Writing Report December 15, 2023

I haven’t written one of these in a while and it’s not been because I haven’t been writing (though I did take a long trip to Germany with Soon-ok in October) but because the writing had been mostly bits and pieces, notes and ideas for future work, and until not anything meant for publication or posting.

I finished my second big project for 2023 in mid-September (I aim to do two a year, starting one on January first, the other on July first) and started gathering material for my Jan. 1, 2024 project…

…if I could decide what it would be.

My recent works have been most humorous novels.  I have one on Kindle Vella (see above), two completed and on deck, the fourth being the just completed Sep. 11 first draft.  I thought the Jan. 1, 2023 work would be a romance / family drama, but while I’ve been gathering material for it, it just hasn’t caught fire in my imagination.

(I have a much bigger project in the works which will probably be a series of several novels, but that’s at least 2 – 4 years away, maybe longer.)

While traveling in Germany, I took along my iPad which also has a couple of thousand books I’ve downloaded from Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and Canada’s Faded Page, among them most of the Doc Savage pulp novels.

My views on Doc Savage will be coming up at the first of the year (watch this space), but reading several of the old novels got me to wondering what a modern pulp adventure would look like and before I knew it, I had a cast of characters, their unique traits and specialties, their supporting cast, and their basic story template plus a great idea for a central location and a dandy mystery to kick off their first adventure.

And I realized this generated a lot more heat than the romance / family drama I want to do so I began anticipating this would be my January novel…

…only a character I created years ago for an idea that went nowhere (primarily because it was aimed at a specific market and I have no access to that market) reminded me she existed and then she re-introduced me to another character I toyed around with in my noodle but never committed to paper / pixel and I thought, well, that’s nice but how would I even get that story started in an interesting way and then I remembered I wrote a play a few years ago that also went nowhere (despite being submitted to several theatrical companies) that fit perfectly as an introduction for the main character as well as introduced another supporting character who could play a pivotal role in the story and then the pulp adventure crew got rudely elbowed aside with a “maybe later, ‘gator” and all my creative energy is going into this new story.

Because it’s that story’s time.

Go back two weeks to the David Bowie creativity post.

Don’t try to force it.

Let it come when it comes.

It’ll make itself know when it’s time to be born.

© Buzz Dixon