Decision made

Okay, I am go with the evil dictator who is autistic plot.

Potential start point I stole from Placebo's A Song to say Goodbye video.  It may help ground the whole thing.  It may end up being the whole thing.  I may be insane.

Wish me luck you lovelies and I'll see you on the morning when we are so up for typing 'til our fingertips are raw and bleeding.  Only, y'know, in a less icky way than that.

NaNo Planning

So many avenues!

In the Aftermath plotline I have an idea to use a main character who has a form of amnesia, meaning that every day he wakes up with the last memories being of a time long before any of the events of the book happen.  This would allow me to write a perfectly linear account of his life post-apocalypse and the events that lead to him being a single parent but then edit it so that each day I choose to relate comes as a shock.  That would be both artistic and a way for me to indulge a little.  It would also allow for a deliberate confusion over what caused the apocalypse, how long ago it was and what society is actually like in the aftermath, all of which would make writing it easier.  However, there is still the hang up of having to write it all in order rather than the more interesting method of how it would be read.

In the Prehistoric plotline I have an idea about following a group of male hunters from the homo sapiens tribe as they encounter a family group of Neanderthal.  It is widely believed now that the Neanderthal worked in small family clan groups that would have had to have met up with other clans for breeding purposes.  Evidence from my own reading mounts that homo sapiens would have had female dominated, if male led, tribes moving around as well as singular or small groups of males between them - thereby creating a less family-centric tribal system.  The clash of that system alone would be interesting to write and explore were it not for the fact that I have no plot.

And then there's the one I intend to write.  Currently inert and lifeless as stone.  There's something in it, I know, but I can't seem to get any ideas out.

Conspiracy?

Idea sleet ahoy!

Ages ago I had the idea for a detective-esque story set in Prehistory.  Oetzi, the ice mummy discovered in the Alps, seems to have been killed by a blow to the back of his head with a blunt object.  Otherwise he was alone.  It would appear that we are dealing with a murder.  Some form of murder mystery in such a time is therefore not totally improbable given the enormous level of societal sophistication we can find evidence for.  However, I have steered away from indulging it because of the immense amounts of research such a thing would require.

I mean, I would first have to read the Clan of the Cave Bear series by Jean Auel before even knowing where to look to find the sort of things I would need to actually write anything of merit.  Then there's the issues of language, of pan-European movement and climate to consider.  It gets complicated fast.

I have been doing quite a good job of avoiding thinking about it as a viable idea in the run up to this year's madness.  Then Radio 4, yes I am officially that old now, decided to do a number on me.  There was this show on whilst I was waiting in the supermarket carpark and there was someone on talking about the possibility that homo-sapiens and Neanderthal Man may well have interbred and inter-mingled as separate species.  They came from a common ancestor and were cut off by an elongated glacial period when some got trapped in Europe and some got trapped in Africa.  This meant that the original homo sapiens would almost certainly have been black whilst the Neanderthals would have been stockier, stronger, whiter and likely red-haired and green-eyed according to the studies done on their genome.  It would appear as though red-hair in homo sapiens was brought, perhaps, by interbreeding with Neanderthals, though studies have been entirely inconclusive - not even correllation!

It would therefore be fascinating to write about that period and to postulate on the interaction between two such different species as they met.  The lady on the show did a fine job of setting up a scene whereby they would spy members of the opposite species for the first time, separated by a couple of thousand years of development and having similar size brains and capacity for speech the difference would not have been insurmountable.  Furthermore, given the relatively short separation in evolutionary terms, they would have been able to interbreed and may even have shared linguistic roots!

Exciting.  But not possible for NaNo?

Mount Trepidation

I am so looking forward to NaNo this year.  I know, I know, everyone talks like this and I become one with the sea and tide of opinion.  But, seriously, I haven't done it since 2010 and, in that year, my experience was marred by a whole welter of nastiness elsewhere in life - mainly work - that meant I didn't enjoy it.  I'm anxious to be back.

That said, I do worry about time.  I mean, I've managed to hit the target twice in the past but one year  was without anything else to do.  I mean, I had my job, but that was it.  I also had massive disposable income and several hours a night with nothing to do in them.  I hit 85k words that year, but they were mostly pants (about 8k were usuable and quality) and the story remained stubbornly elusive.  In other words, I hit the target by sheer babbling.

The other success, if it can be called that, was simply writing 55k words in the month.  Three projects were undertaken and each one was abandoned before starting another.  The first, and most boring, was an 'official history' of an alternative First World War in which the Germans developed tanks (see, told you) first.  The second was an attempt at Socialist Britain that got no further than a conversation and a poor bit of background.  Final one was just a general ramble including a 5k piece that was a badly transcribed copy of the nuclear attack warning radio broadcast from 1975.

The rest... I've not hot 50k and I've certainly not got much of worth from the words themselves.  I haven't really attended write-ins though, and I did that first time, and I enjoyed it most when I did.  Even if the finished result was a bit pap.

