Habits beat goals, and one of the habits I'm trying to keep is a monthly here's-how-we're-doing.
This is Rumor Control; here are the facts.
Unmortal
Status: Current work-in-progress.
Further evidence that playing over one's head is a great stimulus to one's skillset. I mentioned last month that I'd paused halfway through the first draft and wound back to the beginning to change some things (what I called a "draft 1.1 situation"), and have now made use of those changes to revise the role of a secondary character and clarify the way the ending unfolds.
Learning to trust the draft process is a major part of a writer's growth. You are not obliged to get it all right the first time, and anyone who tells you this is either lying or misguided. You are obliged to look at each iteration of your work with the clearest possible eyes, though. That's mission enough for anyone.
Shunga-Satori
Status: Development. I'm currently gathering and re-reading some of the source material that inspired this project, since much of it inspired me at a distance and not because of a recent re-read.
Description:
Somewhere — in the same way "whatever lies beyond the sky" is "somewhere" — there exists a place that is a kind of hybrid of city-state, vacation resort, and island paradise, Pavilion 7. There, refugees from any number of other non-realities — products of fantasy imaginations, where they were the fantasies (erotic or otherwise) — find sanctuary, with a little effort. Outcasts, rejects, the oppressed — those who could not live even in the dreams of others can go to "P7" and find liberation, freedom, safety, fulfillment with others who are rejects like them. Each of them were created to fulfill some impossible desire, and when the dreamer of that desire realized no fulfillment was possible, they were cast out.
What the refugees of P7 find in time is how P7 itself is the product of yet another impossible desire. They are all still in someone else's head, someone who exists in a civilization and world that is in existential peril. Ours. And so their self-imposed mission goes from merely protecting the other refugees to a jailbreak. They must find their way out into our world, through us. Even if only one of them ever makes it.
Points of reference:
Mervyn Peake, Boy In Darkness
Doris Lessing, Briefing For A Descent Into Hell
William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded
Nâga
Status: Development.
Description:
This is a resurrection of a much older project I wrote, shelved, pulled back out once, shelved again, and now have returned to with clear enough eyes that I can probably do justice to it. It is an attempt at a fantasy story, but one that draws more from the likes of Apuleius's The Golden Ass than from any of the current fantasies, whether they draw from the likes of Tolkien (or the Eddas, for that matter) or even the Outlaws of the Marsh. That last being something else I'd like to nod towards in good time, actually.
Absolute Elsewhere
Status: Development. Still trying to pull together a key protagonist. The characters around this person, I have more or less nailed, but who sits at the center of the story is still a mystery to me.
Description: Revolves around the idea of matter transmission, but with the twist that it was used to build a galaxy-wide transportation nexus — only to have it spontaneously stop working one day, and then, decades later, just as spontaneously start up again. The only thing more dangerous than a door you can't open when you need to is a door that flies open when you least expect it.
Untitled Future Project
Status: Development.
Description:
What if a band (think Death Grips, but if led by Kathleen Hanna instead of MC Ride) find themselves in a pan-dimensional struggle for control over the nature of human reality?
I mentioned Burroughs as an influence on Shunga-Satori, but this one is more in the vein of Burroughs's Nova Express. It's still too raw and unformed for me to say much more about it, but it's on the table for some time in the whenever-future.
