A bevy of updates

So. Progress reports. HAH!

Let's see. I wrote ~30K of the darsverse tales short stories as an experiment in serial story fun all based on prompts. Did a novella for the magician series for nano in the summer (most of it won't survive the next draft, but that's normal so what they hey.) Wrote over 50 short stories for the magician series, and 3-4 for the Charlie Series.

Began rewriting the Ghoulish first novel in march. It hit about 20K and Boy and Fox rammed into my head to say hello violently all over the place. I blame Reynard Fox. I started work on that in May and It's September. It has hit 30K. Most of it is decent stuff, I think. I'm trying to write drafts I don't toss out entirely for the next draft, because I am horribly at writing drafts when I mostly know the plot already for what I'm writing. Boy and Fox also requires me writing it in short bursts or the tone slips more to my default style.

I've also been asked to consider contributing completed stuff for Things I Am Probably Not Allowed To Talk About. That may or may not happen. Which means finishing up the Miskatonic Elementary short YA bits because the only other thing I could really submit would be the magician series short stories, and short story collections don't sell.

As for the magician series, I'm going to do a novel for it as Nano. And then let it sit for several months while working on novel stuff. The short stories have been fun, but I have done over 110 short stories set in the world, 3 novellas and one novel. So this novel in November will be a stopping place for it for a good time, and a break from those characters. The downside of having multiple projects on the go with magic is that things can seep into each other and I'd rather avoid that if I can.

There's also 20 other short stories. It's not that the year hasn't been productive, but it has been relatively slow. A slowness that will lead to better finished drafts, I think, but still an odd place to be in for me. I've also realized that I need to have far more detailed notes on plots for stories after I finish the story, so the second draft doesn't involve quite as much flailing around. But that will be another post.

part of the evenings writing

 I kicked a stone off the side of the road and heard it crack into five trees before stopping. The north road was quiet, all gravel and silence around us. “You’re a magician, I’m a monster and that’s the all of it.”

        “Wray.” There was an odd catch in his voice. “You want something else?”

“I’d like to be friends, not just some family project for you to work on. And I don’t know if you can do that.”

        Bryce stopped and stared down at me. Something intense and private went across his face for a moment and he let out a sigh and slumped. “I don’t know if I’ll be allowed to. I’d like to.”

        “Why?” I let my face slide away from human and glared up at him, clenching clawed fingers loosely. “I’m a broken monster that eats corpses. There’s a lot better friends for a magician to have that me.”

        “The Smiths and Joneses have been at war for over a hundred years over the town of Nowhere, Wray. I don’t have friends here. I never will. Anyone could be turned into a weapon to be used against my family.”

        “A war.”

        “A hundred years ago Reginald Jones the Second founded the town of Nowhere. He was murdered by a Smith ten years later when we realized the entire town had been built as an amplifier for magic. Cast a simple spell to cause harm, amplify it, feed it back into itself and the town would boost the spell until the world itself was destroyed. We killed him and we’ve kept the Joneses from using Nowhere for that ever since.”

        “And your mom has been doing that by herself for ten years.”

        “Yes.” Nothing else, his pride firm enough for that word alone.

        I scratched my scalp. “Then why did you take me home from the cemetery? I could be some weapon the Joneses made.”

        “You bit my finger off then ran away.”

        “I know that,” I growled. “But it could be long term, like a sleeper agent. You all have magic and I don’t need it and I could just come in one night and kill you all.”

        “We do have weapons,” he said mildly. “And we all know how to use mundane ones as well as the magical.”

        Another growl slipped out. I moved, toes digging into gravel, and hauled Bryce up into the air a moment later, driving his back into a tree across the road hard enough to knock the wind out of him. I dropped him back down to the ground a moment later and just crouched beside him, waiting as he wheezed for air.

        “I am a ghoul,” I said, the words harsh even to my ears. “I can rip tombstones apart, dig through earth for bones and your magic doesn’t work on me, Bryce Smith. So, this time for real: why did you trust me enough to take me home?”

        Bryce stood on his third try, staring down at me as if he’d never seen me before, breath coming in weak wheezes. I was was panting for air myself, fighting the urge to attack him as best I could. Telling myself he wasn’t prey. Trying to ignore the scent of cinnamon in his bones.

