Steam Lost

For some reason I have lost all motivation for my story. No. I’ve lost almost all motivation for my story. It’s just not interesting to me and that makes is really hard to write it. I did only about 100 words yesterday and none today (so far). That’s a real hard thing to recover from. I’m not sure I want to.

I lot of people that do this say their books are no good and I know the point isn’t to make it good. The point is to just keep writing anyway. But, but, but…

By now I should have 13,336 words.
My current count is 10,248 words.

More Like Lovecraft Than I Want

I re-read part of The Call of Cthulhu last night in order to remind myself of Lovecraft’s style, the events and exactly how the star spawn is described. Well, first off it isn’t really described (of course) because that’s just the way ol’ H.P. writes. Secondly I was upset to realize how close my setting is to the events of Chapter II: The Tale of Inspector Legrasse. There the encounter between the police and the cultists takes place in the swamps south of New Orleans in 1907. The victims apprehended for sacrifice by the cultists are described as squatters and as “mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men.” In my story it’s 1924 and the cultist themselves are the descendants of some of Lafitte’s men. That’s really similar! I wish knew if I had thought to link this all to Lafitte independently or if I thought that because I read it in Lovecraft.

Basically, I have to decide if I want my story to be compatible with the Lovecraft Mythos or not. What I’ve written so far doesn’t contradict with what is arguably the most essential story in the Mythos. One can’t have a Mythos story that contradicts the original Mythos story! The star spawn isn’t killed in his story so my cultists could be involved with it years later. Plus, “the swamp and lagoon country to the south” is pretty vague. There’s a lot of bayou south of New Orleans with lots of room for different groups of cultists and different lines of Lafitte’s men. All I have to do to mesh this up with The Call of Cthulhu is mention a previous encounter in 1907 or something and I’m set. Poof! It’s a Mythos story.

However, I don’t really want this to be a Mythos story. I have plans to use this as part my own vaguely fantasy, vaguely gothic, vaguely noir story world. Just because Lovecraft is an influence on this tale doesn’t mean that it has to be compatible with his Mythos. I could just ignore the fact that there’s a lot of similarity and tell my story any way I want. Or I could make some other changes to make the stories more separate.

Basically it comes down to barrowing the idea of the star spawn and its cultists. That idea is so closely linked to the setting of the story and to Cthulhu that it’s hard to take just one half of the equation. If I take the cultist element in its entirety as I had planned to do, why not just go that one extra step and set the whole thing in the Mythos story world? If I want to avoid a direct connection to Lovecraft I should leave it all behind and think of some other background for the story. There are reasons for gruesome murder that don’t involve monsters from the stars. The problem is that, either way, it’s going to take some re-writing and that’s just not what NaNoWriMo is about. It’s taken me an hour just to puzzle through the problem in this post! I don’t have time for this! Need to write more words!

By now I should have 8,335 words.
My current count is 8,522 words.

The Garou Family and the Le Rouge Clan

I have the introduction of all the families and the major characters done. After making the sketches of them all it was much easier to write that chapter. However, I think it’s going to sound really boring and like droning on and on if I re-read it. So I won’t. I’ve also started on the chapter that describes the gruesome murder. That won’t appear in the finished novel until the end but I have to write it first. Yesterday I thought I was close to having a title, but then I lost it. A title isn’t really that important anyway.

By now I should have 6,668 words.
My current count is 7,221 words.

No One Needs to Know that Alex’s Mother’s Maiden Name Was Aoste

Today was hard. Last year I got to do this whole NaNoWriMo in a bit of isolation. This year there are friends to see and social occasions to attend. This is not a bad thing! I like playing games and hanging out. BUT it means that the amount of free time available for writing is less. Not only that, but I am more drained. It’s just not possible to prepare food, drive over the other side of town, then come back again and still be as fresh as when I was working earlier today.

Also, I am veering a little too much toward realism and over-planning. Here’s my logic. I want to write the scene where my mysterious preacher man Doré meets the townsfolk. But I need to know what exactly they did first (that’s the gruesome murder part). I want to write his reactions as if he already knows what happened which means I have to know what happened already. But I can’t know who did what to facilitate the murder until I decide on the cast of characters. So, I could just throw together a list and be done with it, but I want all the names and family histories to be complete, grounded and realistic for the time and place of my setting. That would be rural Louisiana in 1924. Well, that means research. Now, there’s no problem with that. I love reading about how things connect and what came before what. The problem is that all the character sketches and the genealogical tables and the accounts of the great-grandfather’s adventures don’t add to my word count because it’s all background info that only I need to know. Gotta keep focused on that word count if I’m gonna finish this year.

