Giant Armors Blog

I feel rather emotional about uploading the final chapter of Armor. I feel elation. Relief. Sadness that I didn’t do so sooner.

I want Armor to be read by as many people as possible. I want folks to enjoy it. I want it to live.

And now, it’s finally all out here on the web. Finally.

The ending feels a little rushed to me now. But that’s okay; I didn’t want to dwell on good-byes and long explanations. An ending should have punch, and leave the reader a little breathless.

And so, now, on to the next novel. On to the main story. If I can.

This chapter felt risky.

A lot of fantasy adventure stories avoid the subject of main characters getting hurt. Oh, folks might get cuts or bruises, and characters are often put in great danger. But injury is either minimal or ignored.

But in this chapter, Adam’s hurt. Badly hurt. Nearly dead.

Why did I do this to him? Because this illustrates danger. This is what happens in war. I felt it would be false to put these characters in grave danger, and have them escape with a few minor bumps every time.

This chapter’s also risky in that Tom finally speaks up against Brask. This is weird from two perspectives. Adult readers seem to wonder why Tom didn’t do this earlier. I suspect that kids will be surprised that he speaks up this strongly.

Adults forget that kids have very little power in their lives. Kids can complain, but ultimately they have to do what grown-ups tell them to do. And here, Tom totally puts his foot down. It honestly felt a bit unnatural to me, though it had to happen for the story to work.

At least, I hope it works. Do you think I went too far here?

This was meant to be the first major battle of the book. Tom’s gone out in his Armor before, of course, but this is the first battle in which the Trych completely overwhelm him.

There are three big pitfalls to watch out for when writing about action: describing too much (every little detail), not describing enough (resulting in muddied action where you don’t know who’s doing what), and walking the line so carefully in the middle that the action becomes drab and boring. Worse, sometimes you have to increase detail in one area, and back off on detail in another.

As a result, I tend to re-write action sequences the most.

But this sequence I’m happy with. It’s tense, and a lot happens. Which is good for just about any scene.

We’ve hit an interesting point in the novel.

Things are getting bad. Adam’s badly hurt, and Tom’s tired of passively accepting Brask’s direction. So Tom decides to do a little direction of his own.

When I’ve shown this book to adults, some of them express surprise that the kids are so passive, that they don’t do much. I secretly think that a lot of adults have forgotten what it’s really like to be a kid; your entire life is structured and controlled by others. Other people decide when you wake up, what you do, and where you go. It’s all (ideally) for your own good, but even so kids are constantly under adults’ control. Kids may whine and complain, but they go along with the vast majority of whatever adults tell them to do.

It takes a lot for a kid to really stand up to an adult. Beyond just “I don’t wanna.” Most kid rebellion is at most passive, dragging one’s feet.

I hope all my readers–adult and otherwise–understand this about the characters in this novel. These kids are used to taking orders. Standing up to Brask is a huge step for Tom. It’s part of growing up, of determining when something is wrong, finding the right time to act, then screwing up one’s courage and going for it.

Most folks will tell you that a good story is made up of rising action. That is, you’re always building to the climax at the end of the story.

Which makes complete sense, until you discover that this doesn’t fit the plays of William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s plays have a more hump-like structure. Something major happens in the middle of the story; everything beforehand leads up to it, and everything afterwards is just reacting to it.

Well, I’m not Shakespeare, but chapter 6 is the major event in the middle (okay, about 2/3 of the way into) Armor. Things is where things turn serious. Sure, serious things happened before, but now we see serious consequences. Now, people might die.

This is a scene I added late in the writing of Armor.

I once listened to legendary animation directory Brad Bird (creator and director of The Iron Giant and The Incredibles) talk about pacing in a story. He explained that there’s a tendency–especially in animation–to try to make every single moment special. To go for the big laugh or the big thrill in every scene.

He explained that you can’t do that. While any story will have big moments, it needs small moments so the audience can breathe and react to the big moments.

This bit of Armor is a small scene. It involves Tom and Adam walking around the city, being normal. Well, as normal as they can be. It’s a time for them to see what it is they’re protecting.

It also hints a bit at the society of the city. We see that entire families work in their shops, including children. Nobody’s surprised by this; it’s just how things work here.

This is something Tom must face: what is it that he’s really fighting for? Who is he defending? Is it worth defending? How far would he go to defend it?

All questions he’ll have to answer soon enough.

It’s always a bit dangerous for an author to describe something as his or her “favorite.” Readers can then dive into that bit and wonder why it’s so important to the author, dissecting it and otherwise obsessing over it.

In many cases, this favoritism has less to do with the content itself, and more with the author’s feelings. For a piece of the author’s own writing, the author may just have had a particularly easy time writing that section. Or the author may be proud of a particular word or phrase that’s important to the author, but not to the story.

That said, chapter 4 of Armor is probably my favorite chapter. This is where everything starts to come together. Much of the groundwork for the ending is laid here.

Moreover, this chapter includes several important conversations, my “Gundam conversations.”

Gundam was one of my major influences in creating Giant Armors, and one staple of Gundam series involves conversations between characters about why they fight. Most Gundam protagonists don’t really want to fight in whatever war they’re in, but they’re often surrounded by people who do. So they end up in a lot of conversations about why they’re fighting.

So I wanted to include that in Armor. In this chapter, Tom talks to several folks about why he chose to stay and fight, which I think is an important thing to establish.

This also establishes a running theme of the entire Giant Armors series: the differences between kids from Earth and the inhabitants of the Giant Armors world. The people in that world have a completely different pre-history, history, culture, etc. than anyone on Earth. Not only do they have different cultures, they see the world differently. They organize themselves differently, socialize differently, talk differently, build differently. They are, effectively, aliens.

So, a lot happens in this chapter. Perhaps that’s why it’s my favorite.

Just posted part 3 of Armor, in which Tom meets Adam, they both face their first major battle against the Trych, and Tom thinks up a surprise for the bugs.

Welcome to the official Giant Armors website! I’m very glad you’re here.

I’m Brent P. Newhall, the author of the Giant Armors series. This will eventually be a series of novels about the Giant Armors, the fantasy world they inhabit, and the kids who pilot them.

I’ve just put this site together, and posted the first two parts of book 0 of the series, Armor. Armor is a prequel of sorts to the full storyline.

I’ll post more parts of Armor in the coming weeks and months.