Slap! Randal swatted a stinging horsefly that had tried to make a meal from his shoulder.
[Start with action, and our protagonist, and he's already having a rotten day.]
"One down," he counted aloud. Then he looked at the swarm still hovering in the air around him. "Only about four thousand to go."
[His day is only getting worse. He's in a frustrating situation; no matter what he does, he's not going to make things better.]
The late afternoon sun beat down on the Basilisk, a small country inn a few day's ride from Tattinham, near the eastern mountains of Brecelande.
[An inn, named after a supernatural creature. Tattinham has an English sound to it (in fact, I'm referring to the Middle-English metrical romance, The Tournament of Tottenham. No reason that the readers should know that, but it amused me. We'll be going to a tournament there next. The geography lesson continues ... and before long we'll be visiting both that town and those mountains. Brecelande means 'broken land,' which it is, symbolically, due to the lack of a lawful king. This is again something that's mostly for me.]
Inside the stable, the air was thick with the stink of manure and rotting straw, and throbbed with the buzzing of a myriad heavy, slow-moving flies.
[Yeuch! Gross!]
Randal had once been a squire in his uncle's castle of Doun, and most recently had been an apprentice wizard at the Schola Sorceriae, the School of Wizardry in Tarnsberg on the western sea.
[It's the backstory. Doun is gaelic for 'castle.' Schola Sorceriae is Latin for School of Wizardry; it's translated in the very next phrase. Tarnsberg is Anglo-Saxon for 'secret town.' The western sea is an old name for the Atlantic. We're going to need to know about that castle, because in just a few pages Randal is going to meet someone who knew him back then, and who knew he was going off to school.]
Now he heaved another pitchfork-load of manure over his shoulder, and wondered why he'd ever left home.
[Under the circumstances, woudn't you? Action to break up the huge infodump.]
Randal was about fifteen, with the height and the sturdy build that come of being well-fed from earliest childhood.
[Description of character, early enough so the readers won't have formed too much of their own picture.]
At the moment, however, a film of grey dust covered most of his face, and sweat plastered his long, untrimmed black hair to his head and neck. Randal had started work when a pair of merchants departed and left the stables empty, but the Basilisk's regular hostler—who should have been working with him—had never shown up.
[Sounds uncomfortable. The merchants are going to drive a bit more of the plot in a chapter or so, and the ostler's disappearance is significant. Also puts our character into a poor-me-set-upon mood. Things will shortly get worse.]
"It's no good," Randal muttered. "I have to rest."
[Finally, some dialog!]
He leaned the pitchfork against the wall of the stable, and rubbed his hands down the front of his tunic. His right palm ached, as it did whenever he performed hard physical work these days. He looked down at the hand, and at the raised, red scar that stretched across it—low on the side away from his thumb, higher on the thumb edge, so that it actually crossed the first joint of his forefinger.
[Backstory and description all jumbled together, disguised with the use of the actions with the pitchfork and rubbing his hands. Tunic gives us more of an idea of time period. (This is, in fact, medieval fantasy.) I figured out where the scar would go by actually grabbing a sword.]
Randal clenched and unclenched his hand, trying to ease the cramp in the scar-stiffened flesh. If only he hadn't grabbed the sharp-edged blade of Master Laerg's ceremonial sword ... if only he hadn't used the magical object like a knightly weapon, to kill the renegade wizard Laerg before his spells could destroy not only Randal but the entire School of Wizardry, if only ... but if he hadn't done those things, he would be dead now, and the kingdom of Brecelande would be held fast in Laerg's sorcerous grip.
[The summary of Volume One, for the folks who haven't read it. This book was being offered through a school book club, where there was no guarantee that the others would have been read -- or even available. Each volume has to contain everything. Laerg is from the Welsh, the Seven Sorrows of Storytelling.]
Even working here for the rest of my life, thought Randal, glancing about the filthy stable, would be better than that.
[No such luck. Things will shortly get much worse.]
He took up the pitchfork again, and returned to mucking out the befouled straw. As he worked, he took some comfort in knowing that tomorrow or the next day should see him on the road again, well away from the Basilisk and its stinking stable, and within reach—at last—of his goal.
[The plot shows up! Hurrah!]
Magic.
[Yep, it's a fantasy.]
More than anything else, Randal had wanted to be a wizard, a worker in spells and the enchantments that could change the texture of reality—or, more practically, make short work of clearing out a filthy stable. He had spent three years at the Schola in Tarnsberg, studying the magical arts, before breaking the oldest law of wizardry, the one that forbade a wizard to attack or defend with steel.
[More backstory, and a bit more infodumping. Also asks the question the readers are no doubt asking themselves by now -- why's he doing this the hard way?]
His action had saved the Schola from destruction, and the Regents—the master wizards who controlled the School of Wizardry—had not been ungrateful. They'd made Randal a journeyman wizard, setting him on the second stage of the long road that led from apprenticeship to mastery. But they'd also done something else.
[More summary of the last chapter of volume one. This is because you really have to know what went on to follow this book. Originally, the novel had been a 400 page book, which we couldn't sell because Harry Potter was still ten years in the future and no one thought kids would read a 400 page book. So it was cut into pieces, and the summaries added -- our story so far -- in the first chapter of each volume.]
They'd taken his magic away from him. Until he could get permission from the wizard Balpesh, once a Regent of the Schola and now a hermit living near Tattinham in the eastern mountains, all Randal's skill and training had to remain untouched, no matter how great the need.
[He's going on pilgrimage to do penance. Also tells us what and where the last chapter will be. Pesh is from Peshawar, a city on the Kyhber Pass, since we're going to a pass in the mountains. Bal -- would it be more obvious if I spelled it Baal (The Lord in Hebrew)? Yes, this whole thing is a religious allegory. So shoot me.]
So haven't written as much as I wanted to. Having said that, after this week I get 1 week off uni. If I don't get some descent writing done then, I'm hopeless.
I hope I can show some of that by putting all the tips to good use. (My first story is done to THE END and I'm sending it to my beta readers at the end of the week. My second one is in progress and my third's in outline form
