So I did this last December when I had just finished a year of horrible writer's block. This year was not that! Yay! But as I finish the second draft of Bluesleeves and prepare to wrap it up, I find myself staring down the barrel of another fallow period. Typically when I finish a book it takes me 3-6 months to be able to touch my keyboard without having a burnout-induced panic spiral about never writing again. The smart thing to do would be to set aside my laptop for a while and engage with other hobbies - I could sew, or play banjo, or figure out a better gardening setup for my north facing apartment. It wouldn't be productive to try and push against the burnout and come up with ideas now, because by the time I'm ready to write again my interests will have changed. So I guess I'll take a healthy break and see you all mid-2024 and figure it out then!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA just kidding. Now that we've weeded out those losers with a healthy relationship to art and productivity we can get started. These are ideas I've had throughout the year but not been able to work on, and ones I will immediately start trying to write 48 hours after I finish Bluesleeves.
This got long. Sorry, or enjoy. I'm not a cop.
CAMP SAVAGE TAKE 15
Longtime friends will remember Camp Savage from last year and also every summer since 2018, when the idea for a pulpy camp horror story first entered my mind. This year was a good year for camp media and I: I listened to Camp Here and There all the way through twice (Will Wood is a musical genius and makes me experience shrimp mental illnesses) and read Camp Damascus, which was lighter on camp content than I'd hoped but gave me a great reintroduction to literary horror.
The main problem with Camp Savage is its characters: I made them 5 years ago and they're both difficult to write (Kali, a med student and dance enthusiast, is very different from me) and dated to the Grayson who came up with them. I've been reexamining a few of my old stories for publication (see Fever Dream Dollmaker Edition and Alternatives Redux below) and the main thing I notice is that they pull most of their punches in the weirdness department. If there's gore, violence, weird relationship dynamics, or anything like that, it doesn't go quite as crazy as I know it does inside my brain.
I got a review on UUoIM this year complaining about it being gross that Maeve would kiss a living corpse, rigor mortis and cold waxy skin and all, and I was surprised to find myself laughing instead of feeling embarrassed for writing gross stuff. Yeah, it's supposed to be weird! Maeve's a death-obsessed little freak and we love her for it! I remember watching Hannibal and I don't think I liked it, but boy it stuck with me. I want to write stuff that gives that gutshot "oh-god-what-the-fuck" feeling. In essence, I'm about to go edgelord mode.
So for Camp Savage, that means I'm fucking with my template a bit. Instead of a straight-down-the-middle camp story, I'm considering a sort of nightvalian black humor riff on it, where we have a little more suspension of disbelief and a little more room to play. The camp counselors are all working there as court-ordered community service; it fails to occur to anyone that perhaps putting children in the hands of petty crooks is a bad idea. Our returning cast:
BENJI (he/him)- Born-and-bred Vermonter, named himself after Ben&Jerry's. Terminally chill, video game enjoyer, obsessed with aliens. Mysterious backpack that he never lets anyone look inside. At Camp Savage for selling weed.
ROMY (she/her)- Quebecois doomsday prepper. Sports at least 3 bandaids on her person at any one time, master of impromptu hunting weaponry, keeps journals in incomprehensible code - or maybe just poorly spelled Franglish. Cheerful and dangerously nosy. At Camp Savage for trespassing.
ALEX (he/him)- Peppy, positive, and pfucking annoying. Big narc energy, big youth pastor energy, big jock vibes. Blonde and irritatingly handsome. At Camp Savage, presumably, to keep everyone else in line.
To achieve our goals of increasing the edginess, I've landed on the following strategy: make the protagonist nearly as scary as the horrors. That way when they get scared it hits different.
LEO (she/they)- Edgy goth with a heart of black-burnished gold. Leo's main gag is that they have to wear a camp counselor uniform and do it with the grace of a cat on tin foil. She's anti-authoritarian, inquisitive, and tough as nails. Will knock you out if you call them Leonora, or god forbid, Nora. At Camp Savage for getting in a knife fight. Might have some kind of Supernatural Sight, idk yet.
Another thing I want to work on: creating female characters who fulfill archetypes that I can't imagine female characters in. I did this with Imogen attempting to create a dissolute Lord-Byron type and was extremely pleased with the results. This time I'm targeting The Unhinged Cultist Tumblr Sexyman. Think Bill Cipher, Daniel CampCamp, the Pink Elephant Man, Kevin WTNV, etc etc.
