The Unspeakable Awaits, Hopefully Not For Me
The Dead and the Rotten is out. The Dead and the Rotten is in the hand of hundreds of readers. I say hundreds not because I'm boasting, we've just not hit a thousand yet. Also, for total clarity, I'm not talking 101 copies out there either. Nor 102. You can keep guessing, you have 896 more attempts but there are 897 possibilities.
There is a review of TDATR that I would love to go into, but it wouldn't be professional. I like the review, even with its rating. The review means that what I set to do was accomplished. Maybe one day I'll truly impress that reviewer... Now, after a somewhat rocky start to the year, proper work on my next story has finally begun.
Onto that aforementioned rocky start. Not really a writing-related start as I was getting on quite well with all that, trying out a new method of laying out the groundwork for the book via Excel (?!).
No, the rocky start came when I exited the shower, as I do every day, and ended up with a slipped disc and compressed nerve from the simple act of drying what little remains of my hair. Aside from the pain, this little bastard also disabled my left tricep and has offered up ever-present pins and needles since the event. A bit of medical help made it clear that not only is this one a bit of a long heal, but it'll also be likely to occur again unless I adapt to a few changes... All it took was for me to be told "It isn't a catastrophic injury, yet..." for me to abandon all hopes of retaining a bank balance in 2024 and setting up some orders for a few new bits of kit.
There was a real saga with the standing desk. The first one just disappeared, after heading via the usual destination of Tamworth. Tamworth, you say? Why there? I have just as much of an idea as anyone else, but over the last few years several of my parcels have gone there by mistake. Usually the ones that are actually worth something. No simple USB cable has ever touched Tamworth. After much toing and froing and angry emails, a second desk finally made it to me (but not until it had its own unexpected side quest).
Anyway, I have a standing desk. I have a posture stool. I have an ergonomic keyboard that I'm not really getting along with. I have a bottle of Kilkerran 16 and Maclean's Nose to cheer myself up.
With a crap arm I've not been out for much photography this year. Writing is the easiest thing to do now - it's even easier than sitting down to watch a film, which annoyingly is now not very easy at all and there are several I want to watch. I discovered this difficulty while watching Morbius of all things. I really hope that Morbius is not the last film that I watch.
Back to The Unspeakable Awaits, I've something like 15k words of notes outlining the book, snippets of dialogue, character bios and the like. I've settled on a set of chapter titles that might end up changing between here and whenever I publish the next one.
Isla May
Weak
The Two Kings
An Unlikely Story
The Fourth of Three
Odd Looking Fellow
Not Without Incident
Norfingerton
Bastard Flies and Pissing Rain
Haggar Has His Day
Caff’s Shadow
A Bird in the Hand
Barrel of Gaffes
New Material
Commentary on the Plans of an Idiot God
A Tour in the Dark
The Pit of the Immaculate
Many Hands Make Light Work
Entombed
A Sealer’s Work is Never Done
Beaten, Bloodied, and Broken
We Do Things Different This Time
The Rope and the Bough
They're not really very spoilerific if you don't have context (although I guess the last one doesn't leave much to the imagination), so don't worry about reading them if you are allergic to spoilers.
The Unspeakable Awaits gives me the chance to stretch my legs around Traverne again. The Dead and the Rotten was a fairly contained wee tale, talking place almost entirely within the mossy, filthy, cat-infested stone confines of Rinztown. My new tale is set on a grander scale, it's a bit more of a journey. It was always the plan to be this way (the whole story from Marigold's birth to death is of course, laid out). The way I write, I like to try things out that I've not done before so that when the time comes to return to Havelock's Path, I'm at least a little more competent as a writer.
With Grim Work I wanted to contain a story to under 50k because my part of Havelock's Path was 265k. Check! The Crystal Keep, I wanted to make the equivalent of a homebrew DND adventure, with ticks. Check. In The Vile Realm I wanted to nip a wee bit into a grander fantasy tale. With The Dead and the Rotten I really wanted to write from the POV of the antagonist. Check again!
With The Unspeakable Below, I want to cover ineptitude. Ineptitude, injury, hopelessness. It's gonna be a grim one, but then just how do you begin to deal with with something that could crush your world with but one its... appendages? Incidentally, this was all planned out some years ago; the current injury is just "the icing on the cake" as it were, but it has given me some more inspiration for what I can cover.
I do hope it's not three years until publication like the last one, but we'll have to see. I feel this is another 350-400 pager. Life is generally pretty busy whether or not I'm injured. I'm also now a parent to 12 Purple Hairstreak eggs! That's right, I can't ignore butterflies, even when there is a book to write.
So, there we have it. A fairly odd update, just throwing all sorts of random shit out. At the heart of it all though, is that there is a new book on the way.
The way just might be a long one.
Sláinte.