By now I should have 5,001 words.
My current count is 5,419 words.

Lafitte Begat Beaux Flats

I am still “ahead” in my world count but not as far was I was yesterday. I spent time yesterday researching (just a little) about Jean Lafitte. In additional to all the other references that I have already planned I am saying that the town was founded by some former pirates of Lafitte’s. For a not-entirely-clear-to-me reason I’ve named the town Beaux Flats. I imagine it as a mostly dry hill on the middle of the bayou. The only way there is by boat.

I wanted a patina of the supernatural but in the first chapter there is already a lot of mysterious references. It’s already a little too supernatural. I’ll have to tone it down some in the coming chapters. Maybe I can have a few that are devoid of anything weird. Let’s see if I can do that!

By now I should have 3,334 words.
My current count is 4,010 words.

And They're Off!

This is a post about yesterday. In the last hour before the start of the month I finally decided what I was going to write about. It’s an idea I’ve had for a while but I wasn’t very excited about it until I decided to add a gruesome murder to the back story. Then everything fell in place. I’m not really sure what sort of genre this is or how it will turn out. In my mind the story combines elements from a lot of sources. My main character and the setting are loosely inspired by Doctor Syn from Doctor Syn: A Tale of Romney Marsh by Russell Thorndike. The marsh in Kent becomes the bayou in Louisiana. There’s some story elements from “The Griffin and the Minor Canon” by Frank R. Stockton, mainly what I call the concept of “morality by strange means.” And that also applies to the movie High Plains Drifter where one guy takes revenge against a whole town. I’ve got a little bit of The Call of Cthulhu in there too because in a mildly supernatural story a few hints of eldritch darkness just fit in perfectly. My more literary influences are Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt for a bit of the whodunit set up and The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, père for some of that meditation on the costs of revenge feeling. Also I’m trying to do it all in a style inspired by Kurt Vonnegut. Ambitious!

Yesterday I wrote a little bit about the town which I’m calling Beaux Flats and about the first meeting between my Syn/griffin/drifter character and the young boy who is the story’s narrator.

By yesterday I should have had 1,667 words.
My total count yesterday was 2,166 words.

Ready for NaNoWriMo 2009?

So I haven't really updated this site in a quite a while. Mostly because I haven't worked on any of my books in quite a while. Henpecked here and there and that's it. I'm not proud of that fact, but there it is. Yesterday and today I did a gentle editorial pass over Deep Dark and cleaned it up enough to send it to some friends and family. After hearing about it for a year thay can read it while I write a new one.

Right, a new one... I have no idea what I am going to write about this year. I have seven or more decent ideas but nothing that screams "write 50,000 words about me!" Too bad. Well, I still have a day and a half to decide.

Happy wording!

Back in the Saddle – So to Say

I have actually started work again. My intended holiday break in December just kept going and going and going… Yesterday I looked at my Jaws of Empire stuff. I did some tidying up in various places and added a medium sized section to one chapter where Jundah and Wil are talking. I’ve been thinking a lot about JoE recently and I think I need to change a big chunk of the structure. I had planned to have this whole building up a revolutionary movement sub-plot. I recently watched Sergio Leone’s Giú le Testa, known in English as Duck You Sucker. It’s largely about the costs of being a revolutionary. I’ve also been reading a lot about World War II and watching documentary films from the time. I guess the message that so much art about war is saying, bluntly “war is hell,” is sinking in a little. Or it’s sinking in a new way. In any case, I don’t want to write a story about a revolution. Revolutionaries are okay, but I don’t want that to be the point of the tale. So once I get some of that worked out and some other character arcs I will be in a good position to actually write some more chapters. It was easy to do all the character introductions, but I started to have trouble when I had to start bringing the storylines together.

That was yesterday. Today I worked on Deep Dark. I added more to Articka’s last chapter. He end is not nearly so mysterious now. It’s quite explicit. I also went through half a dozen other chapters and made minor tweeks here and there to the wording of things. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of what I looked at today was not crap. A whole lot, especially at the beginning of the book, still reads as “great!” I most likely am not being quite objective enough (I did write it after all!) and I know the ending chapters are likely to be much less great, but I am pleased to find something I can really work with after coming back to this work which has lain fallow for a while.