        “I can’t tell you.” His voice was so soft I almost missed the words.

        “What?” My voice was almost human, the ghoul-self sliding back in shock as I stared at him.

        He looked over my head, not meeting my gaze. “I can’t tell you that.”

Ghoulish Happenings, chapter 1: Dumpster Munchies

Lives are never straight lines: there’s no one point we can look to and say, ‘this is where it all went wrong.’ I’d like to have one of those but people who know he would probably say my life is fine or has always been going wrong. Strangers might point to right now, when I find myself in the middle of a turf war I hadn’t even known about. That would probably be a lie though, since I only noticed the frenzy of howls by the time I was at the bottom of the McDonalds dumpster at the corner of Fourth and Cameron.

             I’d been in it for almost an hour, working my way through nuggets, fish and finally to a dead pigeon. I probably should have sensed two werewolves having a growlfest before that point but it was a really good pigeon: four days dead, marinated by fries and gravy, the bones almost at a consistency of chocolate. It was the best meal I’d found in four days and it’s easy to get lost in the taste of good food, up to a point.

             The point, for me, included scenting both werewolves at either end of the alleyway. Neither had caught my scent: I’d been in the dumpster long enough to blend into it, and I tried to be quiet in dumpsters so people didn’t notice me in them and run screaming. The local police really don’t like me and I don’t want to give them more reasons not to. So I’d been eating quietly, lost in food, and the howls jolted me out of it. They were low howls, the kind that vibrate through bones and flesh rather than split the air. I had no idea if that was a wolf thing or a werewolf thing and just kept mouse-still.

             I was strong and tough, but ending up with a pissed or hurt werewolf in the same dumpster as me would pretty much be like someone tossing a normal person into an industrial blender set onto ‘aggravated mulch’ or something. I didn’t even eat the last leg of the pigeon, just kept still as the werewolves impacted like cars. Growls and snarls and whines cut through the air as they tore into each other, bones and flesh shattering and healing between movement. Both were male, one older by at least twenty years. Maybe. I can tell how old a person is by sniffing them, but werewolves are monsters as well and heal so fast that for all I know they might not even age like humans do.

             I wasn’t about to look at check. And definitely not about to ask. They were related: brothers, parent and kid fighting? No idea. They didn’t talk, just tore into each other again and again. One was faster, smaller, healed quicker: the older one, probably, the other was bigger and stronger, not healing quite as quick but the bone of them was more fluid, the shifts in healing and changing more controlled. I bit back a whine at the thought of what their bones would taste like.

             I think the fight lasted a minute. It felt longer, but the younger werewolf broke away first and fled. He’d expected a faster fight, uncertainty creeping into his scent. And if I could smell that, the other werewolf definitely could. I had no idea who’d win the next time they fought, less desire to ever find out. The older werewolf whined softly to himself as his wounds healed a final time, bones shattering and remaking themselves as he took on human form. His clothing must have changed with him, because I head the ring of a cell phone closer to the dumpster than I’d have liked.

             “It’s me. I won. He should be home by breakfast.” There was a pause. “I don’t know who is going to win the next time, love. I’m running low on tricks.” He sounded tired, and the phone snapped off as the werewolf walked away.

On Voice

I was asked for writing advice earlier, during which I pointed out that my writing a novel (2 drafts of) while trying to work out a plot problem for a novel I mean to be editing means I am probably not the best person to ask. I made a comment in it about finding one's voice and learning when to let go of it. One that is going to fit into Ghoulish Happenings rather well. My default 'voice' tends to be this low-level snark that works well for some stories* but not for others.

It pretty much won't exist for the MCs in Ghoulish Happenings as far as the two MCs are concerned. Both are rather insecure in themselves and not too likely to use humour as a defense against the world. This will change as the series goes on, but not to a level normally found in urban fantasy, ideally. The genre is pretty much littered with the default male protagonist as walking dead-pan snark and a pop-culture machine even when the humour no longer fits the thrust of the stories. I won't avoid it -- a few secondary characters will be pretty snarky for one reason or another -- but both MCs will be far less in that voice than for other similar projects I've done.

