What Next? (Writing)

 

My writing desk, with Popeye "I Yam What I Yam" and my jar of tea candy. On the screen I have my usual two pages open when writing; my notes on the story to the left, the story itself to the right. Music being provided by Matthew Halsall & et.al (a radio mix) on YouTube music.

Last, but not least, what can you expect to read from C Litka going forward? A good question. Wish I knew the answer. I’ve never been one of those authors who have more story ideas than they have time to write them. I don’t have notebooks full of ideas. And most importantly, I need an idea for a story that interests me so much that I not only want to spend months exploring and developing the idea in my head, shaping it into an actual story with interesting characters with original things to do, i.e. a plot, but then go on to spend months writing it down. Those ideas are rare. Plus, I don’t want to write the same story over and over again, so it has to be different enough from what I’ve done before for me to even want to write it.

Given all this, I haven’t done all that badly; having written and published 12 novels 2 novellas, plus a short story in the last 15 years or so. Indeed, beginning in 2020 with The Prisoner of Cimlye, I’ve written and published 7 books in the last three years. That’s a pace I can’t maintain. Ideally, I plan to write and publish a book a year going forward. Ideally.

Right now my planned 2024 novel is A Passage to Jarpara, the third and final Tropic Sea story. Being the third book in a series, only the people who liked The Prisoner of Cimlye are going to read it, so it has a relatively narrow market. I’ve been working on it off and on since last fall and have some 45K words written in the first draft, probably more than halfway written. Indeed, I have only two major episodes, the connecting narrative between them, and the conclusion to write. The major hang up is that I while I have a general idea what those episodes involve, I don’t have a clue regarding the details or how to make them different and interesting enough to make it worthwhile to write them. I hope it is just a matter of getting motivated. In any event, this will be a minor novel – a very self-indulgent, nostalgic story, written only because I like the characters and the locale and wanted to revisit them one last time. Plus, I feel obliged to get Taef Lang to his university post so that he can start his long delayed career as an island archaeologist/historian. The story will be very episodic, really more of a travelogue than a novel. I’ve got 18 months to finish it. We’ll see.

I’ve explored several other story ideas in the meantime. 

I spent a great deal of time thinking about a fantasy(ish) novel. It would've been a hidden SF novel, as the "magic" would have used the advanced science = magic trope. It would feature a colony of Earth, like in Sailing to Redoubt, that has, perhaps deliberately made the settling of the planet into a founding myth, describing the advanced technology of the Founders as "magic" and outlawing it. But not all of this banned "magic" was forgotten, and indeed, the richest and most powerful families have secretly used various forms of this banned technology to maintain their influence and wealth. Our narrator would be a member of one such but a very modest family, who inherits a mansion from his great grandfather after the grandfather has been missing and declared dead. He discovers that the "ghost" of the grandfather still resides in the abandoned mansion, and that his grandfather may have been murdered, though the ghost can not say for certain... The female lead would be a woman who so nondescript, so ordinary looking and dressing that she is virtually invisible in the art show openings that she and the narrator both attend, making her extra-ordinary. Together they would solve the mystery. As with this, and the other story ideas below, the devil is in the plot, not the setting. I have to come up with a mystery story that would new and interesting, at least to me, and that has proven to be very hard. I shelved the idea for now.

Another story idea I've explored, one that I mentioned in my March update, is that of a portal fantasy novella. The idea sprang from on evening I experienced many years ago. It was spring, I was in college and it was exam time. I took a break from studying to take a long walk in the falling evening, and for some reason, that walk felt somehow enchanted – remembered and never duplicated. Nothing special happened, it was no doubt just a state of mind. But I though that perhaps I could use that experience, along with a girl I noticed on one of my virtual bus trips through London, to make a story of an enchanted evening that was more than a state of mind. But I’ve yet to come up with a plot that works, nor a setting that is significantly different enough from a thousand other stories that take readers to fairyland to justify putting it into words. I am not optimistic.

I’m also thinking about a story along the lines of what I’ve been reading recently, which is to say light novels by Molly Clavering and Ruby Ferguson set in Scotland of the 30’s & 40’s. These stories are delightful little stories of domestic life in what is now a bygone age. I don’ think I could write the same type of story, but I do like reading “small” stories of everyday life, and I like to try my hand at it. I would use post-Storms Scotland which I set A Summer in Amber in as my setting, though I wouldn’t use the same characters. My currently version has a bachelor in his late 50’s retiring in a small Scottish town and… well there’s where the idea peters out at the moment.

A new idea has occurred to me; setting the story I just mentioned in post-storm London, and then using a version of the characters I had developed for the first story I mentioned, though once again, I would have to invent a new plot as it would not involve magic of any kind. Combining story ideas seems to be my go to method of getting stories to work these days. We’ll see what, if anything develops.

The bottom line is that I write for pleasure. I like to do it every day. Since no one has hired me to write, no one owes me any money for my writings, which is one reason why I share rather than sell my stories. However, the reverse is also true; no one has hired me to write a story, so I don’t owe anyone a story. If writing stories turns into work, I won’t write them. And if I can’t come up with a story that I want to write, I won’t lose any sleep over not writing one. So while I can semi-promise A Passage to Jarpara, for sometime in 2024, beyond that, only time will tell.

On a more positive note, I still enjoy writing these posts, and I’m planning to continue to write and post pieces on this blog every Wednesday. (It's such a 2010 thing to do, you know.) In addition, I’ve just launched a new series, The Saturday Morning Post, to be released every, you guessed it, Saturday morning. It will feature my book reviews. This means that my Wednesday post will most likely be about something other than the books I’ve read. I still love to write, and if I can't dream up stories to write, I can find other things of interest to write about. (Fingers crossed.) The idea behind a writer’s blogs isn’t primarily to sell books, but to pull back the curtain a little on the person behind the writing, so that you – dear readers – have an opportunity to get to know a writer as a person one way or another. I’ll keep that in mind when coming up with pieces to post. And, as always, I’ll remind you that I welcome comments and emails from you.