I installed a word count plugin in the dashboard, and was pleasantly surprised to see that in a little over a week I’ve racked up 10,000 words on this thing, putting me solidly in “Novelette” territory. Admittedly, the lion’s share of that is talking about Sid, and those were pieces from the heart, so they flowed a lot easier. But as a proof of concept, I think the concept is proving.
Still got work to do on the theme. Going to make this look very different, but the overall structure is going to be the same moving forward, just various flavors of prose on various topics. Got a lot to learn about WordPress and what happens when your domain registrar and your hosting provider don’t enjoy hanging out.
Also, I’m going to eventually start posting progress on the books, as well. The one I’ve alluded to a few times is called Elsewhere, and it’s the one I’ve gotten the furthest on. The problem is, I’ve been writing it vignette-style. Instead of starting from point A and plotting my way through it, I’ve been working on scenes as they come to me and threading it all together post-hoc. The problem with that is I’ve got a fair bit I could post, but none of it would make a lot of sense, and it certainly wouldn’t land the way I want it to land without the buildup. An emotionally intense scene between two characters won’t mean a ton if you have no idea who those characters are.
The other book is more along my usual lines, a science fiction story called Zero. It opens with a man waking up to find himself dead and simulated inside a computer as part of a project designed to explore the survival of consciousness. I’ll be frank—if you’ve read Dennis Taylor’s Bobiverse books, the beginning is going to seem really familiar.
Upon discovering he’d written a book starting from a similar premise, I had to bite the bullet and check out the series. That’s always a pitfall as a writer; you have an idea, and then you find out somebody beat you to the punch and you have to abandon it. Way, way back I had a story percolating about a supernatural investigation and regulation organization and was fleshing it out before I saw the movie Men in Black and saw them do it much better but with aliens. (And the original comics were supernatural and not extraterrestrial, so I was doubly beaten.)
So when I picked up We Are Legion I was utterly horrified to see his book start out very similarly to mine—but then I breathed a sigh of relief as his went in a very radically different direction early on, so I figure I’m safe on that count. Zero is a begin-at-the-beginning style of plot, so I might have a chapter to post sooner rather than later. But my muse has ADHD; I’ve got the first book pretty solid in my head, and a sketch of the second, and one scene I’m absolutely dying to write that goes at the end of book three. Just gotta get there from here.
And I’ve been hacking at the opening to Elsewhere as well, it’s just trickier because of the stylistic and framing choices I’ve decided to burden myself with. (Playing with a cliché a lot of people hate; figure I’m doing that thing comics do where they try to lose the audience right out of the gate so they can win them back.)
So, yeah. I’m getting in the swing of putting words out there in this public leap of faith. I’ve given a few people in my real life the link, which was scary as all fuck, but it’s me trying to atone for never showing my work to those whose opinions I treasured the most throughout my life. And in the meantime, it’s nice to have a little niche to stack words in whenever I feel like it on whatever topic I choose. I’ll do my best to put up something each and every day, even if it’s brief.
And who knows, I might just stay sane in the process.