Until We Have Faces

I nearly forgot to write a post this week, as my days off have been spent playing with larger scale murder than usual. I just got the game Plague Inc: Evolved on my computer and I'm trying to wipe out humanity with fungal spores. Mankind is surprisingly resilient.

So anyway, writing and stuff.

Camp NaNoWriMo starts on Monday. I'm super excited. Yeah, I realize I've been struggling with this dumb story for months, but I'm starting to feel it again. I've got my main character back in my head. He had become kind of nebulous and faceless (I’ll get into that in a second) and it was hard to actually get him to be in the scenes. But he has coalesced back into a solid form, and is behaving like a human (or nearly human) again.

Death and Romance

Yes, I skipped last week. I'm sorry. I had a lot going on. It was all Halloween/beginning of NaNo/having to work on my day off, and I realized sometime on Sunday that I never wrote my post. But that's fine. I didn't have much to talk about then anyway.

So now I'm a few thousand words in, and this story is taking turns I never expected. My initial thought was that Steve was just some hapless oaf who got killed repeatedly in gruesome ways. But now all of a sudden he's a mentally ill grave robber with possible aspirations of being a superhero and I don't know what's happening anymore. Oh, and there's a love interest?

What started as some easy, jokey series of unfortunate events has turned into something else entirely.

Mystical Murder Weapons

Here is my problem when it comes to prep work and anything involving research. I go to look up one thing, and two hours later I'm reading about martyrdom and the Fisher King. That's one of many reasons why it takes me so long to write my blog posts.

I was trying to research the Spear of Longinus (aka the Spear of Destiny, or the Holy Lance). I was trying to figure out what happened to Steve to cause him all the trouble he's about to experience. I'm inclined to think that whatever kills him first has something to do with it.

Night of the Living Steve

Oh, Steve. Poor, poor Steve.

I'm going to murder him. Repeatedly.

The question is, of course, why? I can write his unfortunate demise in fifty different ways, but I need some kind of narrative framework to hold it all together. How has Steve found himself in this situation? Why is this happening to him? How is he going to get out?

Previously, I've said, on at least two occasions, that he's been cursed by an angry god. But unless I do some work and really flesh that out into something, it just ends up being "just because." As in, these things are happening to him because it's convenient for the purposes of story writing. It's not a good reason. And a good reason for him getting into this pickle is going to be instrumental in getting him out. I mean, how do you appease an angry god?

Choices, Choices

I haven't gone through all my stories yet, but so far it looks like I haven't killed that many people. Or maybe I'm just growing numb to all the murder. By my estimation, there were 13 deaths in The Long Road's 25,000 or so words. And a lot of that was just one guy. And yeah, that's a lot, but most of the others are one, maybe two deaths. A lot have none at all!

I'll get back to you when I actually find the time to reread all the stories and get a final body count.

In the meantime, I'm probably trying not to kill anyone. I'm still not sure what my next project is, if I'm trying to go all literary and get locally published, or what.

The Pieces Are Coming Together

I have characters! Most of them still don't have names, but I'm getting closer to that. I tried to go to bed at a reasonable hour last night and ended up staring at the ceiling for three hours. But I figured out some story stuff. Not only do I have characters by description, I can imagine what they're like. They're real people, living in my head now. It's getting a little crowded.

So, who do we have now?

• The main character, a bartender with brain damage, who seems to have some strange abilities
• Jo Castilla, kind and caring, is on a quest to help… someone
• The honeymooning couple: he's an architect, she's an avid pinterester
• The author, who writes romance novels under a female pseudonym, is here researching his next book
• Mary Jane Sebring, flirty and impulsive, is not going to have a nice weekend
• The proprietress, who runs the Something Something Inn

Murder Isn't Working, and That's All I'm Good At

Not a lot to report on today. I'm still way behind and I've been killing people.

I'm still determined not to give up, even though I only have five days left. I'm convinced that some amazing idea is going to come to me and it will all be okay.

Killing off Celeste was actually way harder than I thought it would be. I had actual emotions. I just wish I could do the same to my readers. But they don't have any reason to get attached to these characters. They haven't been living in anyone else's head for the past few weeks.

