House in the Forest

I’ve started a new serial story on my FB Author’s Page. It’s called the House in the Forest.

It stars Jehanne – from Dancing with a Daemon – but it seems she’s in a parallel universe, or 5 degrees off. She’s much the same woman but not a dancer, now she’s an artist, wild woman and lives in the Occitan, and she’s not (as yet) with Jack although I know he’s there. They’ve not met yet but are going to very shortly and Jack is in a bit of a state although again I don’t yet know what that’s about. To get him well again they have to do a quest …

I’m an intuitive writer and I don’t expect to know all about all my characters, nor the full details of the plot before I begin writing. I do have a structure though, I’ve always found myself most at home with the 5-Act Hero’s Journey style, it works for me. I first discovered the Hero’s Journey when training to be a transpersonal psychologist and just fell in love, it fits Life, the Universe, and Everything so very well. I find Campbell’s original writings on the subject no longer readable but his premises and the way people like George Lucas use it – he did work with Campbell – and then other writers like John Yorke are excellent.

Being a transpersonal psychologist colours all my life, including writing and my life is so much about telling stories. It’s what I encourage my magic students to do too, so much magic happens for everyone through stores. We, most of us, love a good film, our tastes in movies may likely be different but whatever it is we love a good film, or a good TV series, or a good book. And Campbell was write in that all stories have the same basic skeleton, structure. And so, in fact, does Life. When we look at our lives we find ever hour, every day, every year and the whole jolly boiling all fall into that structure that Cambell called the Hero’s Journey, so we love reading and watching other people’s versions of this journey – and when they do it well we call that a good movie and story!

So while House in the Forest is very intuitive it’s also built on that skeleton. It sort of comes naturally to me now although I always need to edit and tweak, iron out the creases. That’s more difficult in a serial story as it gets written quickly but I intend to pull this one together after it’s come out as a serial on FB and publish it as an eBook. So you’ll all be able to get the final tweaked version to keep for yourselves.

In the meantime we have Jehanne who currently thinks getting a bathroom with a bath in her wild cottage on a mountainside in the Occitan is her worst nightmare. Little does she know! It’s going to grow into a huge lake of a problem and challenge and also become the dream of her life. In the first episode I’ve just set the scene a bit, shown you where and how she lives, and I left her at the end of the first episode in the bar down in the village apparently getting some lunch and hunting up a builder who can do her bath.

The next episode will introduce the first of the complications which will, of course, look like a great opportunity – in author-speak we call it the inciting incident *rolls eyes*. Catch up with it on Facebook at Elen Sentier Author, read episode 1 and look out for episode 2 next week.

To keep you going in the meantime here’s a picture of where she lives.