Writing Equestria's Changeling Princesses and the Kinsbane Part 2: Prologue

Continuing on the series where I explain how I wrote my latest book.
The prologue for Equestria’s Changeling Princesses was one of the later chapters I wrote, towards the middle of the writing process for the book actually.

Avoiding spoiler territory here, but as you can tell just from the premise, the story’s set in the past and deals with the past of the queens. As such, I needed an appropriately thematic opening.

But it was also necessary to start the book with Alternia, as she’s the character we’re most familiar with.

But I also needed to have the main characters of book 3, Mirage and Kyria, make an appearance. If they didn’t… well that’d be bad.

Solution? Family bonding activity. What though? Oh wait, there was this story on the changeling’s background I wrote for my side-stories that provides some rather important context for Chamelia’s character and background. Holdon… have Alternia tell it to her daughters!

Actually writing that wasn’t easy though. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it, but trying to tell the story of the Unspeakable Times differently from how I told in the side-stories was HARD. I mixed it up by thinking… how would Alternia tell it compared to say me? And what interruptions would there be from our new main characters?

And out came the prologue. 

Now… if you’re interested into WHY the Unspeakable Times was so violent? That goes back a few years.

At the time I first drafted this backstory for the changelings, I was in my Bachelors of Arts in History, studying courses on warfare, violence, etc. Suffice to say, I was pretty interested in the reasons for violence, the idea that… sometimes violence has rational reasons, and that sometimes… it’s entirely irrational. A lot of that leaked into when I was writing the backstory, leading to a rather dark tone, but I thought it was appropriate given the changelings grim design.

So... yeah.

Comments

[Changeling404]

Cool!