Exploring Old Notes - Part 1

I was looking through my desktop (which is very messy), and I found some old notes I took for Tree of Vines / Breaker (it's original name), and it's kind of surreal because there's so much information I either forgot or changed - especially names.

Apparently Saroii was at one time called Acknasa, and the ruling family "Paroii". At some point I decided Paroii didn't sound good, and as far as I can remember, I kinda forgot the Acknasa name, which became Saroii as well. 

 

I completely forgot the names of the other Hero Nations. I think only one will stay, but on top of Acknasa there was also Lannek, Hikrenla and Meknava. All but Lannek do not sound like names to me, so maybe that's why I dropped it. Earlier on, I was pretty self critical on names I gave things, and this was certainly during the point of time I sort of randomized the names.

There's still a lot of logic that went into the names, but I've since changed the language it was based off of, and it's quite different now. That could make an interesting bit of trivia in the future after my books have been published. I wonder what else will change like this?

I have some doubts that it'll be as big as what I used to do, but still, I intend to write Tree of Vines for the rest of my life. There will certainly be changes in lore, and different versions of the same story.

Anyway, in the same note document I have "Tokvali Maronak" written in it. I remember Maronak was the name of the protagonist for my previous story, so it leads me to believe that it was Karsey's name before he was named as such.

I do kind of like the name "Tokvali Maronak", but I feel like it's a mashup of different cultures. It just doesn't sound right. Maybe a place will be called "Tokvali" and a person called "Maronak", but at any rate it won't be the main character, I think.

There's some excitement that after I die people will dig through my notes, ramblings and previous drafts and draw on stories and world building from old stories that weren't ever brought up again.

I found other notes, but at face value they're not as interesting. In fact, two of them are character pages for Karsey with details that between each other are inconsistent. I feel like it'll stand up better in retrospection when I've finished the story and the character's gone on his full journey and in world and real life development.

As for where I learned of the Paroii names, that's in yet another notepad. A lot of it actually hasn't changed, and I hope that in the published version more of the character's backstories become implicit in the subtext and actions.

There's also lyrics I wrote about Karsey, but looking at it, it's rather embarrassing. I like writing lyrics every now and again, but my standards have became so high that it's hard to write something that I think is publicly sharable.

Well. Other than finding the original draft of Tree of Vine (Breaker at the time), which wasn't really lost in the first place, I haven't really found anything else. I believe there is still a metric ton of notes hiding elsewhere on a disk. I could probably find it, but to be honest I'm not so sure it'll really be that worth looking into.

Perhaps in the next post I'll cover that.