Or “In Which the Writer’s Muse is Smarter than She Is: Part ????”

I got about four thousand words into a novel and hit a wall. I had plot, character, setting, in-world magic of a sort, background story, and … THUD.

The brain would not do it. I pounded at the story, and nothing moved. So I grumbled, counted the words as experience and possible odds-n-sods to fossik about in later, and left it. I started it in the summer of 2022, and dropped it that October. I think I looked back at it twice, once to sketch out the start of a story guide, since it is in a completely different world from what I usually do, then moved on.

In November of 2025, scenes for that story started to appear in my mind. Of course, this is as I am scrambling to work on a series book, because the muse is a real [pjorative insult here]. What kicked the story loose? A couple of things, some of which I had realized over the missing three years, the last one I didn’t grok until last week.

For various reasons, some of which overlap between books, I started reading the Welsh Triads (with lots and lots of annotations), and some academic titles about the role of bards, poets, and similar people of Briton extraction. Also, since I love his writing style, Barry Cunliffe’s book about the Celts, most of which is “We’re pretty certain about this, no clue about that, and asking where the culture called ‘Celtic’ comes from will start fights at academic conferences.” At which point my [mutter mutter] muse started kicking scenes and dialogue at me.

I didn’t know enough in 2022 to write the world I needed, including some terms and cultural elements. I had the politics and some macro things, but not the nuts-and-bolts for world building. Even with that, some of the politics wouldn’t work in the world I wanted to build, because it required copying and pasting actual history. That’s not ideal, and not where the plot and MC intend to go.

I got the scenes written, but without naming the character, because I couldn’t recall it. When I finally went back to the file to see what I’d called him? THUD. The name was wrong. Very, very wrong. It didn’t fit him or the story any longer. That was part of the problem. I went digging, found some options, and settled on one that echoes a little, but is not quickly recognizable to most people. That helped things, and now I can dig into that book once I finish polishing the really rough edges off the other book’s draft and set it aside to rest.

What was stopping me? My subconscious, which is smarter about these things than I am, recognized that I didn’t have the big picture for the story world I wanted to build. The original plot I roughed out won’t work any more, but that’s fine. When I sketched it out, I could tell something was off, but I left it alone. With more research, details that will fill out the world in a far more believable way, and a name that fits both the man and the world, I am ready to tell the story. I know how to get the MC to his half-brother’s court, and the world they live in. Past that, some of the old plot should work, other bits? Probably not.

So, for me, the lesson is trust my gut, read widely, and don’t use a Germanic name for a world without Germanic peoples, unless there is a really good reason that fits the story. In this case, there wasn’t a reason, and the name didn’t match the character. A change fixed the problem, and now the story can get well underway. As can he, because the year-and-a-day handfast is ending, Tuathal has places to be.