We shall see how it all goes. I have notes on magic and monsters semi-done for this draft of GH and will work on characters proper today as well, fleshing out new relationships and backgrounds. I am slowly getting ready to dive back into that world and quite looking forward to what results from it as well as how many of the characters are even going to survive this draft, and how they cope with that later on. Currently I have plans for three novels in total, the second one being redone entirely because of an evil writing prompt, which should at least make it work rather well...

* Such as in nanowrimo last year for a thriller/lit style story in which one character described the nanowrimo of another as 'Lolita, as if it was written by a five year old'

On Second Drafts

I'm at the 12.5K mark of the second draft of Kiln and Kin. In about a thousand words I'll hit one pivotal scene I'd hit at before the 9K mark in the previous draft, which isn't bad at all.  That I'll be able to fit most of the scene in verbatim is also handy -- I'll likely read ahead in the first draft and see what else I can yank out soon, including a few decent bits of dialogue that will hold up just fine in this version.

The second draft does come slower, but I also know the characters better. I'm still feeling out where the plot is going but by this weekend I should have the end-game in mind and go toward that. Doing the second draft of this story is actually helping a lot with the second draft to Ghoulish Happenings, mostly in terms of figuring out how to decide what to keep and how best to keep it. I think I'll just go through the first draft of that again with a lighter and mark the passages that should survive in some form to the second draft, sketch out the plot a bit better and then discard everything else.

GH is going to need a few subplots added, since the one major one is being excised entirely. Since it was full of problematic issues and constant struggles to get it to make sense in the narrative, this is for the best. It also means the relationship between Bryce and Wray can be explored in different angles in that story and probably end up being a lot creepier. I hope.

As for this story: I'll probably be at the 15K mark before the actual antagonist shows up (by proxy, but even so), which does fit the story. Jonas isn't aware of what Qirjin is, or that the gifted exist at all among the masses of humanity. It also means that the characters have almost a week in novel-time just to become friends, get to know each other and have things be mostly normal before that all starts falling apart. Normal is good. It gives the characters some goal to strive toward, after all.

Now back to writing.....

Day Close to 30. Too close 30. Too close. Bad day.

Cutesey title aside, work on the one magician series novella is going well: it is basically about Charlie's first adventure in the weird on her own after the events in the Curdled Magics novel. I'm mostly doing this as backstory for Charlie's own, later adventures on her own in order to flesh out some ideas for the world and give her reference points to weird stuff that don't involve the magician and Jay. I am not sure I will finish it before the actual end of the month, but hope to.

So far the series timeline is:

• piles of short stories (Over 30).
• Road Trip novella, during which a trip is made to Oregon to stop creatures from Outside who want a new cold war. 
• Curdled Magics. The novel, which is about the families of the MCs and the attempt to help a town that has sealed itself off from the world; as a result of the climax of it, Charlie leaves the magician and Jay to travel on her own for a time.
• Ghosting. Charlie novella.
• ?: Probably more short stories, once I get back into the flow of them.

I will mostly take December off from stuff, I think, to let my brain recharge a bit, and then spend January - ? on editing Ghoulish Happenings into a viable second draft for people to critique. I have stuff to expand for it and a few minor/major plot issues to fix but once that's done I'll be able to do another attempt at the second novel in that series. 

weirding plots

I am currently editing/fixing the early three scenes of The Weirding Road. Again. This time it's mostly formatting it as a proper novel and fixing/finding errors. I added one more scene last night and need to add at least one -- possibly three -- bridging scenes to next once, since Amaris ending up back at Zel's place makes no damn sense as it is written now. I have a sort-of feel for where the story is going and how the plot will get it there but nothing is really concrete yet.

Once this draft is finished, it's going to be working on the edit of Ghoulish Happenings (with breaks to work on the Magician Series of stories but nothing more) until I get the novel working properly. At which point I will continue my re-write of the sequel, which is going to be fun since I pared down over half the plots and characters and plan to center on the one character getting his appendix out, which is so deliciously normal it'll be great fun to write.

flash fiction friday: Ghoulish Incidents

A prompt from the monkey, as follows: Even though the waiting room was empty, she sat right next to me. Limit of 500 words.

Even though the waiting room was empty, she sat right next to me.

I was sitting on the cheap metal and plastic chair, fingers having dug grooves  into the metal. I didn't trust myself to get up. Wasn't sure what I'd do if I moved.

