Marching Onward
credit to @anetek for this stunning image
With my primary project taking shape and my outlines moving forward at a steady pace I’ve started to rework my secondary projects too.
The Karsk Phenomenon - or at least, the project that temporary name encompasses - is coming along well! I’ve narrowed a 12-book-mess down to a shorter, focused narrative.
Outlines for TKP are progressing too. One of the three protagonists’ stories is finally ironing out so-to-speak, and the others aren’t far behind.
Important too are the ideas for stories I’ve had during the years-long journey TKP has been on. I’ve mentioned some of these in passing, and I’ll go into a little more detail on those today for the sake of mixing things up! Bear in mind, these are currently still ideas first and foremost, so if they get axed or altered later on don’t be surprised.
F&R is the temp name for my second main project, a far less dark, far more positive story about self-identity and self-discovery. This one indulges more of that fantasy/bittersweet side of my writing that my current project often steers clear from. It’s a simple idea about a journey from A to B, and what F&R learn on their adventures along the way.
The third project, trailing behind F&R is one I’m calling GRIN. GRIN delves back into that darkness that TKP walks alongside - focusing on darker topics and themes while keeping that “light at the end of the tunnel” mantra that seems to be the core to the projects I write, but more on that another time.
I have some other smaller ideas floating about, some happier, some sadder, and one other major story plan that’ll be on the back-burners for what’ll easily be a few years if not longer. That last one is more of an all-encompassing coup-de-grace, the distilling and reinforcing of the other ideas and themes that are core to me as a person and the works I seek to make.
To piggyback off of that point, I can’t write without it having a theme. This probably seems obvious to some people, like “duh, why would you write without an overarching idea or focus?”, which, fair point, but what I mean is: I’ve had dozens upon dozens of story ideas (which is why my main project TKP devolved into a sprawling, bloated mess; too many things in one box). But as cool and fancy and “wow I can’t wait to brute-force this into my specifically designed and planned story” as some of these ideas are, they don’t mean a single thing if they don’t fit with the overall theme or resonance I want the story to have.
A quick example to show how silly it once got:
A protagonist was trying to save her friend because her future self demanded she did! Okay, neat, but her future self was pressured by an at-the-time-unknown influence to force these events along. Alright, confusing but with some potential. That future self was being hunted by a parallel timeline version of the same character who was hell-bent on stopping these events, even willing to sacrifice friends and family if need be to ensure that chain of suffering didn’t continue. It became a reverse-onion of sorts, and this isn’t touching the 9-traincar-timeline structure, or the meta commentary about my other draft iterations, OR the fact that the parallel-hunter protag was working in tandem WITH the metafiction character to put an end to the series as a whole in BOTH senses of the word.
My point is… At least for me, it’s easy to get carried away and lose the woods for the solar system. Reigning in my creative-destructive impulses is hard on the best of days, but I’m genuinely happy that I’ve made it this far (with massive help from my editor, by the way!).
I’ve clung consistently to a spiral motif in most of my works, going ever inward and ever outward. So, like my story concepts and characters themselves, I march onward toward what I hope is a more cohesive and focused future.
