A big, meaty, epic historical novel of the Second Punic War. I sketched it out more than 20 years ago but haven’t written a word of it. The fact that several subsequent years’ worth of writing technical manuals and brochures has sapped any semblance of soul out of my prose might have something to do with it.
Mine is about a young man who realizes that if he ever thinks introspectively again, he will open a doorway in his mind to a world of incomprehensible horror that will swallow our world.
In order to avoid introspective thought, he resorts to an escalating spree of sex and violence, all while screaming out nonsensical words.
Other characters include:
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a young woman who somehow knows of the man’s world-destroying potential, and helps him avoid introspection. She believes there is a good potential in him too.
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a middle-aged man who attempts to elicit introspective thoughts from the main character. Perhaps the this man is from the world of incomprehensible horror, or just wants to release it?
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a mysterious old man who may have once been in a similar situation to the main character.
My novel is about a tactless half-Japanese girl named Callisto who has lived her life with a rather optimistic and narrow world-view. The book is mostly about a relationship she forms with a guy (Sketch) who got the shit kicked out of him on a regular basis as a kid, thus leaving him with about a billion unresolved emotional issues. This is complicated by the fact that he has a younger sister who is going through the same thing, and there’s not much he can do about it. The novel has a lot of violence.
For the first half of the book, it’s mostly about Callisto trying to come to terms with her new reality, and learn to care about people. Then about half-way through something extremely depressing and horrible happens to her. Then the book becomes about Sketch and his dawning realization that he needs to grow the fuck up.
I’m about 3/4 through. I tend to be lousy at inventing plots but an excellent character and dialog writer. It think it’s got great potential if I would weed out some of the melodrama, but it’s depressing as shit to write and I’m not sure I went in the right direction with Callisto. I haven’t touched it in 2 years, but I think about it a lot.
I’m a few years into pecking away at a sword-and-sorcery novel about a young woman raised by a warrior mother and mage father to undertake a world-saving quest. Her magic gets blasted out of her, she has to abandon the quest to another’s leadership and try to get home to be healed, and the meat of the story is about her journey home, the adventures and developing romance along the way, how she winds up saving the world after all, and what happens afterward, which is where the story is now.
It’s online in a series of threads at Fathom, in its ninth chapter there. It actually started as a role-playing game with multiple writers in the first quest phase, under a different sequence of thread names, but I used the magic-blasting to split my heroine’s story off into its own sequence of threads. Since the split it’s been mostly my own and by now has only one other very occasional contributor.
I’m keeping files of the whole thing and might someday try to rewrite it into novel form, but it’s really not good enough. There are some parts I’m proud of, some decent work, but overall it’s not worthy, and it’s way too derivative. Oh, well, it’s fun, especially when some new character (like The Feist, a talking bossy little pony) erupts out of nowhere into the story line and insists on taking charge of things. I am frequently surprised by how firmly my characters will tell me how a scene should play out.
18-year-olds in space in 1967? Again, I am forced to point out how dangerously close to non-fiction you’re getting. Is there a blacklight involved? 