BLAIR (she/her) - Mysterious blood-splattered woman who lurks on the edge of the camp grounds. Carries a broken lacrosse stick. Chatty, but only seems to ever run into Leo.
Genre-wise we're looking at a horror-comedy, equal parts dumb camp shenanigans and fucked up woods stuff. Close third, present tense, novel-length. Plot unknown. The nice lady with the lax stick told me she'd tell me what it's going to be about if I just follow her down the trail a bit.
Media Tasting Notes: Camp Camp, Camp Here and There, Camp Damascus, Lemon Demon, X-Files, Night in the Woods, Paranatural
FEVER DREAM CIRCUS: DOLLMAKER EDITION
Here are some of my character notes from my summary of Fever Dream last year:
CASEY (he/him) - washed-up high school football star with a damaged reputation
JEAN GUY (he/him) - French-Canadian twink with an unhealthy love of knives
ALICE (she/her) - deranged project manager who has every right to murder her boss
TALLY (she/her) - weird little girl who makes living dolls
This is another weirdification project: my original Fever Dream Circus was a novella I wrote in 2017 about ghosts and coming out to oneself in a small town, just after my first book. It was pretty short and sad, only about Jean Guy and Casey, and I don't think I did everything I could have with the material. Spooky circuses are classic for a reason.
I've taken a few stabs at this one, but it has a similar problem to Camp Savage in that it's set in a relatively realistic world. Every book I've ever finished is set in a fantasy world, and I seem to struggle to write stories that don't take place in that kind of setting. I think if I have a fantasy world it helps me control the scope - we can set a city-state far away from everything else and not have to worry about global trade or government or international relations. Maeve, for several reasons, doesn't have to worry about car insurance; Casey does.
So if I attempt either Camp Savage or Fever Dream, I'm going to have to aggressively fictionalize the real world to get it to work. I think one strategy I have for this is to make Fever Dream a period piece and set it in the early 2000s. Ugh, typing that made me feel absolutely decrepit, but also kind of excited for a retro 2007 take. Anyway it gives us a fun analog horror feel while also allowing Casey to make minimum wage at Blockbuster and have an apartment in his shit small town. It takes the internet off the table, makes the homophobia Casey faces more chronistic (is that the opposite of anachronistic idk), and pre-dates the book so it doesn't feel dated in a few years.
Genre-wise this will probably be a quirky horror-fantasy. I'm torn on form; the original Fever Dream was present tense omniscient narrator, with the narrator an actual character in the story, which was fun. I would like to do something similarly experimental - in particular, there are time travel elements, and my plan is to have multiple identical chapters with slight changes between them to indicate the events changing over time. Maybe telling the story out of order to some extent would be a good way to punch up the surreal feeling.
I've always really wanted to do Fever Dream as a graphic novel - I feel like the clown aesthetic and the surreal elements lend themselves well to a visual storytelling medium, but my current level of art skill and speed makes that feel kind of impossible. I think I'll start writing it as a novel and can use that as a script if I ever decide to attempt the graphic novel again.
Media Tasting Notes: Alice in Wonderland, Five Nights at Freddy's, Rocky Horror, Kabaret Sybarit, Burn the Ballroom, that one P!atD concert in Denver in 2005, assorted clown media
ALTERNATIVES REDUX
The last of the old candidates, and the only complete novel of the group! Alternatives is the best novel I wrote in college. It follows Avery Antonoff, the daughter of the feared supervillain Arcflash. Arcflash and the other two members of the Terrible Three, Jack-of-all-Trades and Dr. Janus, were defeated 13 years ago by the Prophets - a traveling congregation looking for their New Eden. Since then, altered people have been all but persecuted out of the city, and radio broadcasts pump out propaganda three times a day to convince everyone that's a good thing. Meanwhile, Jack, Janus, and the rest of the Storm Cell alliance plot their revenge from the lowest level of the city. Avery and her adoptive brother Corvo, children at the time of the takeover, have grown up with knives in their hands and guns under their pillows. Tired of waiting for their moment in the sun, they decide to take matters into their own hands and head to the upper layers. But when Avery crosses paths with the son of the Head Reverend and Voice of the Prophets, Elijah Shepherd himself, she finds herself forced to play by the rules of his world to find the vengeance she seeks.
