Thursday Thoughts

Nostalgia, part two!

A couple more projects I've pondered rewriting.  Like the others, they all have their problems and their plusses.  The allure of new novels is still potent, so it may be a while, but I'm sure these ideas will materialize in some form or another, even if they're cannibalized for another project.

Conspiracy:  This was actually a series of short stories, storyline never finished, that was "published" in my Eye of Unicorn, Tongue of Dragon ezine, which was a private "subscription" (note all the quotation marks!) circulated among a small number of people.  It never quite worked the way I wanted it to - I intended people to "pay" for it (more quotes!) by submitting at least one piece in a certain period of time - but it was a good idea ... and this is off-topic, in any event.  Conspiracy followed a dissolute playboy prince and the leader of the song mages who both had problems that could be solved by each other's resources ... so even though they could barely stand each other, they decided to pretend a romance and get married.  As the story unfolds, we learn a lot more about Calina's dark past ... and two secondary characters on each "side" of the tale develop who I simply adored.

But there's one huge problem with the story:  what's wrong with an arranged marriage?  Why pretend?  I came up with a tentative worldbuild element that might explain this, but I'm still working against the expectations formed by earth's entire history.  This is probably the primary reason why I haven't tackled this already.

Blood From Stone:  This story was a journal written in "real-time" - if there was a three-day lapse between entries, I waited three days to write the next one, and I tried to finish the events of a single day *in* that day, though I think as the storyline heated up and got more complicated, I eventually found this was an impossible quantity of typing.  The basic premise was that everyone was bound to a stone embedded in their body that allows them to be monitored and harmed / disciplined by a class of sorcerers known as Lithomers.  The main character is essentially a gypsy, from a class of people who are still bound to stones, but do not have to keep them on their person ... and she is adopted by a scheming noble to enter the Lithomers.  There's a love ... polygon of some kind (her and three men) and a lot of conspiracy, complication, mythic backdrop ...

Probably the main issue with this story is the slow start and the amount of complication.  To rewrite it, I'd probably have to do a plot / scene outline and identify elements that could be cut ... and I'm sure there are a few. ... a few.  The current draft is about 160,000, which is untenable for a newbie author these days ...

Some of you are probably wondering about my Nano novel, Unnatural Causes.  (Or possibly none of you, but allow me my illusions.)  I'll chatter about that next week, but suffice it to say, I did not "win," but was thoroughly satisfied with what I did get written.