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.

How to begin Draft 2 ...

If you are me, you figure the opening can be used again, and do two treatments of it. Then realize you can skip most of that and start it at a different point. Only your brain decides to inform you that on day two of feeling utterly sick and crappy.

At midnight.

And won't shut up.

On the plus side, I did figure out a little more plot stuff and added a new character into the story. On the other side, I've deleted 3 times the amount I've written on this draft so far.

On revision

One of my goals in writing the first draft of Ghoulish Trappings had been to have two  ongoing plots not connected with each other save in superficial ways, which is harder to do when one plot centres about one character, the other a different one and the entire story is from the first character's POV. There was also a lot of magicians, each with stories and goals of their own and the result was too cluttered a mess to make sense, with the motive force behind the entire story drowned out under everything else.

Noise overwhelmed signal.

So this version stripped out over two-third of the characters. One of the major plots had been banished, several characters no longer exist so minor ones are gone as well. I don't need more plot or more characters to make the story stand up: it just needs to focus on a small core and build on that. At least, that is my hope and desire this time around. We shall see how it goes.

And for the record, this entire draft is the fault of a certain prompt making me reconsider scrapping this entire section of the character's lives. Without it, Cam won't exist and that isn't fair at all. So ... it needs to be small. It needs mundane things. It needs to strain the weird relationship Bryce and Wray have and see how well it holds together.

It will also have an appendectomy in it now.

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.

On the death of a draft

Sometimes a story works. Sometimes characters and plot and story mesh together and things work. Then there is the rest of the time. In two months. I've managed 40K on Ghoulish Trappings. I have fixed stuff for the series, discovered some things that didn't work at all and fleshed out the world a lot. So there's that.

But somewhere close to the 35K mark, I realized something: the story didn't need to be told. The first novel: very much so. The one coming next [which will probably use this same title]: yes. But this story hovered in a place between them that never quite fit. The characters worked. Even the story did, but the plot teetered along and a lot of things that needed to happen simply didn't feel right, entire connections making little sense. If I didn't do the the novel entirely in Wray's POV, it might work. But I don't think so. So for the time being it's going to become purely 'stuff that happens between novels'.

If, somewhere down the road, the series sells and works, I could revise it and throw it up for free online. A story needed something overarching to hold the disparate elements together and this story does not, at present, have that. It needs a serious degree of revision in tone and plot that would basically involve a 'rewrite from scratch'. Which I'm not up for doing right now.

Some of this is probably because March-April tend to be my normal dead months of writing in a year. I'm not sure. But I find myself wanting to write the novel that was to come next more and finding that this novel isn't adding much to the series. It feels like part 2 of the first novel rather than a story in and of itself. I think I will get back to it at some point, and fix things up. It is fixable, the plot is doable, but I need a mental break from the series.

What that break will be, who knows? I need to edit the first book of the series, and will likely begin that soonish. In the meantime, I'm thinking of giving Boy & Fox another hard look and reducing it back to the original concept. It might work. It might not. Won't know until I try.

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.

I think my brain is trying to drive me insane

I spent part of the weekend working on Ghoulish Trappings. Or, more accurately, failing to do so, working out motivations and future plots, trying to connect where the story was to where it had to go. Wrote. Deleted. Wrote. Deleted.

Added bits to the untitlted thing, which also didn't work. Tried to think about that story, gave up. Wrote some small ficlets, let my brain drift back to Ghoulish Trappings.

Went to bed Sunday night. At 1:14 am, definitely when one should be sleeping since it is now Monday and the alarm is set for 6:30 to get up for work, my brain goes: 'Aha! I have it! Here are the next two scenes. This is how it should work ... why aren't you writing this down now?'

OTOH, I did write about ~1000 words this morning and the next two scenes are in my head. So there is that. But even so, I think my brain is engaged in a conspiracy against me. Or trying to see just how little sleep I can function on.

Perhaps both.

Preparing for the second hurdle ...

