struggle. I had such a mental break down at one point that I was actually convinced my bedroom was an illusion. Crying to laughing, crying to laughing, to inane giggling. But I’m OK now. Despite my ‘professor’ changing the specifications of this months essay (again) he’s at least made up his fucking mind. There are fixed deadlines, there is an outline and I can plan and prepare.

Elijah Gill and myself attempted to bash out some of our scripts in the library this week. After I’d been staring at the end of scene six for ten minutes, Elijah leant over and typed in a new scene heading for me. I’d like to share it with you:

As you can see it’s all very productive over here.

So aside from barraging you with moving pictures (GIFs) and screen captions, what am I bringing to the metaphorical table? For the most part: dwarves. They are a seriously underrated fantasy race. What actually bothers me, though, is how role-playing games tend treat dwarves as undesirable lovers. My main example shall be Dragon Age II. Now, Dragon Age is an epic fantasy role-playing game that leaves me little to complain about. The companions (people in your party) are without doubt the main attraction, especially as far as romantic allure is involved. But why, oh why, are you never able to woo the dwarves? In Dragon Age II I think the one character (aside from Anders) who really holds great appeal for me is the dwarf, Varric. He is the one companion you cannot have a relationship with. Not even a fling. It’s the same with Oghren in Dragon Age: Origins. Is it because they’re dwarves and it’s seen as unlikely they’ll have sex-appeal to some people? It certainly doesn’t seem like a plot problem to hook-up with either of these characters. I know Varric is a free range chicken, it’s cool. He can move on and we go our separate ways at the end of the story. So why can’t we have an interesting relationship for the nine years he chooses to stay by my side?

But why am I talking about dwarves and their sex-appeal to begin with? At the start of the week I posed a question on my twitter: ‘What kind of city would you expect Southsunder to be?’ Mick Deak replied with, “Dwarven!” In the spirit of things, I agreed. Now my city is occupied by short people who are blatantly dwarves. My main character has a liking for the inn helper and she is head-over-heels for him. It’s very cute. I’m trying to get them alone in the same room for more than ten seconds but it’s proving difficult (almost wrote ‘probing’ – cripes). These people are short, stocky, broad and beerful and just as gorgeous as elves. I don’t understand why they are shunned so much. Look at Varric. Seriously, you couldn’t be more charismatic than this man:

As far as NaNoWriMo goes, it’s not too bad. I’ve been making notes in a tiny note book each morning to help spur me along, but I’m afraid there is now a scene involving stabbing and human blood. I felt defeated for a day. I’d done so well not to include anything nasty this year, but it couldn’t be avoided. I felt I was doing the reader a disservice if I tried to write around the truth. Saying this, it’s not a gory scene and it’s not written to make the reader squirm. Cringe, yes. Worry, definitely. Feel ambivalent, of course. Want to run away in terror, no. It’ll need improving but I think I’ve done alright.

Last but not least, my mood board is finally printed and arranged on my wall – hooray! The picture of the girl with red paint/wings/blood/an explosion of emotion coming out of her back inspired the ENTIRE story. Click [here] to see the artist’s page.