So here's a question, readers. What makes you get attached to a character?

Famous Last Words

Well, it's about time to kill someone off. I didn't want to do it, but it's happening, and I can't stop it.

Poor Celeste is going down.

I've been saying for a while that if I was going to kill someone, it would be her. Then for some reason at my local NaNo Write-In, I was talking about luna moths, and how they have no mouths. Like, they spent their whole larval stage being a very hungry caterpillar, but once they reach their adult stage, all they do is get it on and die. They only live for about a week as adults.

Can you imagine, the tragic tale of a caterpillar, looking longingly up at a beautiful delicious leaf or whatever, saying to itself, "One day, I'll have wings, and I'll fly up there and eat that leaf." And they grow up and… aww… no mouth.

The Devil's in the Details

Have you ever heard or read something that just sticks in your head because of how messed up it was? Like, it's sickening and you can't get it out of your mind? I wrote something like that. I think it was Wednesday. It might have been Tuesday. Either way, I'm still thinking about it. Part of said I shouldn't write it like that. Another part said I definitely should, because that's how messed up the situation was.

So, a bit of context (because I have to make you read it now too). It's a bit of backstory about how Des became a vampire. That involves a horrific plane crash that he alone survives (and not for long). This is what happened to his punk band, Winter on Venus. They met a horrible end.

Further Adventures in Vampirism

You might recall how I realized the only thing I'm actually good at writing is murder. Well, today I got to work 30 minutes early and had to do something, so I started pondering my novel, teeny little notebook at the ready. And I realized what this story needs.

A serial killer.

See, all Des wants is a home. A place to belong. And he's about to get a little too cozy, so I have to ruin that for him. So what would threaten his quiet little un-life? The possibility of exposure or death. Or exposure followed by death. So I think we need some vampire hunters.

These vampire hunters were drawn to this quiet little college town by a string of gruesome murders that look to be the work of vampires. But are they? You'll have to wait and see, I guess. Anyway, our group of peaceful, ice cream serving vampires are going to find their lives turned upside down as suspicion begins to fall.

Two Parts Heartbreak, One Part Explosions

Something amazing happened yesterday (Monday). I learned some fascinating things about my character. It all started with Reddit. Something mentioned that Jim Croce had died in a plane crash. "Why do so many musicians die in plane crashes?" I asked myself. I mean, Patsy Cline, John Denver, half of Lynyrd Skynyrd… And then I thought, maybe one 1980's (or so) punk rocker got "lucky" and was got help from an unlikely source. Namely, vampires.

So then I was at work, and I suddenly had this whole story going in my head. They're in a plane, on the way to some show. Something goes wrong. They crash in the forest. One survivor. But he's not out of the woods yet, literally or metaphorically. He's not doing so good, but he's going to try to find his way to civilization. Spoiler alert: he's not going to make it. Suddenly, vampires. He has to be turned if he wants to make it out of there more or less alive.

Cause of Death: Plot

This is a late post and I apologize for that. At 9 pm, I suddenly realized, shit, it's Tuesday. I'm not sure why I didn't write it yesterday. Netflix was probably involved. At this point I have no idea what this post is about. I'll be just as surprised as you.

All right, let's talk about murder. There's bound to be plenty of death in this upcoming vampire story, so let's revisit Mad's Greatest Hits of Murder.

I have killed a lot of people. A lot of characters, I should say. In a previous post I shared an excerpt where I gored a big-game hunter with a mammoth tusk. And that was, what, fifteen years ago? I have a long history of this.

A Mistake of Mammoth Proportions

When I last delved into old stories, I mentioned a story I started about an island inhabited by living mammoths. That sounds dumb every time I say it,  but there you have it. I was going through my old notebooks and papers the other day, and I found it. So I'm going to share it with you.
 

I have a tendency to set stories in the current year unless there's some specific reason to put it in the past or the future. My notes indicate that the prologue takes place in 2000, while the story proper is in 2002, so it's reasonable to assume that it was written sometime between those dates. So would have been 12-14. Keep that in mind because this is awful.