Mack Hawthorne progress report

Mack, Wes, and Theodore are back in Restaria now. Mack has already caused some trouble and they haven't even gotten off the ship yet. Apparently, he has some demons from the battle in which he was taken prisoner. I expect we'll find more as we follow him, but he's a very angry man. He can be nice most of the time, but a customs officer just found out that you shouldn't push certain buttons with Mack.

I started writing late tonight, so I was only able to do another 1000 words or so. The book sits at about 4.5%.

Lesson learned today

I found that my outline is going to be a very iterative thing. My initial outline hit the major touch points and themes, but I had trouble when I first sat down to write. Eventually, I just started adding some bullets to the section where they first get home and that gave me my starting place. I found it interesting that once I had that done, I could turn around and write a scene that I hadn't even thought about yet.

They came in on a ship to a Restarian city, and of course they are going to have to deal with customs. Particularly since they are on a smuggler's ship. It wasn't hard to imagine a customs officer being suspicious about some people claiming to be soldiers, but with no way to prove it. Fortunately, Theodore is a nobleman and an officer, so I expect he will take care of things. Mack just doesn't have the ability to deal with this sort of thing yet. He's carrying a load of anger and loss right now. Unfortunately, it's not going to get easier for him for quite a while.

This whole scene was just something that occurred to me as a way to introduce some of what makes Mack tick and some of the burden he carries.