In the eight years between the completion of Working Class Villain and this gray and grizzled morning, I have poked and prodded and started and stopped four major writing projects. Other ideas have come and gone and been scribbled down and discarded (my file cabinets are full of folders that contain single phrases on folded napkins and indecipherable cursive scribblings on yellow legal paper), but these four are the ones I always come back to.
Each of these projects has an official title, but for the sake of simplicity we'll call them Planet, Detective, Time, and Giant. I'm superstitious about these things, so if we do not reveal their true names, no malevolent parties can interfere with them.
Planet is a science fiction horror story that, up until recently, I was sure would be my next book. What little time I could devote to personal writing in the last two years was mainly spent on this one. At the moment, I'm debating whether it would be better served as a short story, though what's really stopping me from continuing is that I'm unsure how crazy the protagonist is really supposed to be.
Time is, by far, my favorite idea, but I'm not sure how the middle works. I started writing this one almost immediately after Villain was finished, and now it's like a half-built house abandoned in the back of my mind. The frame is there, and it's beautiful, but I don't know where to put the stairs or the bathrooms.
Giant is tough to explain. When I'm working on a story, the writing is often the last thing that happens. I spend a long time marinating in ideas, working out characters and plot points on long walks or in idle moments. In this respect, Giant has been a work in progress for as long as I've been writing. But is it a worthwhile project or is it just a daydream? This one has been outlined, a few opening chapters have been written, but it remains largely hypothetical.
Detective is the story I'm actively working on now. It is a fantasy/mystery set in the present day, which makes the world building easier than any of the other three projects. Apart from how the magic works. I'm currently 6,000 words deep into this one. Not spectacular progress, but it's inching along.
That’s all for now.