It's that time of year: the time when I try to start a new WIP and post about it on Tumblr. Things are finally starting to settle down in my real life and I need a project, so here's my new idea:
Ashlin's List is (going to be) a fiction podcast about Ashlin Caruso, resident Regular-Ass Professor whose boyfriend, Devon, has recently been murdered. To cope with their grief and find a connection to Devon after his death, Ashlin starts following a list that Devon left behind for them of locations in the city that he wanted them to explore together, since he was really interested in urbex. Unfortunately for Ashlin and the normalcy of their life, the locations on the list turn out to be gates to other universes, which Devon, as part of a secret society known as the Guardians, was tasked with protecting. After being found and scooped up by the few remaining Guardians, consisting of an immortal being with a weird attachment to Devon's family, a transplant from another universe who's been not-so-successfully keeping tabs on Devon for a while, and the ruthlessly pragmatic Head Guardian who will stop at nothing to maintain the stability of the gates, Ashlin joins up in order to protect the multiverse from the (yet unnamed) supernatural force trying to collapse the gates between universes and send the multiverse into chaos, and its Acolytes, or human servants.
The story is told (at least in season 1) via voice memos of Ashlin's adventures, and it's (hopefully) going to be a 3-season project.
Info about characters and Picrews under the cut!
CHARACTERS
Ashlin Caruso (they/it)
The main character. An extremely unreliable narrator, and right at the center of the "liar-oblivious-in denial" triangle. Very, very tired physics professor in their late 30s. Has attack-dog tendencies lying in wait for when it cares a bit too much about someone.
Devon Bell (he/him)
The local narrative haunter. Ashlin's ex-boyfriend. His mother encouraged him not to get involved with the family business (fighting eldritch creatures and trying to stop the multiverse from getting destroyed), but he Did It Anyway and got murdered about it. He also never told Ashlin about any of this. Incredibly enthusiastic about pretty much everything he's ever done. Very outdoorsy.
Emery Dean (he/they)
(Additional art by my lovely mutual @lyss-overcomplicates-everything!)
We all know that one transmasc who's especially vulnerable to instabilities in the multiverse, am I right? Emery's been slipping back and forth between universes since he was young, but he was usually able to get back to his home universe, universe 43: that is, until he wasn't. His attempts to get back via Shady Multiverse Fuckery not only failed but destroyed his home universe completely, so now he's stuck here in universe 86. Dated his universe's version of Devon, and once he got here wanted to see if they fell in love in every universe: unfortunately for Emery, they did not. So he's just been trying to keep an eye on and protect Devon for quite a few years, which failed completely. Sort of a Guardian, but he doesn't like labels. Impressively the closest thing to a good person of the lot. Confident and sunshiney, unless you ask about his past. Don't do that.
Aracelis (she/they)
A member of an immortal species known as the Timeless: one of them was born in every universe to protect it from the Claws, but the vast majority don't bother with that. Except, of course, for Aracelis. Aracelis loves humans and humanity, and because of that would really rather the multiverse not collapse because that would mean most of the humans would die. Has had a string of failed relationships with mortals, one of which was Devon's great-great-grandfather Arthur Bell, the original Guardian. When Arthur was killed, his last request to Aracelis was that they take care of his family and make sure the Guardian organization continued, which is exactly what she's been doing for several generations. Totally did not indoctrinate all of his children and grandchildren into Guardianship. Laid-back and detached by human standards, but very caring by Timeless standards.
(Timeless can look however they want. Above is Aracelis's default appearance. They're the only one who bothers looking human: most Timeless prefer to be spheres of light or four-dimensional figures or creatures that don't actually exist.)
Noa Kivikko (Kivi) (they/them)
Intensity in human form. Has been running the Northeastern Guardian headquarters by themself for about a decade and is very, very good at it, thank you very much. Will stop at absolutely nothing to maintain the stability of the multiverse, up to and including murder. A Finnish immigrant who moved here to devote their life completely to guardianship. Their family has no idea where they are. No one knows their first name and they'd like to keep it that way. For whatever reason, Aracelis loves them with all her heart and trusts them immensely.
