The pitch: An inhuman spirit preys on students in a fictional late-80s college town in the Arkansas River Valley. No one knows where it came from or who to trust. Or maybe some of them do. There's another newcomer to Blackridge, someone with plans to put the demon to use in his own schemes.
I wrote quite a bit of this when Amazon introduced its now-defunct serial fiction platform. It's some of the worst writing I've ever done. I like the plot. I like the characters. I'm even proud of the way I made the setting my own. The actual prose, though, is bland garbage. It reads more like an outline than a finished story, or even a good draft. I think it's worth fixing, though.
The pitch: A traveler plunges through a misty otherworld to an abandoned underground temple, where he meets a group of ruthless treasure-hunters and learns that he is in a desert in an unfamiliar, dying, land. Even though he knows he can't trust them, he doesn't see any other way to survive the hostile environment, so he joins the strangers and helps them search for the relics of the lost civilization.
This one is actually a sequel to Losing Lanterns (for those who've read it, the protagonist is Aradoc), but it stands alone. It digs into a lot of things I've wanted to explore for a while. As far as having emotional patterns I want to infect you with and a vision of life I need to share, this is the best of the three. I'm not sure I'm ready to grow it into what it needs to be, though.
If I were getting started today, I'd probably be working on one I've been calling "Dogstar" in my head. There is an absolute zero chance of this being the actual title, by the way. The name comes from -- well, let's back up a bit.
A little while back, I talked about this thing that's been percolating in my head for a long time. Imagine telling stories as a sort of Plato's Cave scenario. There's the story being told now, but, somewhere outside, there's the pure story, the story everyone is trying to tell. No story we tell is the real story; it's just what we've put together from the bits we can see. It's impossible for any medium to convey the pure story. Our stories are only shadows.
The idea of a pure story behind the story was the foundation of The Nameless Way. I've been digging into a chaotic mess of scenarios and, not just mechanically translating them into a coherent story, but dissolving and distilling and reconstituting them to taste what I can of the truer story they came from.
So anyway, there was this space opera comic strip I did when I was eleven or so years old, just a grid on sheets of notebook paper. It starred a rocket-powered talking dog (based on Mike's favorite bean bag toy) who gets sucked through a black hole into another universe, where he has a series of outer space adventures. That's why my placeholder name is "Dogstar."
There's a stack of those comic strips that I've somehow managed not to lose over the years. As I suggested earlier, I'm studying the whole pile like it's a bad translation of a great story, a transmission I was trying to relay, but couldn't get right.
While I've resisted the urge to actually start writing it, I did build a Scrivener file for it and I poke at the details every now and then. I've already uncovered a promising narrative and a bunch of characters with interesting conflicts and story arcs. There's even a little romance. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. It always looks easier in this phase. I haven't even made up my mind how I'm going to portray the dog.
Of course, I've got to finish the one I'm on, first. My New Year's Resolution was to publish at least part of it (maybe I'll explain what I mean later) this year, and that still looks like a plausible goal. I got a lot done before I had to go full time on the money-grubbing and, now that I'm adapting to the situation (and the new manager helped me get a schedule that doesn't completely crush my soul), it's picking up again.
You can also find this on my Substack, Whiskey and Fire.
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