This time, I have a human as the main character, eliminating that complicated mess, and dragons are seen as an ancient story to be feared - nothing more (yay for drama later on when he meets one, eh?).

As per usual, I cut the first 13 lines a bit short so that they don't stop mid-sentence.

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During the summer, Damien Vennik mainly ran errands for his parents, who worked the family’s small farm. Damien was spared that task due to his small stature; though he was already fourteen, travelers often mistook him as a young child, and an underfed one at that – the one time that he had tried to help his parents, he had collapsed from the combination of heat and exertion; only the skills of the village healer, an old man named Akano Syris, kept him alive, and even then he was bedridden for nearly a month.
Now, he was jogging through the village, his bare feet nearly silent on the smooth ground.

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A couple of ways around this

1) He has a billion older brothers, or maybe eight

2) There are many slaves/servants that work on the farm

3) It is a magical farm

4) The farm requires someone full-time to do non-physical tasks. accounting, sales, distribution. Usually someone has to sell the goods at market (toss a bunch of radishes on the donkey and drag it to the town square). That isn't very difficult work compared to the other stuff you would do at a farm (cow slaughter, picking strawberries).

5) The farm isn't really a farm. Could it be a honey farm?

quote:

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http://www.farm-direct.co.uk/farming/types/index.html
Farms take many forms.
* Huge cereal farms where many thousand of acres of wheat billow in a summer breeze,
* Tiny market gardens where specialist herbs are grown as a part time enterprise.
* Intensive poultry units where tens of thousand of birds a day are produced from a remarkably small area.
* Mile upon mile of upland and fell where a handful of sheep graze an area larger than many towns and yet barely earn enough to keep a single family fed and clothed.
* Mushrooms come from dark sheds and cellars.
* Strange structures on the seabed nurture mussels and oysters.
* Apples come from trees but so does mistletoe and paper and chewing gum.

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6) He does something very specific that no-one else wants to do. Say, they have honey bees and he harvests the honey because he has a natural immunity to it. That could be an all day job and generate enough revenue for them to handle him not doing other farm work.

Thank you all for pointing out the flaw in that background. I'll have to make some changes to get this to work, namely finding something physically strenuous for Damien's family to do that has no real sedentary side tasks.

*BING*

Of course, I could have him living in a village where it's very hot all of time except for a small area (a cave or something used by the healer), then give him some sort of allergy to direct sunlight; the only way to protect him while he's outside is to totally cover him, and that would cook him shortly. The only fight then is to avoid making him a vampire in a fantasy world where vampires may actually exist (I haven't decided yet).

...Or I could make him really scrawny, and make his parents hunters or something. Maybe his dad's a hunter and his mom's a weaver or something. That would be far simpler. Especially if the wildlife in the area that his dad hunts in is dangerous - no kids involved in hunting amarok!

...hehe, I like using mythological creatures (this beastie is a giant wolf in Inuit mythology). Yay for wikipedia when looking for something like that.

Thoughts on this approach?

I didn't intend that sentence to be a sign that Damien is stronger now - I thought more that he's small and skinny (thus very light), and even a rather weak person (weak, not ill) could still be a good runner. Running is easier when one weighs 80 pounds than when one weighs 200 pounds - that sort of thing.

It's funny that you didn't intend the last line to indicate a change in his strength, because that's exactly what I got out of it, and it was my favorite line- the reason I wanted to turn the page- to find out what had happened! LOL! Did the healer give him some extra jamba in his juice, or what? Was that the unraveling of the entire story- that he had bonded with a dragon hatchling and her strength increased his?

Irony.

I think you've got fun stuff going on in your noggin, I love all of your ideas. When you focus it all into one storyline, I think I'm gonna love reading it!

Bree

o.O Idea! Damien's going to be a mage later on, so I could make the strength change part of the story - there could be a rare illness that strikes some children, making them smaller and weaker (a sort of starvation thing), killing most of the victims (like I said, a RARE illness). The few survivors (1 or two per century, compared to a few dozen deaths worldwide) gain incredible magical powers, though they never fully recover from the illness's effects (you wouldn't either if your growth was stunted for your entire childhood).

The disease would be rare enough that only people actively involved in powerful magic would know of it (knowing the few living survivors, and the details on the world's great mages in history), so the healer (being only minimally skilled in magic, and never trained) never identified it. It's a kind of secret held by the mages, revealed only to the powerful.

Hehe, thanks for the reply, you made the near-stopped train of thought for this launch - I think you switched the dying steam-driven train with a magnetic train like the Bullet train in Japan!