"You shouldn't be here." I didn't look over. My voice was flat and cold, even to my ears. It was long past visiting hours; security had decided no one was paid enough to try and get me to leave. I look human. I'm not, and didn't hide it from them.

"Wray." She didn't reach over, didn't touch.

I turned my head. "Ghosts don't belong here."

Cam flinched, as if the words were an exorcism. "I'm your friend."

"You're not Bryce's."

"He'll be fine. They're just removing his appendix."

"He's a magician. He can bend the world. This shouldn't have --."

"That doesn't make him perfect," Cam said, even softer.

I could have made a joke, then. Didn't. Nothing came out. I eat corpses, never bothered me at all, but right now my stomach is twisted up in knots, the air thick with the smells of chemicals and death.

This is a place people go to die. I don't say it out loud. At least, I don't think so, but Cam reads my face and raises a hand. Drops it. She's made of magic, like all ghosts: touching me might destroy her, but I can see she wants to.

It pulls me out of the fear. A little bit. "Why are you here?"

"Three weeks before I died, my best friend downed pills. I took her to emerg, sat in the waiting room. Didn't call her family, because they would have blamed her. Didn't call mine because they would have said I shouldn't have made low-class friends in the first place. I sat. I waited. No one should wait alone, Wray."

"He's alone. In the room. With the doctors."

"I know. But I don't think they'd do their best work with you watching them?" she said.

I blinked. She didn't flicker, didn't vanish to some other place, but looked as if she wanted to. I snickered, forced myself to let go of the chair. "Okay. Good. Good point." I ran my fingers over my face, trying to pull words together. "Fuck."

It wasn't "I'm scared."  It wasn't "Thank you." But she seemed to get it anyway.

I looked at the clock. I waited.

Urban Fantasy Conceits

A major downside to making a world in which both monsters and magic are real is to what extent it is hidden from the world and the means for doing so. If you can do whatever you want and just wipe the minds of mundane people after, the system is obviously a) going to be abused and b) make your characters into jerks. To say nothing of being difficult to sustain in a modern age of high-tech phones, google maps and so forth.

For the Ghoulish novels there are two systems in place. The family of magicians who are called the Illuminati [this is both an insult and the name they've picked for themselves] can alter memories and make illusions and such. This is not always effective, and sometimes they need to have humans killed, hard drives stolen and so forth, but they try to hide that reality from other magicians in order to preserve their image as able to fix any mess. The reasoning behind this in-universe is that magic is quite dangerous and having more families of magicians would lead to even more magicial fallout(which creates monsters, urban legends, ghosts etc.) and screw the world up further. Also, magicians don't want to share power. But the stated reason for the system does have altruistic aspects.

(There are hints that repeated mind-wiping and the like has damages people via increases in ADD and the like, but I'd rather leave that as  hinted at  since it's a giant minefield I have no desire to dance around in. It is probably not true but does make for a fun conspiracy about a conspiracy.)

The other system, that being fae glamours over other monsters, is less well understood. The fae offer the service, and seem perhaps compelled to do so, but no one knows why and they aren't likely to tell. As the fae are a mystery even to the magicians this is likely going to remain entirely unsolved during the series, along with many other questions about the nature and goals of the fae. Technically, the first system could get by without the second but it would definitely be very difficult in the modern age.

Criticisms and worries of the systems will crop up in the novels but for the most part, more magicians does mean the world would be far, far more dangerous place so the general conceit behind them hiding magic and monsters from the world is, if not necessary, at least understandable.

Plotting Fun

Plotting out Ghoulish Trappings is going fun in odd ways: my notes file now has a header on major changes from said notes file. The location it has been set in has changed and a couple of pre-novel events moved about. Three short stories have been written (badly in two cases, pretty much just outlines of ideas) and will likely be fleshed out better prior to the novel starting. I realized late last night that I had been effectively plotting the second and third novel in the series at the same time, hence a lot of stuff didn't feel as if it was working.

