Horrors of Crowdfunding, Creativity & Other Tales
Obligatory commercial bits first: The Trail of Cthulhu crowdfunder is in its last days; the FiveEvil crowdfunder is just getting started. I’m involved in both of them. If you like my stuff, then lo! there is stuff to be had.
(Also still on offer - two slots where I write a Trail scenario to your specifications. I’m really looking forward to these; I like the challenge of taking unexpected elements and working them into the haiku-frame of a Cthulhu investigation.)
Recent musical discovery that may get added to the writing-playlist - Public Service Broadcasting.
I’m in the early stages of a new novel at the moment - I’m still working on Black Iron 4, this is a different thing entirely. It’s something of a shift in style for me, if not in theme, and it’s nerve-wracking. First chapters are talismanic, setting the tone and foundation for everything to come. Yes, you can and will rewrite them over and over again - if you did a graph of edits on any manuscript, it’d would average out at a U-shape for most books (or a capital W for troubled novels). But the first chapter is the moment in the leap of faith when you push down with your foot and try to leave the ground, and you don’t want to stumble.
I just realised that exactly ten years ago, I was writing the opening chapter of The Gutter Prayer. And that went pretty well, so it’ll take that as a good sign. For those who don’t know the tale, I wrote the first part of Gutter for Nanowrimo in 2014, then abandoned it for several months in favour of a truly terrible magic-school novel. I admire and envy those writers who have THE BURNING IDEA THEY MUST WRITE, or who can feed a spark of inspiration until it blazes. I fumble in a warm fog.
On a not-wholly-unrelated note, I’ve been reading a lot of Alan Moore lately. I’m half-way through his Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic at the moment, although having read Promethea, listened to The Highbury Working and Unearthing, and read RAW’s fantastic Masks of the Illuminati (not to mention Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum), a lot of it is familiar ground. But I’ve always believed that creativity is smashing two ideas together until sparks fly, and it’s fine for one of those ideas to be familiar. The trick is going further afield for the other rock.
I’ll be at Dragonmeet at the end of the month, where I hope to admire and possibly even hold an advance copy of Dagger in the Heart.
Of possible amusement: The Brief History of Ea - Sauron’s Version
Back to the word mines,
Gar