I Need More Characters

This was a fairly easy writing day. Usually the weekends are full of errands and going out. This weekend has not had any of that stuff. I have been able to sit back on focus on this novel.

I realized today that my story is rather empty of characters. I have my four main characters and they have all spent long sections of the story remembering or wandering around the desert landscape or talking to themselves or interacting with each other. I think that is all okay. This is story about looking into the past or thinking about the future. Yet there is still some stuff that should be done as dialog. When I get to one of those scenes I have no one for main characters talk to. So I created a Chancellor for the Queen of the insects to talk to. I immediately thought of the Chamberlain from The Dark Crystal. I happen to have the concept art book for that movie so I was able to look up his name – SkekSil. I love his preening, cooing way of manipulating everyone in that film. But he’s not afraid to get his hands dirty (and stabbed) when he needs to. He’s the perfect model for a male insect fighting to hold on to some authority in the nearly all-female insect society.

I actually had to take a short break and brainstorm about the Chancellor and how he came to power and what interests him and motivates him. That line of thinking led me to wonder about the insect males in general and what kind of place they would have in insect society. Some of this ground I covered way back in 2008 when I worked on Deep Dark. I think I have a different take on it this time. Besides, this whole pile of ideas about cultural elements and secret societies and missions to uncover lost knowledge is largely irrelevant to this story. I like that I have these ideas now and some of that will show up no doubt, but the further adventures of the Chancellor is not going to be part of the story. That is why I took only a small break. I have to get back to this novel.

The benchmark word count for today is: 28339

My total word count so far is: 29384

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.

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.