One thing I'm focusing on are events that occur between the novels: aka other adventures/weird shit that befall the characters and will get referenced to since I've never liked how characters seem to exist in stasis between urban fantasy novels, as though nothing noteworthy occurs between the events of novel A and B happening a few months later. As such, stuff between the novels includes a move from Vancouver to Prince George for Bryce and Wray, a ghost adopting Wray and an incident involving two dopplegangers both convinced they are the original person. Other things happen, of course, in terms of finding jobs, Wray getting ID,  them making friends and the like, but these will be referred to specifically. I will probably fix and write the doppleganger story up soon as it does constitute Wray's first 'case', but it's nothing urgent.

There was going to be another situation/incident, but I figured it'd work better between novels two and three, and plot for the latter is rummaging about my head as well. I have a rough head cannon that the first book is akin to coming of age, the second to finding a home that matters, the third more Adventure!* and the fourth is going to be Wray taking true steps along the path to trying to be a kind of proper private investigator. At which point the series will, probably, come to close, barring other viable ideas that fit it.


* Aka: if monsters exist, why don't armies and governments use them? Granted, a lot of resources in the setting go to hiding the existence of monsters and magic from the world but not all things can be hidden or even wish to hide. The ideas for it are very vague right now but the major goal is not to demonize the military and the like over what is, to them, a very sensible idea. It will also have the Bryce/Smiths plots and magicians take a backseat to stuff about monsters themselves.

On the exhaustion of a finished draft

The draft of Ghoulish Happenings has hit an end. 75,000 words done, including a few edits to the first 10 pages and I am exhausted. Between the draft that failed gloriously in November [aka  a reminder that post-apocalyptic and me don't mix well at all], I've spent three months working on this story and while the sequel is niggling at me I know I need a break before I consider plunging into it in any depth.

(Which has not stopped me from writing over 2 pages of notes for it... *coughs*  Though today will be spent writing an essay to myself on magic in the world because I think I was horribly inconsistent with it and really need to fix that. Magic isn't a science per se, but a lot of the characters will approach it as one due to upbringing, which needs to be reflected more clearly. Also comparisons to computers should crop up.)

It's always weird for me to surface from a novel. Nanowrimo novels are skeletal drafts, ideas tossed up into the air. Crapped out, if one wishes to be inelegant. Actual novel drafts are for me 2-3 month affairs of ~1K words/day on average.  This draft took just over 70 days of devoting the vast majority of my writing to it and I feel -- not empty, so much as pleasantly exhausted. There are things to fix, but all are fixable. The ending needs work, but that's okay: I like a story that ends on a quiet note, with the characters moving on to the next step of their lives.

Not everything is resolved, not everything should be: entire plots don't actually connect to each other at all because I get cross with novels when they do. I know there's some stuff to beef up, things to fix, and I need to take a long, hard look at the character of Bryce again, though doing a short story two nights back that was set two months after the novel helped with that a lot. I need to flesh out Elsa and Hamish more, dial back on a couple of other characters but that's all stuff I will know going into the print/read through.

I think this is the first time in many years where I've had a finished treatment* that I'm happy with, and said wary happiness might even survive the read-through of it. Knowing what didn't work and what has to be fixed as I read is huge. But I need to do the print/read aspect before I start on that. In this case, I won't be ripping the story apart as much as putting caulking into it.

Things that definitely helped this draft:
1) I went into it knowing it would need fixing. The nano-draft helped a lot, in that respect. Going into a draft knowing there will be at least 2 major drafts after it is a huge mindset change. It helps that I've come to terms with the fact that my novel-writing method is: write draft, discard. Write draft, discard. Write draft, fix. With that in my head I should be able to go back to my pile of unfinished projects and give some of them a solid boost back into life sometime later this year.
2) I was definitely doing a sequel, so that influenced the draft in a lot of ways I probably don't consciously realize. In this case, it's being curious myself at what happens next, and finding out where Bryce and Wray go from here. Which is a fun head-space to be in.
3) Knowing that if I do more than two novels, the third will probably involve the MCs getting therapy during the course of it. Which is probably illegal in urban-fantasy series, but makes perfect sense.

Now off to work on figuring out magic in a more cohesive sense ....

* Drafts doesn't really work, given that the november version and the december-jan version of GH have very, very little relation to each other; i think I kept part of one scene and nothing else at all.

Tasting the end....

Closing in on 74K. Taking the day off from writing to plot the last bits of story and plan to have the draft 'finished' sometime this weekend. There are scenes I need to add early on and likely things to fix even in the latter half of the story. Ironically, I was trying to pace the writing so I didn't rush things and still wrote over 5K yesterday, but about half of that was a scene that had been sitting in my head for weeks now so I don't think it went too badly.