This book as it currently stands would make a great YA title - the characters are in their late teens, with a violence and romance level to match. But the thing about Elijah is that he's PEAK blorbo. Every person I've ever shown this guy to wants to waterboard him and then tuck him into bed. They want to put him in a jar and shake it. They want to put out cigarettes on him and then brush his hair. The best thing I do to this man in the original book is briefly put him in a muzzle, and that's not nearly enough.
So I have a few ideas. I could leave it as-is, tidy it up to my current standard of writing and try submitting it as a YA title. I could rewrite it, age them up to mid-twenties, and just punch up the sex and violence. Have the Storm Cell take Elijah as a hostage, make Avery pistol-whip him, etc. Avery discovering her feelings for him as Elijah's discovering her betrayal? Juicy. Or, a final concept, I had the idea of a split narrative - alternating chapters telling Avery's story before the revolution and Elijah's story afterwards, and how they negotiate their evolving power dynamic.
In any case, Alternatives is a dieselpunk superhero story told in my standard close third past tense novel structure, and I don't have plans for anything super experimental in terms of form - it's a pretty straight-up-and-down story written by a 19 year old, but I still think I have lightning in a bottle with these two (haha get it she has electricity powers). I'd have to relearn electrical engineering to write it but I did it once, so I think I got it.
I haven't seen Black Swan. I keep meaning to watch Black Swan, and I know I'd like it, and I haven't done it yet. Longtime friends are aware that I need to be strapped to a chair with my eyelids duct taped open in order to consume new media. But I saw the Contrapoints video "Envy" which contained an analysis of Black Swan, and I think I also saw an analysis of ballerina style by Mina Le, and I watched Princess Tutu and went to see The Nutcracker TWICE so basically I'm an expert on ballet.
I talked about Sick House last year - Juno the polar expedition doctor, Sybil the opera singer ballerina on a nervous breakdown, the sick old aunts, and the house taking on their illness itself a la Hill House. Bly Manor has added fuel to the fire of my idea of a dollhouse that mirrors what happens in the house, and in my #sickhouse tag I've been collecting lots of broody images of moors. I still don't have much of a sense of plot - this one would probably be more straight gothic horror than the other horror entries on this list, and would probably largely consist of Sybil running around the house in an empire-waist nightgown with a candelabra getting upset.
I like how it parallels Bluesleeves and UUoIM as books about artists and inspiration and beautiful things. Juno was a fan of Sybil's before she went off to the Arctic, and is another woman in a typically-male archetype: this time the sullen standoffish professional type whose heart can only be melted by the pedestalized concept of a woman he's created from afar. I plan to tear that down by having Sybil be spunky and annoying and force Juno to see her as a person and not a doll on a stage (good potential with the dolls in the dollhouse). I feel like I could write this book really well, but I don't know if it forces me to do anything new - I've done a lot of gothic stories and I don't know if it would be any different than UUoIM. But the aesthetic is fun, and I think if I kick it around my head long enough I could find a new take on the gothic and the decadent.
It'll probably be a gothic horror written in past tense, typical novel or perhaps novella. Maybe the new take could be based in form - epistolary or moving perspective or first person. The idea of a novella is interesting, because Juno is partly inspired by Vandorus from the novella Lacrimore, which makes the most of its short length with really beautiful and atmospheric prose. Maybe with less length to work with, I could hone some really impressive style.
Media Tasting Notes: Lacrimore, Princess Tutu, Black Swan (probably), Wuthering Heights, Bly Manor, The Picture of Dorian Grey, The Terror, Fall of the House of Usher
LIVING CITY
Okay, we're getting into the stubs, but I want to be comprehensive. Sometimes little ideas get cannibalized into bigger projects, and I think this one's a particularly cool idea. I don't have much material for it, but I was considering the idea of a house that's a character in the story, and wondered about blowing it out into a living city. I don't think that's a new idea necessarily, but if a city can live, it can get sick or die, right? I think Juno might be in this one too, called in as a doctor to help heal the city. The main crux of this one is a Guild of Architects who are basically the caretakers of the city - they're an extremely secretive and lofty lot who hold the plans to the city that tell where the various parts of its body are. The lungs are great humid conservatories, the roads are veins, etc etc, and we get to follow our protagonists on their mission to help the city.
I wanna say this character's name is Isodore or Isobel or something - they're a novice in the Guild of Architects and near religiously fervent about becoming a good architect. I know they have my haircut; that's the default haircut every one of my characters starts with. The name Iso wasn't an ISO standards joke until thirty seconds ago when I decided it was. Maybe they have a love interest named Ansi.
