I haven’t done a ton of writing lately. I've actually been doing some reading.
Most recently, in that's it's ongoing, I've read Hank Green's An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. I started it last night, and I'm almost done with it. It. Is. Fantastic. Narratively, it's fascinating. It has a habit of telling you about things before they come up in the story, but it doesn't make it any less exciting when it does come up. Like, something will be mentioned, and it piques your interest, and you want to know what on earth that's about. Then it gets to that point, and it's still all, "Oh shit! That happened!" I'm explaining this terribly. But it’s fucking great. And it includes all these elements of modern culture, like the internet and social media, that makes it all seem kind of… possible.
Seriously, if you are a fan of… books that are good, read it.
The other thing I read recently was not a book. Not a real one. Not a complete one. I had opened it up when I was looking for excerpts for my last post. It's Cape Nowhere, my 2012 NaNo novel.
I have some mixed feelings about this story, beginning with the title. I always thought that wasn't a good title. Like it was a little too on the nose or something, like no one would actually name a place that. But I've kept it because I love it. I like the way it sounds. And both Cape Fear and Cape Disappointment are actual places so… sometimes things just get names like that.
Anyway, the story is actually in four parts, because of my lifelong problem with running out of story before I hit the word goal. So there's the story I intended to write (around 23,000 words), then a short ghost story set a hundred years later, then another set two hundred years after that, and then about 20,000 words back with the original characters, but set two years earlier. Yeah. It was a mess.
Ignoring the two middle stories because, well, they don't matter, I have two stories, or parts of one story, concerning the adventures of what I like to call the "Victorian X-Files." It's actually a little bit after the Victorian era, but that's not the point. The point is, they were a satellite office, and the Paranormal Division, of the BOI (Bureau of Investigation, what the FBI was originally called). There were a couple of agents, and a mad-scientist sort of tech guy who provided them with vaguely steampunk ghost-hunting gear. Like the Thanatophone, which enables one to hear entities through the veil. It was all very cool.
The plot, however, was all over the place, clearly being made up as I went. I had this idea about a guy with a clockwork heart, and I was shoehorning things in to try to get to that point. It had some good bits, but overall, kind of meh.
The second part, which is actually first, covers how the protagonist came to be part of this little satellite office in Oregon, and his first big case. There's a spider-person who dissolves people's insides, and it's super gross and really great.
“Ah, yes, there has been some putrefaction due to the dissolution of the organs,” Murphy said, kneeling beside the body. He took a probe out of his medical bag and prodded the side of the torso, eliciting a sloshing sound. “As you can see, he’s basically a bag of soup.”
The plot is slightly more structured, and I'd kind of figured out the characters by that point.
The big issue with that one was that it was ostensibly set in the early 1900s. No later than 1914. But the dialogue and the narration and everything is very modern.
“Everyone else said it was some kind of psychotropic effect of whatever did this,” he said, gesturing at his shoulder. “English guy, on the other hand, ran out of here like it was the best news he’d ever heard. Like maybe flesh-melting psycho killer was the last thing he needed for a scavenger hunt.”
It's fun, but it's not accurate.
The reason I bring all of this up is that rereading it reminded me how much I loved this story, and I'd really like to fix it up one day. But I either have to write it in era-appropriate language, which might lose this… flavor… that I've created, or I have to move it up to the modern era, in which case everyone would have apps instead of cool steampunk devices. Lame.
This is why I never get anything rewritten. Sure, there's all this potential in these rough drafts, but also these huge problems that would require a complete overhaul to fix. I don't how to take the good bits and make something readable out of them. Thus is the problem of The Long Road, as well. And The Edgelands. And The Midnight Carnival. And the vampire one… Whatever it's called. Cold Blooded.
But there's no time for all that. I've got to prepare for my next NaNo novel, which will undoubtedly be a string of nonsense threaded through tiny beads of quality. Like diamonds on feed string. That is, the string off of a feed bag. Like chicken feed or whatever. Sorry, my mind made the comparison, then realized that feed string might be an incredibly esoteric thing known only to farm folk, and even they might call it something entirely different. But this only proves my point. I make references and jokes that no one else will understand, so obviously those won't make it to any final draft.
Anyway, I'm out. I'll see you next week.
Title Source: Supernatural 7x21: Reading is Fundamental
No comments:
Post a Comment