It is fun that the sequel will be a completely different beast, with the MCs having both grown up a bit.  Ghoulish Happenings is very much a coming-of-age tale, whereas the sequel (tentatively Ghoulish Trappings in my head .... as of now ...) is more about finding one's own feet as adults and navigating a wider world. If you screw up, it becomes your duty to make that right: that other people will be trying to drive them out of the city is only proof that they have already screwed up in the worst way possible -- that of not having noticed they did at all.

I have a truckload of research to do for the next couple of weeks and then will begin the edit/fix of GH. If all goes according to plan, of course.

Benefiting from error

The first section of Ghoulish Happenings is done: what was going to be the end of the first novel has happened in the story and became more abrupt than planned, also changed a fair bit due to plotting out the second novel in my head at the same time. The major plus side is that the ending, which felt abrupt even when plotted out initially, now flows into the second story/half of the novel far better. I'm almost at the 63K mark in the story and will probably have another 20K to go after this, paring down what would have been the second novel to the basics as an ending to this story.

There are still things to alter in the early part of the story, a couple of useful scenes to add but so far it is working. Now what will happen in the sequel, on the other hand, is mostly still a question in my head. I know some of the players and their goals but I'm still working out the overall thrust of the story though I know it is going to be more of a quiet and personal story than the first novel was.


From last night's output:

“He killed my friend,” I said
“And that’s the solution?” Lance didn’t lower his gun. “Do you plan to kill everyone who kills your friends?”
“Yes.”
“Killing them won’t make you feel better,” he said, and there was nothing save certainty in his voice.
“It won’t make me feel worse.”

YA Research. Really. Honest.

Probably, one should not do research while writing the novel in question, but what the hell. Soon-to-be-current reads include:

Food for the Dead, a folklorists look at vampires in New England (mostly for the chapter on ghouls..)

A History of Cannibalism and

Cannibal Killers: murderers who kill and eat their victims.

To be fair, most of this research will probably go into the sequel but it is nicely weird to be researching this for what is still, in my head, YA.

Dry Amusements & Novel Stuff

In which i go meta on my own work. Kind of. I used to write poetry pretty often. Way back in 2006 I did over 500 in a year (the genesis of this blog, in fact) and did a 30 poems in 30 days and poem an hour for 24 hours once as prior experiments as well. I did write poems in 2007 but slowly petered off, to the point that my ones from 2009 onward languish on my computer without having been printed out.

This is only interesting because I have been posting older things on tumblr, having gone through 2004 and into 2005, ignoring the longer ones -- most of them being, in retrospect, not that good at all. The differences are interesting. 2004 was a mishmash of styles and influences, whereas 2005 is largely rhyming poems, many of them relatively challenging and some needlessly complicated. Some of them are decent. Most, I think, suffer by being constrained too deeply into restrictive styles.

I tend to post a poem a day, mostly because I will run out eventually, but it is nudging me into writing small bits of poetry again though I tend to view the results thus far as not that good at all. I may have to do a poem-a-day project soonish just to find out if that spark is, mostly, gone. It shall wait until the current novel is doing before I really think about it.


In better news, the draft of Ghoulish Happenings has passed 53K. It's worked out to roughly 1K a day of 'finished' material though I have a series of notes on some characters and things posted to this blog that need to be fixed. None of that is major and much of that has been incorporated into the latter part of the book (Post 40K). As the last third of the book is plotted out in very loose terms -- meaning I know the ending but the details of getting to it are a bit sketchy -- I suspect this draft will count as 'done' sometime by the end of February.

At which point I shall give thoughts to the sequel, which I've begun to write. It was going to be a short story submission to a zine but I realized there is no way I was going to make the deadline for submissions and figured that having a first chapter as a short story is probably a good idea anyway for a novel. As long as it connects to the larger plot of course.

In which two novels become one ....

The original plan for Ghoulish Happenings was to make two novels out of the major events compassing the first few months in which Wray and Bryce know each other. As I'm over halfway through the stated plot and mid-way past 30K into this draft I've realized that isn't going to work at all. But keeping it feeling as if it was two separate novels might, in the sense of Wray giving the impression to the reader than the ending is where it's at even as the second act kicks into high gear.