Media Tasting Notes: ???
PSYCHOPOMP GAMES
THIS ONE CAME TO ME IN A DREAM. I trust dream book ideas implicitly; The Witching Hour was a pre-sleep story I told myself, I figured out a lot of HoSL and Northbound while falling asleep, and Evanthe and Bluesleeves came wholecloth from a dream I had in 2020. So there's a nonhuman protagonist that wears an animal mask, and they're in a competition with other spirits(?) to do something for an Anubis-like character. I really enjoy writing non-human characters looking through the window of humanity like "whoa, weird" so this would be a lot of doing that. I also really enjoy books that have a set progression - Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None where the characters are all dying off one by one is so satisfying to me, and the part of Gideon the Ninth where they're all trying to work through key challenges one after another is really good too. Battle royales, the whole Spy X Family star thing, anything where progress is tracked by a series of repeating events is catnip for my reader brain. So our little psychopomp is probably trying to lay various souls to rest or something. Kind of kindred to the game Death's Door. Now that I think about it, this might make a good video game. Too bad I can't code.
Media Tasting Notes: Gideon the Ninth, Death's Door, The Night Cage
LIGHTHOUSE LOG
The stubbiest of stubs. An epistolary novel told by a lighthouse keeper in log entries that start out dry but start getting weird. I think the keeper has a crush on the rowboater who brings them supplies. I also think there's a radio involved somewhere. Perhaps a child of my story The Bell Tower which was originally written for a lighthouse. Maybe Lovecraftian.
Media Tasting Notes: Oxenfree, Dracula, The Strange High House in the Mist
TL;DR
Gonna write a new book next year. Got a lot of ideas. If you're one of my beta readers (you know who you are) weigh in! What do you think sounds cool to read?
Feeling slightly better after a hellish few days. Sickness bugs are the worst... and I seem to have doubled my susceptibility to them since the tiny human came along... thanks babe! . Today is all about recharging the batteries and getting back into a routine coz right now I am running on empty! . . . #sickhouse #happiness #instamum #lifestyle #mummyblogger #mumsofinstagram #family #parentingblogger #parentsofinstagram #stayathomemum #motherhoodunplugged #lifestyleblogger #mumlife #ukmum #autismawareness #asd #autismmum #autism #instatoddler #toddler #sensory #littleboys #specialneeds #autismacceptance #onthespectrum #additionalneeds #mylove #dailyparenting #myhappiness #scottishmum (at Hamilton, South Lanarkshire) https://www.instagram.com/p/BubanqklW92/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=qow2c2qlpnbg
It’s been another sick weekend for us but thankfully the tiny human seems to be on the mend. Plenty of kisses and cuddles from daddy has done the trick and he’s slowly getting back into the swing of things! Here’s hoping mummy follows suit and I’m able to get off the living room sofa. . . . #sickhouse #winter #instamum #lifestyle #mummyblogger #mumsofinstagram #family #parentingblogger #parentsofinstagram #stayathomemum #motherhoodunplugged #lifestyleblogger #mumlife #ukmum #autismawareness #asd #autismmum #autism #instatoddler #toddler #sensory #littleboys #specialneeds #autismacceptance #onthespectrum #additionalneeds #mylove #dailyparenting #myhappiness #scottishmum (at Hamilton, South Lanarkshire) https://www.instagram.com/p/BtJRQsblcOT/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=14psjr939cnlp
Finally feeling 100% again after what can only be described as the month from hell. Cold & Flu virus, Norovirus, stress, anxiety, autism... ALL OF IT! . It was crazy, but onwards and upwards. Getting my cleaning done today and feeling motivated by all my fave accounts @littlemissmops @_ellenokeeffe @mrshinchhome_x_ 👌🏻 . . . #Sicktober #sickhouse #instamum #lifestyle #mummyblogger #mumsofinstagram #cleaning #parentingblogger #parentsofinstagram #stayathomemum #motherhoodunplugged #lifestyleblogger #mumlife #ukmum #autismawareness #asd #autismmum #autism #instatoddler #toddler #sensory #littleboys #specialneeds #autismacceptance #onthespectrum #additionalneeds #mylove #dailyparenting #myhappiness #scottishmum (at Hamilton, South Lanarkshire) https://www.instagram.com/p/BpPT-RvAnpr/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1v651f4xlp0ly
