So the creative month of November is upon us once more. This year, I have decided that not only am I partaking of the madness that is NaNoWriMo but I am also going to attempt the 30 Characters Challenge. This should ensure that my creative juices are well and truly flowing by the end of the month; or possibly that I’ve totally burned out by the middle of the first week and I don’t do anything else for the rest of the year. Only time will tell.

For NaNo, I’m trying my hand at a horror novel; just like I’ve done for the past three years. In fact, it is the same horror novel. I never get to the end of it (I actually won NaNo in my first year but didn’t finish the novel) and restart it every year. This year will be the last time I do that, I swear. If I don’t finish the book this time, I’m going to have to face up to the fact that I never will. Then it will be time to move on to something else.

I’m semi-pantsing it this year, as usual. I have no plot outline, just an idea of where the story is going and who will be in it. The actual minutiae are not set in stone though, so with any luck I’ll enjoy ploughing through to see where the thing goes as much as any potential reader will.

As for the 30 Character Challenge, I intend to use this as a way of getting a host of characters prepared for use in Ink Proof Cannon when it launches in January. For those of you who don’t know what that is (and there will be many, I’m sure), Ink Proof Cannon is my new anthology webcomic. I have a friend interested in producing the art for one of the stories (a science fiction story involving bounty hunters, revenge tales and lots of mutants) but I’m doing the rest myself. I’ll therefore need to get my act together if I’m going to have these characters designed in time, and a 30 Characters in 30 Days style challenge seems like just what the doctor ordered.

I’ll keep you posted on how I get on.

Sometimes we come to the unfortunate realization that what we are writing really doesn’t work. It can happen to all of us and chances are it will happen more than once. With me, it happened a while back but I’ve only just worked out how to fix the problem. It will be nice to finally get through this story.

Anyone who has been reading the stories section of this website (or who was following the Building Tales blog before I incorporated it into this site during the last redesign) will have probably come across The Curse of the Other World. It is designed as a supernatural horror but it really wasn’t working for me. I couldn’t get a grip on the characters and I didn’t feel they fit the way the story needed to play out. In short, the story was not working for me and that’s why it ground to a halt.

It struck me yesterday while I was reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo that what I needed to be writing was more akin to detective fiction than supernatural horror. The storyline fits better into that genre than what I was trying to do with it. That’s not to say there will be no horror in the new version because there will, but now I think I’ve got the angle I need to see the story through to its conclusion.

As for the characters, I’ve been reading a lot of Poe, Conan Doyle and Lovecraft recently and each of them has shown me one thing: if you are going to unravel a supernatural mystery, you need a character that will keep ploughing on regardless of the danger to themselves or others. Poe and Conan Doyle have that in abundance because of how their Dupin and Holmes characters act. With Lovecraft, he has characters who invariably should have given up and run away quickly before going insane or being killed horribly (or both) but don’t because of a singular thirst for knowledge that borders on insanity.

The character of Sarah Barclay was designed to be a knowledge-seeker in the Lovecraftian style but with a personal need to see the storyline through to its conclusion because of events in her past; hence why the storyline was running in two time lines simultaneously (and I don’t think I’m really giving anything away by saying that here). I’ve decided to ramp up her drive in the new version; and also change her name. I’ve been working on this storyline since before I met my partner’s family and writing about someone with the same name as my sister-in-law seems a bit odd now, so I’ve gone with the alternative name I had considered for the character when I started out. It’s not a problem to change names of fictional people but I thought any of you who read this might be interested to know why I made the switch.

I’m going to start posting the first draft of this new version once I’ve finished chapter one, because that way I’ll have a bit of a buffer for those times when I run out of steam or just can’t make the time to write on a particular day. Expect to be able to read something new soon.