Given that the reader will know this -- i.e. because they have half a novel still to read -- I'm not sure how effective a transition it will be, but I'll probably give it a whirl anyway. Turning both novels into one single novel will likely work better in the long run and also help with the pressure-cooker of events that pushes the character toward certain actions.

Things to alter in the next draft:
* Bryce. The story isn't served at all by making him terribly shy nor does it fit the revised ideas of how the various families of magicians work. Or, frankly, his parents wouldn't have put up with that shit. Thankfully, this should be an easy fix overall as I am pretty inconsistent about how shy he is, and when, and why as is.
* The nature and effects of the memory-damaging curse on Wray needs to be fixed, but that's also an easy enough fix overall.
* All the Smiths need to smile and laugh a lot less. The twins and Wray are an exception to this because they aren't, strictly speaking, a part of the natural order of things.
* Show Bryce going to school, doing Family stuff on the computer after and such early on. Have Wray doing chores around the property (handyman stuff) as a way of him paying rent as well.
* The Families of magicians are highly political and secretive. That the town of Nowhere is something of an anomaly -- being outside the perpetual war for status and influence -- needs to come up earlier.

The sequel: I have a few ideas rummaging in my head, a lot of it based around the idea of the Private Investigator as protagonist in urban fantasy. In this case, the series is intended to be about the character starting out on that path, rather than being one from the get-go, which I figure should prove more interesting overall, ditto with thoughts on what day jobs they'll do to pay the bills in the meantime.

Small excerpt and thoughts on genre

Between work, feeling like crap from some cold, work Xmas parties and Christmas baking (later today) my word count since the first of December has been ~5K. I am now on plot point 7 or 20 and a few hundred words away from 20K into the story so things are shaping up rather solidly. This story will lead into a direct sequel, though I may hold off on writing it to give  myself a small break from the setting and give thought to other sequels set after a small time-jump. Mostly because it occurred to me that a lot of urban fantasy uses the occult detective theme, but very few show the character in the process of becoming that.

Which seemed suited to YA, as a platform at least. Both Wray and Bryce get to grow over the course of the two  novels and then I work out the ones after that. As the second novel is going to involve preventing the end of the world, the novels after it will not up the ante. You've saved the world, and then someone asks you to deal with some sheep being killed on a farm, say, and how you cope with that shift, and how one makes small things matter again, will be fun to explore.

Also, at one point down the line, Wray is going to put 'saved the world' on a resume when applying to work at a McJob.


On a deeper level, I've been working on urban fantasy stories for some years now, shifting characters and situations around and trying to find an idea that grabs and holds me. I make no guarantees that this will be it, or that I won't shift between this story and others, but lately every novel I have worked on ends up with plots whispering, in a chorus not at all greek, 'sequels, stupid!' in the back of my head.

I have no idea if this will be that story, or just a flavour of X month/year in my head, but we shall see. It has more potential than some, since I'm starting the characters -- and reader -- off at ground floor, rather than the usual 'established characters, A, B, C major backstory events that will be Important umpteen novels down the line' that tends to be more common. Not that I dislike that: I've used it often enough, and I think it works for what it does. I just wanted to try a different tack and see if it held together better.

We shall see :)


Excerpt from Yesterday:

And it all made Hamish that much harder to stomach. I didn't want to hate him, but I was learning that it was really hard not to hate someone when they hated you in turn. Especially not when the part of me that looked in the mirror at the ghoul that stared back agreed with him in some small way. What better response to a monster than hate? So, to drown out all of that, I walked slowly and tried on mantras, like: 'It's not me, it's you' and 'I may be a monster, but it's not all I am'. It probably didn't help, but it also didn't hurt. Much.

Ghoulish Blurb & writing methods ...

And my first quick stab at a back-cover blurb for the story....

For over a century the town of Nowhere has been a battleground between two ancient families of 

magicians, one determined to claim it back as their own, the other to stop the town from being used to end the world. At least, that's how the propaganda machine of the Smiths goes ... 

Wray couldn't care about any of that. His memories of his human life seemingly stripped away in the transformation into a ghoul in the town cemetery, all he wanted was to be left along to gnaw on some corpses. Instead one of the Smiths had dragged him into the world with the intent of civilizing him and getting him on a no-humans diet.

