Well, the leaves are turning and writing season is upon us. I took the spring and summer off from writing fiction. When it's warm enough to be outside, I want to be outside, not inside at my desk. Oh, I maintained my habit of writing by spending an hour or so every morning writing my two blog posts a week, so with that habit still intact, it will be simply a matter of switching over to writing fiction and spending a bit more time writing... Once I have a fiction story completed in my head to write.
I'm working on that, having spent the idle spring and summer daydreaming a potential new story. I have a setting, a situation, named characters, and even five pages of notes to remind me of what I had dreamed up with, though they will be largely obsolete if and when I start writing, since the details of the story change week to week, day to day. But even with months of thinking about the story, I haven't been able to organize my many little scenes and ideas into something resembling an actual story. And to be honest, I'm far from certain that I will be able to. Nor have all the characters really come into or stay in focus. And while you don't have to know everything before you start writing, and indeed, some writers know next to nothing about the story when starting, past experience has taught me that I need to know not only the beginning, and the end, but the middle as well. And to be honest, at this point, I don't even have the end clearly in mind.
The fact is that this time around, I'm determined to have a complete story, one with a beginning, a middle, and an end solidly in mind before I start setting it to words on a screen. In the recent past, when I reached the middle of the story I thought I knew, I discovered that I had merely done a lot hand waving over the middle of it, content with only vague ideas about what to do when I got there. They proved so vague that I couldn't put words to them, forcing me to stop and work something out in greater detail, breaking the flow of writing. This time I'm determined to have the entire plot in my head; indeed, I might even write a bullet point outline down before I start so I can write straight through the story without getting lost in the middle. However, with summer of daydreaming, the fact that I've not built that complete story in my mind suggest that this story may not end up going anywhere. Always a very real possibility.
As for the story that I do have in mind, it would be released a straight "Fiction/Literature" category story, though with no pretense to being literary fiction. This time around I'm deliberately not aiming at any specific genre, even though it will have elements of fantasy/science fiction, mystery, and romance in it. Indeed, it will be step further away from genre writing than the Girl on the Kerb.
I'm thinking that the story will reflect the types of stories I've been reading and enjoying recently; that is to say small, slice of life stories where things happen, but there is no strong, over arching story line, i.e. no Hero's Journey or epic quest. It will probably have a mystery for an underlying driving force. And while the story is set, in my mind, in my usual "universe", on a planet settled by Homo Stellar humans with their 200 year life spans. That event is in the distant past, suppressed and distorted into myth. The setting will be my usual Edwardian era type with a mix of old and new technology.
The working title of this piece is Chateau Claire and the premise is that our narrator finds that he is the heir of a once important family he never knew he was related to. With the death of an unknown great aunt, he comes into the possession of the the title chateau on Summer Isle. The story will recount the changes his life that ensue from this event, as well as a mystery surrounding this great aunt. At present I've played out lots of little incidents in my mind, come up with lots of ideas for plot points at the beginning, but things peter out after that. I haven't been able to bring them all together into a cohesive story that would keep readers reading it. I expect I'll keep working on this story until the end of the year, but since it takes me three to four months to write the first draft of a novel, and several more to revise it, I will need to start writing it by the new year for it to be my 2024 novel. At the moment it is very much a bird in a bush. If I don't have it in hand by then, it's on to plan B.
Plan B is to return to and finish writing A Passage to Japara. That story, currently at 45K written is half or more done. It is currently aground on the reef of two major scenes that I've yet to invent original enough details for to make them worth writing. I have to believe that, if motivated enough, I could come up with those scenes, and get the damn story afloat, written and done with. However, at the moment it is Chateau Claire that holds my interest, though I have a feeling Passage to Jarpara has the best chance of being released in 2024. Who knows? It could be neither. I'm not under contract, so I don't have to write anything.
Stay tuned.
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