The first of Advent has passed and we are fast approaching Christmas itself.
What better way to count down to the „big day“ than by opening the doors of an Advent Calendar?
Now I can’t send you a piece of chocolate through the interwebs, but I still can give you a treat each day. 😉
Because – and you know this if you follow me on Twitter – I’ve been busy preparing
my very own Advent Calendar!
You might remember the one from last year, but the one this year will be a bit different.
Don’t get me wrong: I really like the stories I wrote for that one and it was fun to create them on the basis of a picture that was send to me. But I wanted to do/try something different and as DarkFairy and I picked up the idea for Your Picture – A Story (that you can still participate in if you like 😉 ) to write like that, I decided to do something else this time.
But what did I do?
I spent a couple of months thinking about what I wanted to do and at some point I ended up with this basic idea:
- The Story follows three Characters
- Each door is a Chapter for each Character
- They are each on their own Journeys, looking for something
- At the end – something I’m not going to tell you – should happen
With this I then drew up the twenty four numbers and drew circles, triangles and squares around them while trying to place them in order, so no Character would appear twice in a row.
Then it hit me: I had three Characters and twenty four days, which meant eight Chapters for each Character to go through their Journey.
But let’s be honest: Eight Chapters is a weird numbering.
So I re-drew the stuff and decided to add three days were there would be a Chapter for each Character, giving me two more Chapters to tell their Story. Of course through this the no-Character-appears-twice-in-a-row was pretty much annulled, but that’s okay.
The next step was then to create the Characters and see where their Journey would lead them and to be honest when I was about halfway finished, I did not think I’d meet the ending I had in mind.
But I knew some things about my characters:
- One should be a Sorcerer
- One a Warrior and
- One should be something else
- I wanted a Character that was one gender
- I wanted one that was the other and
- Then there should be the one that was neither
But I’ll talk a bit more about that later on, just let me tell you: Using a self-made gender-neutral pronoun can be quite tricky, but totally worth it.
I don’t really want to give too much away, regarding these three, as you should get to know them yourself, when the
Advent Calendar starts tomorrow.
But
how should you read it?
If you follow the principles of an Advent Calendar you’ll just read the story one door at a time, but you could read it with a twist.
As I said did I think up an order of appearance for the Characters, which means you can decide yourself whose Journey you want to follow. Though that means that you have to wait a couple of days until that part of the Story is picked up again. 😉
With each Chapter I’ll tell you when the Character will appear again, but you can also see it in the colour coding on the page for the complete Calendar (it’s explained there).
You just have to choose if you want to follow the Woodling Mina, the Stoneling Sasha or the human Damian. 😉
Long story short:
Every day the new door will open at 7:00 am UTC+1 and later on be linked in its respective door in the Advent Calendar.
You can receive a notification right away if you follow me here, on Facebook, Twitter or one of the other social media I’m at. Twitter and Facebook will also give you a chance to see my progress with the finishing touches on the Calendar (I still need to translate most of the Chapters into English…)
Well, I guess that’s about it.
Come back tomorrow and check out
Poison’s Advent Calendar!
See you around
PoiSonPaiNter