If that wasn't bad enough, the local police have threatened to arrest him for the crime of existing, a magician has summoned Bigfoot into the town, werewolves are having a war over territory and the ancient battle between the Smiths and Joneses is heating up, with Nowhere as a focal point – and when you have centuries of enmity stoking the fires, the resulting conflagration could be more than anyone expects.

Tagline: some meals even a ghoul won't eat, especially those spiced by revenge ...

---

The tagline needs serious re-working but I do like how it highlights one aspect of the plot that the blurb does not. I suspect the actual blurb used, in the end, will be a modification of the first paragraph of the story with the last paragraph of this blurb-attempt, but it is at least something.


As for the story itself, I've reached the point where I'm entirely happy that the first draft is being tossed aside. A few lines are being kept, some scenes reworked: Say, 1,000 words out of 50,000 will be salvageable in this treatment. It is more extreme than normal, but also the first time I've tried doing a story almost entirely by the seat of my pants, hence the utter failure of story and setting to mesh together.

I've finally reached the point where my now-basic method of 'write a draft, toss it aside, redo it' has reached my brain as: 'This is your method. Deal with it and don't burn out on the story.' I'm also dealing with the fact that most stories I am working on now want to have sequels and be series despite years of having no desire to do anything like that at all.

We change, and what/how we write changes. I figure as long as I still enjoy writing -- which I do, even past the dreaded 1 million words marker -- I should just embrace things and run with them. Hopefully they shall lead to a finish line :)

Huzzah and Hooray! Aka 7K

7,000 words into the second treatment of Ghoulish Happenings. I have finally passed my notes files for it in word count, and been doing 1-3K a day roughly. The story is shaping up well, and writing scenes by hand is handy in fixing them later; I've already corrected one minor plot glitch and one character pointed out a potentially more major one -- that I am choosing to think of as a plot point to be explained rather than a hole in the narrative -- but the story is working rather well at present.

In another 60,000 words, it may not be at all but we shall see when we get there. So far the plot involves Wray being asked to help ID a body and track down who or what killed the hiker along with some fun character bits and hints towards people's pasts.

A small snippet:

 "And you wanted me mad," I said slowly, "because you figured you'd win if we fought?"

"I did, yes."
I frowned. "Now you don't?"

"Magic does not seem to work on you. I had not taken that into consideration," Lance said blandly.

I said nothing to that; I was pretty sure he was lying, and not just because he was a cop.  

So ... the state of nano!

It is a state, with boundaries and everything. To whit: the end result of this years nanowrimo escapades was a very mixed bag. The Second Theft was fun to write but the ending failed entirely and in the same way the first idea of this story did back in 2004. On the other hand, the story was a lot more solid and the characters worked a lot better. I doubt I will ever go back to it, but I should have plotted better than I did.

I plotted ~8 chapters, with some end-points. Had I plotted more in terms of story/character arc, I would have realized that if you give someone the magic to wish things to happen the chances that anyone will be able to imprison them to stand trial for crimes is a bit difficult. I got a lot out of penance and the desire to be punished, but if I'd been plotting better Jake's growth in his magic would have been a lot slower and him being forced to rely on the myth of his previous time in the world to bluff people. Or done the entire novel from Thomas's pov.

On the other hand, it was a good sign that pantsing a novel can't work for me at all. As was Ghoulish Happenings which literally began with 1 page summing up all the characters and the plot. As a result, I lost the MCs voice often and ended the novel realizing that the setting needed a drastic overhaul and the final third of it wouldn't remotely be in the next draft. But hey: one writes, one learns. One gets better. I use nanowrimo not to make 'I will publish this!' novels as much as framework-drafts and notes to myself on things not to do and do better next time.

For example: I am working on the second version of GH now. 6K words. 4.5 is setting and character and notes on magic, 1.5 is 3 pages of plots. 20 points, story plotted out. I've moved several points, know the person the novel is meant 'for' in-world, i.e. it's a letter Wray is writing to his sister, or more likely a series of letters never sent. And knowing that should keep the voice more solid. A lot of the story worked. I had a few awesome moments.

We shall see what the next version brings....