Henrietta Bell (she/her)
She made a deal with the aforementioned supernatural forces to help bring about the collapsing in exchange for immortality, and now she's the shadowy leader of the Acolytes. She's been alive since the 1870s. She's been killed 5 times, four of which were Aracelis and none of which stuck. She was married to Arthur, and though she genuinely did love him, she ended up killing him after they had a daughter because they were on opposite sides of the conflict. The most entitled 150-year-old white woman you will ever meet.
Sophie/Ezekiel Dean (she/her, later he/him)
(Additional art once again by Lyss: go check out their blog and their art, guys, they're so cool)
This universe's version of Emery. A transmasc egg who feels trapped in the monotony of his life and wants things to be different, for reasons he totally does not know, not at all. The reason Emery's always been so vulnerable to universe breakages: since he was young, he's been (consciously or subconsciously) trying to bring alternate versions of himself here to see if his life could have been any different. The whole "total collapse of reality" thing appeals to him because he wants to burn everything down and start over. Very, very good at breaking through universe barriers. Henrietta is a toxic mother figure and terrible influence to him. (The fact that he's Emery, and that he transitions eventually, is technically a minor spoiler, because he's so deep in the closet he could find Narnia for all of season 1, but since those of you who are looking at this are likely here from guess-that-ship and you already know all of that, I'll let it slide)
Irina Bell (she/her)
The perkiest trans goth girl you will ever meet. Born into Henrietta's side of the family and indoctrinated into Acolytehood, but around age 17 decided "fuck all that" and ran off to join the Guardians. The baby of the bunch. Desperate to prove herself to everyone. Especially Kivi.
There's also a few other minor characters, but I unfortunately have neither Picrews nor character bios for them. Maybe I'll make another post at some point.
Tagging @quackerjack and @sharidragonwood because I know you guys were interested, and also tagging @creation-help because I ended up using one of your name lists for Kivi (it's their last name, but it's what they go by, so it counts). Thanks to everyone who's asked about this, and if you want to know anything else about these guys, please ask me: I love talking about them.
Hi! I found your blog when you reblogged my "how to writeblr" post but your WIPs all look super fascinating! If you have taglists, can you please add me to the ones for "Songs of Decay" and "Bards, Courts, and Changelings?"
Also please feel free to ramble about either of these WIPs, I'd love to hear more about them.
Wow, thank you for the ask! We have added you to our taglists! :D And we are soooo happy to ramble about Songs of Decay and Bards, Courts, and Changelings. This is Inkwell. I am gonna cover Songs of Decay, and Crooked Writer will cover BC&C in a part two post.
Be warned. This is a very long post. I had waay too much fun writing it, hahaha. Bards, Courts, and Changelings will be a much shorter post, as it is in an earlier stage of development.
Part One: Songs of Decay
A HISTORY OF THE PROJECT
This is definitely a 2020 project, hahaha. We wrote draft 1 in script format because it was an easy way to write intermittently. We pulled out board games like Arkham Horror (2nd Edition) and Betrayal at House on the Hill to help us add the eldritch elements and throw in some chaos. We tracked the insanity level of different characters through some of our scenes. Then, when we were done, we were so happy with the story that we wanted to DO something with it rather than it just being a hobby project… and we were like, "What if we actually turned it into an audio drama?"
Crooked Writer does voice acting, but neither of us had ANY experience with writing audio dramas. It was our lazy way of not converting to prose, but also trying something new!
We created draft 2 by having friends come read what we'd gotten done out loud. We would edit and write for two weeks, then gather online, divvy out parts for the night, and read through it. It gave us a lot of motivation to get through the draft! I personally am not the kind of person to sit in on someone's early writing project and read it out loud for an extended period of time on a consistent basis, and it still blows my mind that our friends wanted to do that with us. It was so much fun.
Now, a great deal of research and worldbuilding later, we have four seasons planned and are midway through writing draft 3 of season 1. :D
WORLDBUILDING
The story isn't straight cosmic horror, it's more flavored by the eldritch, and much more inspired by the board game Arkham Horror than Lovecraft. We have our own pantheon of Horrors who have different thematic elements and warp and corrupt in different ways. Technology is roughly equivalent to the 1910s, and eldritch Horrors have been threatening to end the world as we know it for centuries. We have four countries who approach the long-standing eldritch problem VERY differently:
Our setting country, Malgrave, has a "kill it with fire" approach. They have a specially trained corps of Stewards and an Eldritch Anomalies Department (the EAD) to handle things using mostly weaponry. Malgrave views eldritch corruption as an individual's choice to bring Horrors and Fiends (Horrors = world-ends-upon-arrival monsters, Fiends = smaller monsters) into the world and destroy/remake it, so laws tend to treat cults and such in a similar way to how you'd treat the mafia. The temptations are overpowering to many. You can't trust anyone completely.