So, I am looking forward to this year, but it is very much scaling Mount Trepidation now.  It's been four years since a 'success' and six since I really enjoyed it and got the bug.  Here's hoping I can recapture some of that!

Songs and Planning

Planning, yes, champing at the bit to get going.  Of course, still torn.

Also, I am beset by music and the idea, germinating in my head, to take about 15 tracks and use these to organise my writing.  That would imply approximately 3k words per track, and still be below target, as well as suggesting that each track would take about a chapter.

So, take the album Fundamental by the Pet Shop Boys and the film Hitler: the Rise of Evil and you pretty much have my autistic man becomes dictator and nastiness happens novel plot in a nutshell.  The trick will be to cover the early life in such a way that I can edit the order afterward and still make it interesting.  In films they often use isolated vignettes and time-lapse to cover aspects like this and most books I read don't actually bother with this sort of thing.  Those that do tend to be the more monstrous novels, those with huge doorstop plots (like Shogun) and they deal with the passge of time by, well, covering all of it.

I don't want to do that.  I'm not sure I enough sub-plot to make that sort of thing interesting and to advance characterisation and plot.  I'm toying with the idea of giving my MC a few more foibles to flesh it all out, such as maybe going for a homosexual angle.  Now, I'm anxious that my generally dysfunctional and slightly amoral autistic MC doesn't misrepresent minorities, so I don't think he'll actually be homosexual, but he doesn't know that and I figure he'll try.

I'm also moving more toward creating an independent world in which this plot can take place.  Why?  Well, partly laziness, there's a whole bunch of stuff that I would need to know inside out in order to make a political rise to power style of novel accurate and convincing in modern society.  To do it in a historical manner would necessarily invoke Godwin's Law and I would have a hard time escaping the allusions, however deliberate, to Hitler and the NSDAP - which would possibly make me look like I endorse their methods or their ideology.  That's a no-no.  But, if I do create a new world, then I will have to contextualise it enough without going overboard so that the reader feels at home enough there to make sense of it but not so at home that they make assumptions where they shouldn't.  They need to recognise that it is not our world but I shouldn't be hammering that home to the reader - they should be figuring that out for themselves and feeling clever!

Heck, at this rate, I could just publish my babbling and hit the target...

To prologue or not to prologue?

Time gathers pace and so my idea-sleet continues - of course.  I can't just have one idea for NaNo, I must have loads and then find that none of them are developed enough to actually manage to write and finish a novel or even a plotline!

Anyway, in amongst all of this there is a question to be asked.  Should one prologue?  I mean, with my autism-politics plotline I thought a prologue would be a good way to show how the end goes down in such a way that draws a reader in.  However, I also remembered that there are plenty of people and readers whose opinions I respect that say that they never even read prologues.  Which makes sense.

So, should I bother writing one or should I cheat and make it chapter one?  Or, horror, should I just not open and instead rely on the early life of my autistic future revolutionary to grab the reader?

Then there's the Aftermath plotline that keeps pootling around my head.  I originally cheated and added it to the end of the plotline that appears on this blog as Bradford Interchange but... I dunno, I have a soft-spot for the idea of a non-linear plot but for the fact that I would have to write it linearly to begin with - that would be hard for me to do.  In that sense it would be the perfect candidate for NaNo because I would be forced to write it and get it all done - and I may even edit it - but in another I worry that I would destroy it and get bored and then abandon it.

NaNo plot

Okay, so, this is going to be the home of my attempt on the north face of NaNoWriMo this year.  I guess that means it's as good a place as any to be doing some plotting and planning.

At this stage I'm looking at writing a political thriller with a main character who has high-functioning Asperger's and will end up taking over a country.  Think the rise of Hitler, with a smattering of French Revolution, and a great deal of using albums I like to suggest how the plot will unfold.  I'm thinking to start with the ending, follow it with the story of the main character's early life - where he shall have an affir and gravate towards the big cities and the different style of life there.  Somehow I'm thinking he will fall in with a group plotting their own government take over and, by dint of being autistic and single-mided, he'll end up in charge.

Yeah, it's like the Rise of Evil but... I dunno.  I hope it's interesting and I hope I can write it.

That... or something involving time travel and multiple dimensions.  That will end up with a large section in a Middle Ages area with a dragon.  Singular, small part.  Knight in shining armour that is not all they seem will rescue a damsel.

Babbling.

NaNoWriMo

If you haven't heard of this, it's worth a peak.  I'm intending to try again this year, first time in a while, and, as part of the challenge, I'm intending to post up here anything that I write on a given day.  That is, without revisions, and I shall publish all of the entries at the end of the month on a date in the past for the blog (so that I don't clog this place up with needless verbiage).

In other news, has anyone else had an idea for a story based on an album?  I mean, I know I am a bit of a freak with my zeal for the Pet Shop Boys, but I always feel like there are stories lurking in their music - especially using Fundamental as a skeleton and adding things like It's a Sin and Try It to give chapters and extra plotlines...

Okay, so first post here since MAY and I'm babbling as always.