But Don't Quit Your Day Job
Feb. 20th, 2016 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingSince I decided to take a break from fandom, I'm thinking about four possible writing projects.
Jackson Lake
A series of thirteen interconnected short stories set in the town in rural Georgia where I grew up. When Georgia Power created an artificial lake on the outskirts of town in the 1940s, they flooded an entire community. Through the stories of twelve POV characters (the first character also gets the last story), who are all loosely based on people I know or am related to, it becomes clear that the town is now haunted by ghosts both real and metaphorical.
Stories I Tell Myself
A collection of about seventy very short stories based on things that have actually happened to me filtered through a thick lens of horror tropes. I've already written and performed most of these stories as either stand-up routines or slam poetry at various open mics, but that sort of shit seems juvenile to me now, so I'd need to edit everything into prose that can be read by other human beings.
While the City Dreams
Although this would primarily be an adventure novel, what I want to do is to trace the progress of someone who becomes monomaniacally obsessed with achieving a goal that most people would consider evil. The setting is a multi-tiered city whose technology is futuristically advanced but which also has magic, because why not.
From the Desk of the Demon King
An epistolary novel in which not-Sauron does his best to manage his empire. The eponymous Demon King will be the main voice, but there will also be letters written by his three generals, his accountant, his rival, his former mentor, the queen of the kingdom that's been sending warriors to defeat him, her mother, and one of her lieutenants. He'll probably end up romancing the queenbecause I've never had an original thought in my life.
Now that I've written all this down, it looks trite and stupid. But then again, we are all the horribly mutated descendants of a virus clinging to the surface of a radioactive rock hurtling through space, so I don't see how the quality of my ideas matters much in the end.
Jackson Lake
A series of thirteen interconnected short stories set in the town in rural Georgia where I grew up. When Georgia Power created an artificial lake on the outskirts of town in the 1940s, they flooded an entire community. Through the stories of twelve POV characters (the first character also gets the last story), who are all loosely based on people I know or am related to, it becomes clear that the town is now haunted by ghosts both real and metaphorical.
Stories I Tell Myself
A collection of about seventy very short stories based on things that have actually happened to me filtered through a thick lens of horror tropes. I've already written and performed most of these stories as either stand-up routines or slam poetry at various open mics, but that sort of shit seems juvenile to me now, so I'd need to edit everything into prose that can be read by other human beings.
While the City Dreams
Although this would primarily be an adventure novel, what I want to do is to trace the progress of someone who becomes monomaniacally obsessed with achieving a goal that most people would consider evil. The setting is a multi-tiered city whose technology is futuristically advanced but which also has magic, because why not.
From the Desk of the Demon King
An epistolary novel in which not-Sauron does his best to manage his empire. The eponymous Demon King will be the main voice, but there will also be letters written by his three generals, his accountant, his rival, his former mentor, the queen of the kingdom that's been sending warriors to defeat him, her mother, and one of her lieutenants. He'll probably end up romancing the queen
Now that I've written all this down, it looks trite and stupid. But then again, we are all the horribly mutated descendants of a virus clinging to the surface of a radioactive rock hurtling through space, so I don't see how the quality of my ideas matters much in the end.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-20 11:18 pm (UTC)Speaking of writing (or maybe speaking of trite and stupid), I finished the first draft of a novel this Tuesday at just about 90k words. It's a trashy science fiction romance, and you are sort of to blame for its existence. You might not remember this, but you gave an eloquent defense of the meaningfulness of fanfiction when I saw you in DC a couple of years ago, which got me thinking about maybe writing something I enjoy (as opposed to the painful and failed attempts at writing something profound that led me to stop writing fiction). I did enjoy it, and I've never even come close to finishing a first draft of a novel before, but now I've printed it and it's lying in a corner of my apartment and I'm terrified of reading it because I'm fairly certain it's an abomination and that I will cringe so hard I have a stroke.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-21 06:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-02-22 10:58 am (UTC)