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| A locale in The 2026 Project |
The 2026 Project novel, as I outlined in a previous post, is going to be another light novel - a "small" slice of life story.
I think this taste in light novels goes way back to the first books I read when I discovered reading (rather late in life - 5th grade). I started reading the Tom Swift Jr and Hardy Boys books. The Hardy Boys were focused on solving small crimes locally, and while Tom Swift featured inventing planes, submarines, and ever more exotic things - no doubt the seed for my interest in science fiction - however, my favorite Tom Swift series was actually the original one, which was written over a couple of decades starting in 1913. It featured Tom (Tom Swift Sr. in the new books) living with his widowed father in then contemporary upstate New York of 1913. The first story featured Tom buying and fixing up a damaged motorcycle and dealing with bullies and crooks. Eventually his inventions took him far from Shopton, but there was always this air of quaintness about the stories, set as they were - when I was reading them - in the rather quint and distant past. Later, most of the science fiction stories I read were in fact, old fashioned romances - characters going off to exotic lands and surviving the trip. They may have discovered amazing things, and had amazing adventures, but the stories were focused on just that. As I expanded my reading to things like detective stories, mysteries, sea stories, Victorian/Edwardian adventure stories, military stories, and later domestic life stories, often set in England, these were all stories set on small scales, without epic scope or serious novelistic ambitions.
My current interest in writing small, light novels, arises out of my recent readings, which include the domestics stories/romances from the pen of British female writers like D E Stevenson, Molly Clavering, as well as the mysteries stories of Ellis Peters, and a modest novels like John Hadfield's Love on a Branch Line, and of course, P G Wodehouse. And this is not the first time I read such stories. Why thirty years ago I was reading not only D. E. Stevenson stories, but Miss Read stories, and several similar American stories as well.
So, with that longwinded introduction out of the way, what will my Project 2026 novel look like? In my first tease about this novel, I said that the inciting incident is that the narrator has been charged with preventing, or at least delaying the publication of the memoirs of his great aunt. She had lived a rather scandalous life in her youth, one that involved a wide variety of serious and important people in the present day. Her son, the narrator's boss, fears that the publication of her memoirs might cause some of these important people to get upset enough to shove a spanner in the gears of his promotion within the government ministry he is employed at.
This great aunt had decided, in order to get away from all distractions, write her book in a remote family-owned lodge in a setting inspired by the north woods, vacation lakes, and Scottish highlands. Her son is also genuinely concerned about her being up there with only her maid, so sending our narrator up there with her is not entirely selfish. In any event, the result is another "What I Did On My Summer Vacation" story like my first book, A Summer in Amber. During his summer, in the north woods, the narrator will meet more characters that eventually lead to investigating and solving an age old mystery from the distant past. Romance, or rather, romances in this time, will be a feature of the story as usual, but with a little different twist. In short, the usual ingredients.
That, anyway, is the over-arching ethos for my Project 2026 novel - a long summer holiday with a mix of romances old and new, old history and mysteries from the past to be explored. In my next piece on the project, at some point in the future, I'll talk more about some of the other influences that, like spices will be stirred into the pot plot, especially a few songs.
