A Legend of Epic Proportions

I am posting a day late for Margo Lerwill's I AM LEGEND blogfest where we are invited to talk about with is EPIC LEGEND about our WIPs.I thought I was posting on time and then I remembered that today is not the 29th, it is the 30th. Sigh. Hopefully I'm not too late to enter the contest to win either a copy of Donald Maass’s The Fire in Fiction or George R.R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons.

I'm excited to talk about the EPIC PROPORTIONS of my WIP. What was, several months ago just a single planned novel has blossomed into something far greater. Instead, I am writing a saga of stories meant to resemble the ancient mythic cycles.

It begins in the days of early history when Men all lived together with the Gods in four great cities on an island in the center of the world. It follows Men through the centuries as they are spread across the world, chased away from their paradise home by a terrible enemy. Cities are built and destroyed, civilizations rise and fall, heroes are born and then die. The saga will cover hundreds of years. And it in the end it will all lead to an EPIC CONFLICT.

But this isn't just a story about men. In the tradition of ancient mythology, it's a saga about Gods and Men, about their relations with each other and how they shape the world together. In my world, gods are not just in the background. They are characters in the story whose actions affect everything around them.

And in the midst of a world still being shaped, where cataclysmic events wreak havoc upon men and men rain destruction upon each other, the gods themselves are on their own quest. They seek the prime mover, the increate, the source of all things.

But there is an EPIC VILLAIN standing in the way. Erresuma was born out of the death of chaos, I said, but that's not entirely true. There was one being of pure chaos who refused to die, even as his world condensed and exploded, he clung to life, refusing to be reborn as he was meant to be. He lingered on, barely alive at first, he slumbered in the center of the world until the day that he awoke to find that everything he had known was dead and gone and in its place a world of light and order. And as he raged against this new world he vowed to destroy it and return it to the chaos that he loved.

My goals are certainly ambitious on an EPIC scale. Like Tolkien, I want to create a world with a whole mythology. What he called mythopoeia. I want my readers to be able to feel the depth and history of the world. Right now the working title of my saga is The Apotheosis Cycle. And by that you can glean a bit of where the stories in the cycle will be going. Hopefully the finished product will be as EPIC as I envision it in my head.