Side note, because I love the Stewards: The Stewards have really fun political power dynamics, as they are supposed to keep the king's family from turning on him/protect the family, but also can't really contradict a royal, sooo it gets messy sometimes. They technically have the power to report or stop a royal that's corrupted, but just try doing that in practice and see how it goes. Stewards tend to be more subtle. They also die, a lot. The MC's father, Sam, is one of the few Stewards in living memory to retire from active duty. Pays well, though!
Eastcairn, Malgrave's other neighbor, uses augury - magical engineering - to create wards and automatons that are powered by protective patterns. These patterns slowly corrupt over time and must be maintained regularly, or they will amplify corruption rather than negate it. Eastcairn views corruption as a contagious miasma in the air and isolates eldritch outbreaks in sanatoria and asylums. There are many strains of corruptive virus, and most if not all are incurable by current science.
Logoria is Malgrave's neighbor to the left and uses patterns just like Eastcairn, but rather than using physical augury patterns they use mathematical patterns in music and dance to ward off corruption. They have trained singers and musicians and dancers, and choirs are common.
Not a ton of development on the fourth country, because it's farther away (only worldbuild the top of the iceberg, right?) but it has a protective martial art, a caste system based around the concept that corruption runs in family lines, and people there know what different kinds of corruptive influences/objects/presences smell like.
These varying perceptions pool together in our story, as Sam is from Eastcairn but worked in the Stewards in Malgrave and has a medley of views about the nature of eldritch corruption that often conflict with prevalent theories. Augury isn't well thought of in Malgrave, but both he and Tom practice it. The conflict of "eldritch corruption: illness or choice?" is central to the first two seasons of Songs of Decay (particularly the second).
CHARACTERS AND STORY (Season 1)
Tom moves into the very rural Malbury county because living too close to his far wealthier ex-wife will end with him losing custody of their daughter, Sara. His dad lives in Malbury county and is supposed to be living far away from all eldritch influence. However, Tom is appalled to see how rife the county is with cultists, corruption, and eldritch Fiends - such as the Moose that he and Sara run afoul of on the first day of school. Tom also has a past record that requires him to report to the EAD and means that the EAD could refuse to grant him an augury license, which is literally Tom's livelihood right now, SO Tom offers to help with local problems. In doing so, he trips into the plot of a local cult that centers on the estate of one Lady Esther Lambert, a widow with a grudge against the EAD.
Esther married into one of the local noble families and is used to fighting for herself because no one else will. She throws an annual party at her house at the end of summer, but this time things go very poorly very quickly. Tom and Esther have to band together with other guests to stay alive and prevent the summoning of a greater Horror, but they don't know who to trust when you can't even rule yourself out as an enemy.
So, throughout Season 1 you've got Tom trying to be a good single parent, learning how to prep and cook three consistent meals a day while also getting drawn into fighting eldritch monsters and cultists. You have Sara, his daughter, who is trying to adjust to a lower class lifestyle, meeting a grandparent for the first time, and stressing about her dad putting himself in danger. You have Sam, who convinced his son to move to Belleview because he was worried about him, but also has so much corruption from his time in the Stewards that he is one poor decision away from snapping entirely. You have Chief Compton, a former city policeman and current head of the local EAD bullied into the role after the last chief died trying to contain an eldritch summoning. And you have Lady Esther, whose late husband's family literally built her house around the idea of summoning eldritch Horrors, and whose perception of the local EAD is so poor that she would rather fight off monsters with a shovel than call them in to help.
We are having a great time writing this story. :D
The hope is to ultimately put it on YouTube, but we want to get the first two seasons ready before we get to that, as they contain the first major arc.
Okay, I am done now. If you've made it this far, thank you for reading! Again, really appreciate the ask, and absolutely delighted to be able to ramble away like this.
Cheers!
