Imperial League 1454: Five Storylines

With just over a month to go until the start of the dragon racing season, Sara Hymnia picks her five storylines to watch for in 1454

  SARA HYMNIA
  Wolf Sports Imperial League Correspondent

1. Feran Andoal joins Temisia

This year's biggest story. Defending champion Feran Andoal leaves Lautern, the team that brought him two championships in five years, to join one of the oldest and most hallowed names in Dragon Aerosports, Temisia. Temisia's resources and record of success give Andoal every possible advantage for his title defence, but settling in with a new team – and a new teammate in Gerald Ipemas – is never straightforward. How Andoal gets on in the decidedly more aristocratic environment at Temisia will likely determine whether he can defend his crown, and may set the tone for the next five years of the IL.

Hey, so remember that time I spent a week roleplaying as a pundit for a fictional sport derived from a tumblr voting bracket about fictional cities? I'm bringing that back in a big way as a side project to the web novel I'm launching this weekend.

Consider this a sort of augmented reality bit - you can definitely read The Dragon Racer without reading these posts, and it might also be fun to follow Wolf Sports' coverage without reading the core story (in which there's also a bunch of fictional sports punditry, but that's from Wolf Sports competitor DNN, the Dragon News Network, who have the broadcast license for the actual races), but I'm writing the Wolf Sports stuff to add depth and breadth to the world of The Dragon Racer and its central sport.

There are going to be three different pundit characters in Wolf Sports coverage (Denis Urban, linked above, is one of them, in all of his mediocre, curmudgeonly glory), sometimes I'm gonna have them all write their own takes on a thing, sometimes they'll cover different aspects, they each (hopefully) have their different focuses and I'm trying to stitch a lot in between the lines of what they are willing to put in print, so hopefully there's some intrigue too.

Anyway I hope the posts are fun, and that you'll consider giving Wolf Sports and The Dragon Racer a look~

Desperate to compete in the Grand Prix of dragon racing, Phoebe, the black sheep of the Hyperio family, strikes a deal with the local mob to steal an undersized lunar drake from the mafia. With the help of two childhood friends, she scrapes together a team and stuns the Imperial League with shoestring-budget success. Fame brings perilous entanglements, though – a pop star romance, a private investigator on her tail, her irate father's determination to bring her to heel and, of course, the mafia trying to get their dragon back.

And out for a walk late one winter night, Phoebe meets an aspiring idol who seems to see right through her…

I wanna do a webnovel. Or rather, I want to release a project I've already basically finished in webnovel format instead of all-in-one-go, in the hopes of generating a steady drip-feed of validation rather than one big lump. The wisdom I'm seeking is this:

what site do I run it on?

A question I think about sometimes for writing projects is 'what is the minimum viable chekov's gun?'. Like, if you conspicuously put the proverbial gun on the mantlepiece in act 1, what's the least use you can put it to that will pay it off? Can you put the proverbial gun on the mantlepiece and pay that off without firing it? Without anyone getting shot? Not necessarily in a subversive way ('haha! the gun is loaded with blanks!' or 'haha! the gun isn't loaded, but a secret message from the wife's lover is concealed in one of the chambers!') but in a way where someone noticing, picking up, interacting with the gun pays off something significantly less dramatic than violence or the threat of violence?

Today I'm thinking about this in the context of alien megastructures, which apparently I'm just coming up with as settings for everything these days. If I have a story set in a cool alien megastructure because that's a cool place to put a story, how little can I get away with explaining or revealing about the alien megastructure and have it still be enough that people feel the alien megastructure is more than just set dressing

Idle thoughts, conversation starter, tell me about cool books/plays/stories that have deflationary payoffs (which, I guess, implicitly there's a spoiler risk in the comments, I don't mind being spoiled on stuff but I know some people do)