Ascend by Shahab Alizadeh. Their work has been a huge inspiration for previous short stories as well as this project!
progress Update
So, it’s been around a month now since I first started my writing challenge! As a reminder, the challenge is to essentially write an entire novel in a very limited span of time (well, a chronology linked through a central character present in all the stories, but details, details.)
I gave myself a modified version of NaNoWriMo, i.e. National Novel Writing Month. For those unaware, NaNoWriMo’s original intention is for participants to produce 50,000 words over 30 days. I am doing a modified version of this, where my goal is to instead produce 72,000 words over ~60 days.
Or rather, that was the plan. However, my ideas get a bit ahead of me, so I figure I’ll be modifying this whole thing slightly - it’s more likely going to end up being ~100,000 words over ~90 days. Yeah, I love making more work for myself. Fucking idiot lol.
Thankfully I’ve been consistently averaging >8000 words per week to get there. Basically, I am on track, just so long as I don’t slow down even as my room gets colder.
Has it been easy? Not at all. But it’s also been an extremely rewarding experience that’s taught me a lot about what I’m capable of when I don’t allow myself to make excuses about why I don’t have time or energy or whatnot to write. It’s also been great at kicking my subconscious perfectionism in the teeth. Might need metaphorical braces if I do this too long though…
book Information
I think I’ve written enough that I can actually give a bit of a teaser regarding what the hell I’m even writing about.
Most of it is still pending of course, but the current working title is Olympus in the Dark. To summarize it thematically, I suppose one could call it a… dark contemporary fantasy? Honestly, that might not be the best summary, mainly because I suppose it would fall under the same category as Gaiman’s American Gods or Hawkins’ The Library at Mount Char, neither of which I would really refer to as urban fantasy, even though that’s the genre I see assigned to them more often than not. But yeah, supernatural shit, weird happenings, the works. But like with most of my writing, the fantastical is just a gentle vehicle for more intimate storytelling. That hasn’t changed and likely won’t for some time.
Although I’ve also heard of the term ‘rural fantasy,’ which isn’t too far off from what I’m going for.
In any case, the novel is a chronology consisting of 8 short stories (technically; one of them is broken up into 3 small parts in between the others.) The reason why I hate the term ‘urban fantasy’ is that it implies cities, gridlock, skyscrapers, etc., which are of course present but only really in 2/8 stories. It doesn’t seem fair to refer to it as such.
Maybe the ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ cancel out. Maybe it’s just ‘fantasy.’ Quick maths.
To be more specific about how far I’ve come: I have finished the initial draft of the first two chapters/stories (All Things Must Come and House of Pork Bones, respectively), as well as the first of 3 parts for the ‘connecting’ story. As of this post, I am a third of the way through the third story, Witchdance. All titles are, of course, subject to change! I am indecisive and cannot be trusted to maintain anything that has not been set in stone.
Oh wait… what’s it all actually about? What’s like, the premise? The plot?
That’s going to be for the December post. See y’all in a month!
Stay warm,
Johnny