Secrets of a Small Town

So here I am trying to plot out this new idea. As mentioned last time, there were a series of real life deaths that lack a satisfying explanation. I'm going to fictionalize them and give the story a proper conclusion. 

But. These three deaths are the only thing I know about the story. I can do literally anything with the rest of the narrative. Is this realistic fiction, or is something supernatural afoot? Who are the other characters? Who is trying to solve the mystery? Who is trying to keep the mystery from being solved? I have no idea, and the possibilities are endless. 

I've created a thought-dump document, where I am just putting anything and everything that could fit into this story. I have a vague idea about a main character. There may be a love interest (for once), and I am resisting the urge to kill them off. 

Trying to Make a Comeback

Would you believe that I fully thought I had posted something in September? I'm not sure how I've gone from twice a week to every other month, but here we are. 

I know a lot of it is due to my lack of motivation to write. It's hard to talk about the projects I'm working on when I'm not making any progress on them.

Then, at some point, I went from working on a series of projects to slowly slogging away on just one. I've largely stopped working on other things because I'm supposed to be writing this vampire novel. But then I'm not really working on that either. See, working on lots of different rough drafts actually got me somewhere, because it was just writing. It didn't have to be good. It was just about getting words on the page. But with Cold Blooded, I'm writing for an actual audience who will actually read it with their actual eyeballs. So it has to be… perfect. I can't just go down a rabbit hole of a plot tangent, because it might not work out, I'll have to backtrack and fix everything, and I'll have wasted my time. So I'm making an outline of all the scenes before I sit down and write anything. But it has holes in it. And I don't know what goes in those holes. So I stare at it and wring my hands and I don't do anything. 

And it doesn't help that old stories keep getting stirred up in my head.

• A show about a coastal town where weird things happen makes me want to fix my 2012 NaNo novel about… a coastal town where weird things happen.

• A song about a soldier home from war almost inexplicably gave me an idea for my 2014 Camp NaNo YA novel about an evil carnival.

Add to that a new idea that I'd like to tackle for NaNoWriMo this year, in which I remedy a gross injustice perpetrated by reality itself. That is, a series of deaths under mysterious circumstances that never found a satisfying explanation. The official story is that there was no sinister meaning behind them, but I believe otherwise. They have to mean something. And so, through the power of fiction, I intend to base a story on these deaths, and create a narrative around them that means something. 

So yes, that means I'm setting Cold Blooded aside for now. Just for a little while. I think it will be good. As illustrated above, I always get ideas for the story I'm not working on. 

And maybe, just maybe, I'll manage to post more regularly while I embark on this new project.

I'll see you… soon?