Since this is the first week of this website, I figured I'd publish the first actual chapter of the Cabbage Girl just to get the ball rolling.
As you can see, the Cabbage Girl's life is fairly grim.
One of my (many) motivations in the creation of this story is a sort of rejection of the weird class-ism that still sort of sits in a lot of fantasy -- this idea that only "great people" (i.e. kings and princesses and knights and wizards and prophesied saviors and people descended from them) have the ability to really do anything important.
Even George R.R. Martin's work seems to focus overly-much on the upper classes and their privilege and only cursorily pays much attention to the plight of the "smallfolk" as he calls them. And most of that attention is only to underline how unimportant the "smallfolk" are and how awesome the noble-descended protagonists are.
So the Cabbage Girl is "smallfolk". She's an orphan, a thief, an urchin. Don't get your hopes up. She's not the lost descendant of some noble line. She's not some shining knight waiting to happen.
She's practical, selfish, more prone to run than fight, and, as described in the prologue, distinctly not a pretty, pretty princess.
-- MJC
As you can see, the Cabbage Girl's life is fairly grim.
One of my (many) motivations in the creation of this story is a sort of rejection of the weird class-ism that still sort of sits in a lot of fantasy -- this idea that only "great people" (i.e. kings and princesses and knights and wizards and prophesied saviors and people descended from them) have the ability to really do anything important.
Even George R.R. Martin's work seems to focus overly-much on the upper classes and their privilege and only cursorily pays much attention to the plight of the "smallfolk" as he calls them. And most of that attention is only to underline how unimportant the "smallfolk" are and how awesome the noble-descended protagonists are.
So the Cabbage Girl is "smallfolk". She's an orphan, a thief, an urchin. Don't get your hopes up. She's not the lost descendant of some noble line. She's not some shining knight waiting to happen.
She's practical, selfish, more prone to run than fight, and, as described in the prologue, distinctly not a pretty, pretty princess.
-- MJC