I haven't added to Ghoulish Trappings in two days. Hit the 26K mark and the story is flowing together so I let it simmer a bit in the back of my head and worked on other things. The story is flowing, the plot coming together and the big hurdle of a first-person pov is slowly rearing its ugly head.

The entire story is from Wray's POV. One of the major antagonists (i.e. people who want him and Bryce out of Prince George) is a behind-the-scenes sort of person. I plan to have her show up in the the story soon but without Wray really catching on to who she is and what she's done. It is an interesting balancing act between her desire -- quite sensible -- to not be noticed by a monster that has reasons to e cranky with her and could snap her neck with little effort and having the reader go: 'WTH?' at the same time Wray figures out what is going on.

OTOH, the other characters are working just fine and the tensions between various magicians and factions within them are fun to hint at. I have a couple of characters who still have to set up onto the stage and after that I will see where the story takes everyone and who is still around once the dust settles.

On complications....

Wherein novel plotting gets byzantine. I have Wray and Bryce just trying to live their lives in Prince George, only to be thrust into the reality that the various families of magicians either a) don't believe that or b) have no desire for a creature such as Wray in the city, and factions within them with plans of their own, along with a cult in the background that want Bryce removed from the city so that it can remain hidden.

Essentially, there are the two MCs, a ghost friend of Wray's, the gremlin, and one police officer on the same rough 'side'. Then there is a cult on another side, and ~8 magicians, each with differing goals and from various families of magicians who also have plans of their own. Trying to keep track of all of this is liable to make my head hurt, but in a good way. The fun part will be somehow meshing it all together since the story is being told from Wray's pov (though, since it is a letter to someone, he can and does jump out of the narrative proper at times).

The story is at least living up to my expectations of it being the political novel of the Ghoulish series, such as it is, and oddly hasn't been plotted out definitively so far. My plot notes are mostly written concurrently with the story but I will have to forge ahead of that soon to lay proper groundwork for other things. Much of the weekend was taken up with considering plots and writing out notes and doing research, which is all well and good but leaves the word count at 13K.

Fun plotting stuff: a lot of things that will show up in the third novel and the whys and wherefores of them. The limits of Bryce's knowledge get explored as well as the limits of what the magicians known themselves: their focus is on magic and the monsters it creates. Whatever else may be in the world isn't something they much concern themselves with.

Hard plotting stuff: setting a novel in a real city is hard. Especially one with a dearth of available materials. Much of my non-online reading had been one guide to wilderness treks from the city, a social geography of it that is a decade old and a history of Prince George written in 1946. OTOH, the third novel will be set in Toronto (I think) which should prove far easier for research purposes.

10K into a sequel ....

And already one character wandered into it who wasn't planned at all. But she is going to be necessary to set up the sequel and it is a fun wrench to throw into the works. I have one more rough scene in my head and then will probably spend the weekend just plotting out the rest of the story, power through the draft, take a break from  the series as a whole and then begin the edits to Ghoulish Happenings.

I've never looked forward to editing before, and never been very good at it. The Rites of Exorcism rewrite that I began last year languishes at 25K but working on this story has given me a few ideas toward that one. I also have Boy & Fox to get back to, assuming I can figure out what the story is really about -- I may shrink it down and end up with a novella. The jury remains out. I also have a trilogy of books -- The Dogs of War -- of which 1.2 books are written in various drafts and the entire series plotted out.

And finally, there is the weird story whose nature is still puzzling me, which I need to get back to adding scenes to. As such, my goal for the rest of this year is, barring work on the Ghoulish series, to revisit, fix and remake those stories languishing on my hard drive rather than dive into something 'new'. New is easy for me, as nanowrimo proves time and time again. But to fix something that didn't work, or make something work better, is definitely more of a challenge. I figure I'll grow more as a writer by fixing such things than by flinging myself into writing new things.

Updates as warranted, but expect a fair bit of silence from this end. Or none at all, depending on how bad (or good!) things get.

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.