Writing The Gloaming ...

This story came from a weird place in my head. I've sat on it for most of a month, mostly writing notes, revising the setting and so forth. The basic building blocks of the world began with pondering why gods wouldn't be in a pantheon and then coming up with an answer. One that immediately made me go: 'Oh, yeah, this is probably unpublishable via any traditional means' ... and then seeing that as something of a challenge. The world has grown from that, in odd ways. It's less an exploration of magic and more one of monsters. (Similar to Ghoulish Happenings but with a better-defined world. I love the characters in that story, but the world and character relations never fit properly. Some day I need to work on it again. Definitely.)

This is also one of the few times a setting came into my head well before the characters did. Normally I start at character and work outward from that; this story worked toward them in terms of interesting things I could do with the idea, and character relations. And finding myself going 'no, that won't...' and realizing the 'no' meant I had to write that instead.

So there is an entire school dedicated to, well, schooling for preternatural students. Which also means a cast of 40+ characters between students, teachers, security and family Stuff happening outside the confines of the school. The trick in saying 'oh, the supernatural has always been around and real' and marrying that to the real world has been an interesting challenge and a lot of the reasons are buried deep in the world building. The revelation behind that is going to throw Crane - and Exen - for a  loop in a lot of fun ways.

There are antagonists, actually planned and considered in-depth early on, which is a change for me. The fun will be seeing how it all plays out and if I can actually pull this off :)

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.

This post is for me. So there.

The Higher Ground remake has now been titled The Second Theft. A horrible title, but better than nothing at all. A little bit.

Things that are done:
The main characters have been fleshed out, roughly. Jake needs to find his anger, Thomas to let go of his and the larger arc of the story is the brothers coming to terms with all the lies they've told each other and the mistakes each has made regarding the other.  It is easy to think, "I've changed! Why doesn't anyone see that?" and not give them the benefit of the doubt of changing as well.

Things that are not done:
Everything else. I do know the end scene of the novel and how at least one antagonist meets their end. And I think it has to begin roughly like the first version did because their lives before they are dumped in the other world is important, as is Jake's new car.

I need to flesh out the Kingdom of the Seven Keys. Right now my rough notes make it an ugly aristocratic-driven kingdom with magic reserved for the rich and wealthy and most crimes being punished with death. Which makes sense, given the transition in the thousand years since The War but it does remain woefully generic. Sooo....

• The world (faerie, according to humans) originally 'belonged' to the hingari, or at least -- next to the People -- they were the first inhabitants. As such its shape needs to be fluid, no map adequately fitting the territory. The seven keys/locks are old magic that allows seven city-towns to remain solid and serve as the focal points for the Kingdom. They don't move, so it is easy to find them. The rest of the kingdom is less easy to pin down, and movement between towns can range from an hour to several days, which makes travel uncommon and difficult.
• This shall fit into the idea of the middle ages and how people never knew the wider world since no one left home. Add to this the idea that the Kingdom is deliberately encouraging this looseness of geography and holding back scientific (and magical) advances that can allow the Kingdom to better fit together in order to keep the power structure intact.
• At present, due to lack of training for many, most magics are small and unimportant. 
• (finish later)

ramblings

The basic premise of Rogue Dreams involved a civilization built around cameras and the government watching all the citizens a la Big Brother. Right now, we live in a Little Brother world of data mining and the like that won't exist in this future; the point of the system developed is to stop and prevent crimes. The trade-offs between security and freedom are always interesting to explore and in this case one of the definite themes to tease out is that the government is doing the right thing.

People should not be assholes. This is as true in the future as the past, and works as a general rule. In RD, status is Important and jockeying for it can involve slander and naked ambition, which an omnipresent camera system can help contain. It helps that this society has been entirely social-engineered at some point in the past in a desperate effort to not repeat the mistakes of its predecessors and there are going to be characters who rightly think the government-watchdog idea isn't viable; obviously such things cannot work in a long term, as a better method would involve educating the populace to be better people .... only sometimes being a bastard works.

That the government does not use AI means that citizens cannot be watched effectively, which creates an entirely different set of problems and issues .... to be considered in another post.

This is going to be hell....

... in a fun kind of way, but hell. You see, I had the idea(s) for Rogue Dreams back in 2010. The first version was some 5 pages of notes and 3-4 of story, stalling out when I had to pause the entire thing to find a calendar system to adapt to the setting. Because: novels, man. (Actually 'because novels' would be a handy explanation for many things.) I quickly realized what I had in mind was too much story for one novel and had too many things it focused on, so set it aside in the back of my head. The ideas continued to poke at me, and even try to convince me they'd work as science-fantasy by making the MC some kind of magician in a future-SF setting.

Ideas lie like that, desperate to come to life in one form or another.

So I began a new set of notes, grabbed some recent sciencey books (Physics of the Future, How It Ends, a book on quantum mechanics that's recent (as most of the books I'd read on it were 4+ years ago) and a couple of other odd titles)  and am, this time happily, running into issues of setting and research again.

For example: names. The world is an indeterminate amount of time in the future, after a war against AI that humanity both won and lost [no AI has been allowed to exist since the war, probably to the detriment of the society, in a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater] and there is one global government divided into 1000 city-states all linked together by one vast computer system. As such, there is one homogeneous culture with a single shared calendar (sexagesimal, meaning that there are six months, with six-day weeks and 60 days in each month, holidays between some of them) and language.

It also means that names are purely identity-numbers. 0 is a placeholder, with the first six numbers being a grid reference on the world map, the next six being what city-state one lived in and twelve after that being ones personal identity in that location. Additional numbers indicate city-state of birth, how often one has moved and the like; you meet someone, ping them through System, and get their basic data. As it is both  impractical and absurd to use such a system in actual conversation, everyone selects their own use-name at some point, or accepts one giving to them by parental/authority figures. As use-names can be changed and be jokes and so forth, they also allow people a sense of fun and spontaneity that their 'real' name does not allow.

Update for BOGF

Managed 4K so far today, with family stuff (and Dr Who) earlier and such for breaks. Not bad, given I managed to end up at a walk-in clinic because of work on Friday. I swear I accumulate scars at work like other people do raises.

On the plus side, the story feels pretty solid so far. I have to alter some background details like character's ages and need to figure out what is really bugging one of the MCs, as if had become more relevant than expected and two of the MCs have shown surprising streaks of pure nastiness that is quite interesting.

Working on a novella

Tentatively titled 'Found', it's about a man, his family, and his accidental adoption of a hellhound. Which, thanks to poking at dog breeds on the 'net ,I have decided is 'mostly Bouvier'. It says much about me that I figured the dog needed to be a specific breed.

The fun of resurrection

Higher Ground is a story I wrote in 2002. Some people liked it, I finished it, re-read it and pretty much didn't care for it. (Major plot holes, last minute 'wait, there is no villain! Shove one in!' stuff, the usual fun of doing a draft of a novel without, say, plotting more than a couple of chapters ahead.) However, as much as I disliked the end result, I did have a soft spot for the core concept of it:

Why do characters who end up in Fantasy World stay?

Not everyone would want to, or should, but I thought it would be focus on a character whose only goal is to get back home because of mundane issues like the new car getting towed, work, rent and so forth. As such I am entirely re-doing the novel from scratch and altering a lot of character roles. Or shall, in time; I'm doing up notes at present so things are more solidified in my head when I start out.