Spider Season
I haven’t done much actual writing on Spider Season over the last few days, but I have been laying a lot of groundwork: figuring out relationships, mocking up scenes in my head, deciding on plot points, and so forth. I have decided not to use units for anything if I can help it. Instead I will refer to a day, half a day, most of the morning; a pace, a day’s travel, a week’s travel; and so on. One unit of measure that I will keep is the “stone”, because that is sufficiently archaic without seeming too tied to our specific world. I could see people in a primitive society measuring things in “stones”.
I think the maguffin is a ring and a book. The book is magic: the ring is anti-magic. This is what protects her against the evil sorcerer that wants the book. But if the ring is anti-magic, how can she learn magic from the book? If she takes the ring off to cast spells, wouldn’t the evil sorcerer strike then? Maybe the evil sorcerer is a ruse to get her to go to the Ivory Tower. She needs to stay focused on her goals, though. She looks at this bit with the sorcerer as a distraction.