Rogan’s Ruminations

I began writing in earnest in 2016 and I began by creating a main character and parachuting him into a world that would not have been out of place in a J.R. Tolkien novel. I had already formed the idea that he would have a close male friend with whom he had either grown up or they had become friends when they were youngsters.
This second character was going to be of a different race, creed, and colour but not so different that he was an alien, or he had three arms or any such thing, I wanted him to be a fellow human. Rogan and Ongar were born, and I began working on their characteristics and relationship with each other and the people around them.
Rogan was immediately excepted by his peers and Ongar was ostracised to an extent because of the colour of his skin, I choose to make him grey and without hair. I wanted to be able to tackle some modern social issues through their relationship, and at first, I thought about Ongar taking the lead and Rogan being his second, but at the time in which I set my story and the location, there was no way this was going to work, Ongar would have been put to death or simply pillared in the streets it just would not have worked.
So, I had my two main protagonists and I had a setting in mind so now I needed an adventure, which is what I began to construct next. As the world around them began to take shape so to did the bigger picture and the bigger picture led to a wider world with maps and a socio-economic and political world. I recall that I had written about three chapters of between 20, and 25 pages before a question began to form in my mind like a tree sprouting from the ground as a small chute.
The question was, ‘How did it all get to this?’
That was a very good question which I could not answer at the time unless I started to write backwards instead of forwards if that makes any sense. So, what I had written stayed as was and I began working on the book before. The title of that ‘before’ story was ‘The Great War.’
Rogan and Ongar came together during the great war, except they did not, they were already very good friends even before that, and ‘oh no’ I was also formulating another idea that would somehow upset the apple cart, I could not shake this notion that Rogan also had a white wolf from an early age that he had somehow saved from certain death because it was a Warg, a creature from myth and legend that was known to be fierce and strong and well, evil.
Rogan was becoming a collector of people and animals who were ordinarily shunned by ‘polite society.’ That was great except that it meant that I had to now go even further back in both of their stories so that we could see where all three formed their attachment to each other and how they all would fit into the world around them. I also wanted a race of ‘baddies’ and at least one ‘evil’ genius to be the main enemy and threat.
It was shortly after this that I read more into the legends and myths surrounding the Orkney Islands, a lot of which were just drinking songs sung by various Viking raiding parties. So now I had my location, and my ‘baddies’ the inhabitants of the Orkney Islands, who were known as Orsk, which I believe is a corruption of the word Ork, or Orc, and the word Norse, so the Orsk were the enemy and rather than being green they were all shades of grey, whether this was because of their lifestyle or because they painted their skin that colour, I had not thought through at the time.
The landscape which I had been describing all along slotted nicely into the Highlands of northern Scotland, it was rugged, harsh, and dotted by sparsely populated villages and hamlets. Now I just needed a year. Somewhere in the dark ages just on the cusp of wild warriors charging into battle and the advent of shield-wall tactics. I plumbed for the year 900 A.D. and the rest as they say is history.

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