©2022 Michael Raven
Header art: “Guidance” by Sentient Line on DeviantArt
I’m still a little off-center after today. Everyone in my circles is trying to go about life as normal, as if some crazed melomaniac with nukes isn’t trying to test everyone’s resolve with respect to his fetish for a world that never existed, while still trying to get however small grip I might have on herding cats for my “writing persona” in social media, to snowfalls outside that I’m trying to ignore, to having a sneaking suspicion that workloads are soon going to be like taking a sip of water from a firehose.
And then, on a bit of a lark, I tossed out a pitch on Twitter for my NaNoWriMo novel that I had worked out in 2020, but found that I really really shouldn’t do novel writing in November (or at least, that intense of a commitment, because it rarely works for me).
Folks are, for whatever reason, acting on a call to pitch science-fiction/fantasy novels while agents and publishers review them for possible hoovering up if the pitch is any good. I honestly hadn’t considered it until I saw some of the pitches myself which seemed, in many cases, to be derivative stories. Not that “Gloamfell” isn’t somewhat derivative, but I did try to mask some of the influences when I outlined it and I didn’t see it coming off as a copycat in terms of the conceptual story. It is my own take on man v. machine v. monster v. magic story. And a bit of threat of ecodisaster tossed in for funsies.
I don’t expect any nibbles. I might shit myself if I got one. And, in light of all of the other things going on, do I have time to write the story? And would anyone actually read it? For the record: I think I am on the order of 20k words into the first draft, but I have a feeling I’d jettison that and start from scratch if I were to get up the gumption to try and see it to the end.
But, you see, the problem is that it is hard to get up the gumption without some kind of promise that it might end up in someone else’s hands — or in front of their eyeballs, these days, I suppose. I don’t know that I have enough gumption to write it exclusively for myself.
And yet, tossing out that pitch today made me reminisce enough about the tale I wanted to tell to get those synapses firing.
If you want to know more about the 50k foot overview of where it was heading, why doncha go ahead and check out the following elder posts, back when I think I had all of about thirty followers:
I have other notes elsewhere about the secret part of the story that I wasn’t going to give away before I had even written the darned thing. It was fairly fleshed-out and outlined, but life got in the way as it tends to do in November for me for whatever reason it tends to get in the way for me around that time of year.
The story is was largely inspired by a combination of art images I stumbled upon by Jakub Różalski and SentientLine.
Part of me has been itching to “get over myself” and get back into prose for a spell. Poetry is my comfort zone. and I feel like I’ve been getting to complacent about staying where everything is warm and soft and fuzzy and comfortable (with thorns and blood).
So I might dust off the old files and dig back into telling the story of Winter, a mech pilot for the Republik and how meeting a mute young lady she names Shani or Red, and her strange, hulking, talking feline going by the name of Wolf, on what was supposed to be a routine patrol upended her life and made her realize that maybe there was something to those old folk stories her grandmam used to tell at bedtime that both frightened and enthralled her.
sceadugenga 