webnovel

On the time for writing the chapter and required research

Okay guys, since I finished the chapter I wanted to finish, it's time to elaborate a bit on the challenges that this story brings with it.

When I started it a few days ago, I thought that with all the knowledge I acquired with how geeky I'm about Polish and global history of the middle and late medieval period, writing this novel would be an easy task. But the reality quickly struck me down.

How fast can the horseman travel? What is the endurance of the horse then? How does it influence the speed of an army and a small group? What is the speed of a typical carriage?

From one question to another, even a simple task of deciding how many days it would take to travel from point a to point b, turned into long background research that I had to do in order to keep this novel as real as I want it to be (outside of the system part obviously)

While the system in the first place is just a plot tool that allows me to ignore some of the more technical aspects of the novel - like explaining how the trade worked back then, and trust me, it is a nightmare to learn about, not to speak about making it interesting enough to warrant putting it into the story. What's more, I'm not an engineer, hence the amount of work I would have to input just in order to explain the way in which a single mechanism of let's say fermentation barrel would work... WOuld require not only continuous googling the correct words in my native language and then translating it to English, before trying to make the sentence look nice and be actually comprehensible to a normal reader but a lot more work I'm too tired to explain.

One of the other aspects that I want to mention is the complicated structure of the past times and lack of sources.

As Tarnow is my hometown where I spent my childhood years in, I hoped it would be easy for me to write about it... Only to learn that three most important streets of the entire city (to this day) were actually created barely 200 years after the events of this story, with the first MAP of the city being dated around the same time. In other words, outside of my fragmented knowledge of the city I learned occasionally, there is a huge field for the uncertainty that I have to work hard to fill in a proper way, instead of just saying it was like that and that, only to force myself into the corner later.

So I would like you guys to know, that what is just a single paragraph or two in a chapter, can take even a few hours of research from me, hence the considerably slower release speed that what I initially aimed at.

次の章へ