-Inkwell
Songs of Decay tag list: @hd-literature @pure-solomon @blind-the-winds @sarah-sandwich-writes @lucianinsanity @coffeewritesfiction @surroundedbypearls @tate-lin @ettawritesnstudies
Oh and what if the next dress description in Ballad of Empires is going to be so beautiful complex but at the same time my favourite creation yet? The imperial gown with high neck collar or a deep plunging neckline without being sexualised or more but beautiful because it does not reveal much? The simple and yet flared and gentle embroidered sleeves and flared skirt?
Or the imperial gown which screams royalty? Beads and sash and soutache amidst rich embroidery and a headpiece. A gown with layers of tulle and yet elegant. Pearls and flowers of agate. A cape with broad shoulders made of several faint coloured layers of veils.
I feel like rambling about my WIPs today, possibly because I'm overflowing with creativity but cannot fucking write, so here goes.
So there's 2. The first one is called I Didn't Sign Up for This, and it's currently in the editing phases-- hopefully soon I can start a second draft of it. It's a realistic YA-type thing about Sasha, my main protagonist, accidentally replacing a boy at her new school who died three weeks before she got there and leading the sustainability club that he started. It's definitely still got a lot of kinks to work out, but I'm getting there. There's a lesbian love triangle at the center of it, featuring Sasha, Julia the eccentric and angsty sister of the dead boy, and Zoe, who is an outwardly confident and carefree outcast with a ton of secrets who is to this date my favorite character I have ever written. I'm not totally in love with it right now because it's a first draft that I've been working on for three years and there's a lot wrong with it, but I definitely could be someday.
The second is called The First, which I'd define as magical realism, centered around five high school seniors, once best friends, who are stuck in a time-loop-limbo sort of thing until they can find out how the sixth member of their group died. I'm only six chapters in and I'm still figuring out what the plot's going to look like, but the characters are everything to me already. There's my main narrator Arlo, who's a burned-out gifted kid with unresolved trauma surrounding the other members of the group and unresolved bisexuality that she definitely has not figured out yet, her ex-best friend Kimber, who's kind of the leader of the group and also the one who Arlo has a totally-not-sapphic-at-all-really-why-would-you-ever-call-it-that dynamic with, and who may or may not have committed some class B felonies, Kimber's new best friend Lev, my anxious gay disaster boy who I absolutely do not project on at all, Phoenix the nice-enough hippie kid with dark secrets and a mysterious feud with Arlo, and his girlfriend Thea, who I've spent countless nights trying to psychoanalyze because there is *a lot* wrong with her. I want to finish it so badly so I can write about these five some more, but alas, I can't.
There's also a few other ideas that I desperately want to write but probably shouldn't because I have too many projects, but that's a post for another day.
Time to ramble about my WIP for a bit to my three followers and whoever else stumbles upon this before I go back to my trigonometry homework.
It currently consists of three chapters on Wattpad and an outline, but hopefully I can get it to a more finished state by the end of this year. The basic premise is: it's a dystopian future in which anything, even murder, is acceptable for the sake of entertainment, and 24 teenagers have been signed up by their (shitty) parents for a reality show called Fight For Your Life (also the title of the work). The show is basically Survivor, but when you're eliminated, you die-- in the second draft I might make the structure of the game itself a little more original, but the borrowed structure works for now while I'm trying to get my plot out. Out of the 24, about 11 or 12 have major character focus, most of which make it past the merge: I'm experimenting with an omniscient 3rd-person POV structure so I can give all of them some time in the limelight and not make it super-obvious who's going to win. There is some commentary on the public's tendency to see real people as fictional characters: I have a scene planned for the end where the winner is being decided on by audience voting, and the final three is all like, "Yeah, no way that many people are willing to vote for someone to die: we didn't even like doing it and we didn't have a choice", and then they look at the vote counter and there are millions of votes. There is also commentary on parents basically owning their children in the eyes of the law: a lot of these parents only want fame or money, and they essentially sell their children to a corrupt reality TV network for it. There's 2 queer romantic pairings, 1 straight romantic pairing, and 1 major opposite-gender platonic pairing, the dynamics of which are basically (respectively): strong protective guy/smaller, less strong, very sweet guy, lovable annoying guy/person patient enough not to find him annoying, strategic smart girl/rather stupid guy who thinks she's a little intense but goes along with pretty much everything she says anyway, and kindhearted sensitive guy/devious manipulative girl who only cares about herself and also him. I'm really excited about it: hopefully I manage to keep my motivation.
