Kat Dancing

One thing I love about blogging: it gives you a lovely excuse to lay things out for others, often thereby making them clearer to you yourself. Or babble nervously. Take your pick.

Since I want to do this about the story I want to start writing tomorrow, a story y'all may or may not be interested in, I'm hiding it behind a cut. However, I've no idea how my RSS feed will handle this. It didn't like yesterday's pic at all. Apologies if there is a great long post in spite of me.



To date I've written two stories. Both had young(ish) women as protaganists and essentially developed out of my teenaged-dreaming years; they were cool characters who stuck with me, nagged at me, sat around in the back of my head (in the case of the second making sarcastic comments; in the case of the first just lurking in large and ominous silence) until I finally wrote something about them to get them the fuck out of my head. The stories themselves, as well as the settings, were found only after immense trial and error and essentially grew up around the characters.

The story I want to start tomorrow came about differently. I was doing some backstory for my second novel - specifically, I had included telepathy in my second novel as a rather crucial point and it had only occurred to me after the fact that this might be problematic. There are no reliable reports of telepathy now. In Joey's world, 500 years in the future, it's an accepted and ruthlessly utilized phenomenon. Clearly something had to happen between then and now, and my hindbrain said that it was both intentional and not very nice.

As I did some research on the scientific background and continued to write backstory, the impression grew, revolved slowly, began to fit bits and pieces of story around itself. I started to feel the hand of a narrator in it. Things came together - like the title, A Certain Kind of Mind, a phrase I said to someone one day and that stuck in my head.

Finally, in the last week, I started writing down some of those general impressions; and as I did, they became more specific. My narrator got a name (Isaac). Scenes and bits of story came out of nowhere. I learned that he had a wife and two grown children; that he was unemployed (this was an early revelation, actually) that he was living in... grey, is the only way I can think of to describe it. And that he had his life changed for him, and changed the world with it.

Isaac is looking to be a challenge. For one thing, his voice is still very quiet in my head, and - notwithstanding that this story started as an idea, rather than a person - I'm still a character writer. I need that voice or I'll have nothing to write. For another, he is, as I mentioned, male, married, and a father; and he's just past his fiftieth birthday. See above about young women protaganists and you'll see why I'm worried.

It feels good, though. Like stretching.

I've no idea if I'll actually finish this story by Monday. My guess is that I won't. The story feels shorter than my two previous stories (60,000 words first draft and 80,000 words first draft) but it's still formidable. My outline is not much of an outline; there's a lot of blanks, one of which, sooner or later, is going to sink me. The minor characters, even the ones I know are necessary, are for the most part faceless blanks; half of them I can't even pin a name to, and others showed up unexpectedly in the outline. Who is this "Saul" I write of? I've got ideas, but not enough. This will only get worse as I write. I'm guessing that I'll start out sure, get maybe ten or fifteen thousand words into the thing, and flounder.

But that's okay. As long as I write enough to get a feel for the voices in it, I'm going to come out ahead.

Well, the weekend ought to be interesting.