I started a bit late, and started in with a problematic bit of what I wrote yesterday…
And stuff clicked. I also drew an enigmatic map in my bullet journal, and if I wasn’t having a miserable time transferring stuff from my phone to my desktop, you’d have a spiffy picture of that right now.
Since I am, I’ll drop it into a future post.
Meanwhile, however, my MC isn’t in trouble at the moment… but in getting someone else out of trouble, she’s going to end up neck deep in the soup.
Some of this is plotted (those 30 story sentences), but a lot of it is simply pouring out of my fingers as I work from one scene to the next.
And I read something both wonderful and relevant to the Ohio Series yesterday in Terry Pratchett’s A Hat Full of Sky which I’m going to quote here:
Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place where you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently…”
That’s what coming home to Ohio has been for me, and it’s what these books are, down at the very bottom, about. They have magic, and monsters, and a lot of alien strangeness.
But they are still here, now, in this place that I love and that I have loved since I was born here, and forty-one years away has given me both new eyes, and extra colors.
And I’m using them on these stories.
Oh wow! I’m sure you mentioned it before but I didn’t remember that you were actually *born* in Ohio, only that you spent some formative years there later. That’s so cool.
I’ll have to give Terry Pratchett another try. I tried him when I was younger but it was sort of “too much humor for my fantasy” and silly me, I hadn’t considered that maybe my tastes could have changed in 25 years.
Especially since I adored Good Omens! (Neil Gaiman’s probably my favorite writer, but I know Terry played a huge part in that too.)
As a massive Pratchett fan in my youth, I highly recommend giving him another go. Terry’s work also changed over the years. So if you think you might not be gripped by his earlier works, do jump into some of the later books.
The wonderful thing about his writing is that you can pretty much just pick a book that sounds interesting and dive in – they all connect but also stand on their own just as well.
There’s still the humour that makes the Discworld the place it is, but over time he let the sharp bite that was always there out into the writing a little more. The City Watch novels are especially good for that.
He did a fine, fine job on working social commentary and real world events into stories that take place on a flat planet that’s floating through space on the back of four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle.
I was born here, and lived here for most of my life through age nineteen. Those years were interrupted by one year in Alaska, one year in Costa Rica, and about six months in Guatemala that would have been a multi-year stay had it not been for the earthquake. (The civil war going on around us wasn’t enough to get my parents to get my brother, sister and me out of there, but the earthquake did the trick.)
On Terry Pratchett. I’m reading the Discworld books in series order. I’m all the way to Going Postal, and sadly, don’t have that many more books left.
I was and am a huge Terry Pratchett fan — and his first few novels weren’t great. He was very young when writing the early books, and it shows, but his work got progressively better with each novel, and about five books in, he hit the top of his game and stayed there. He regularly makes me laugh out loud or catches me off guard and makes me cry — and while this series-order read-through is both for pleasure and as homework, I’m having a hard time remembering the work part.
His series is very different from the series that I’m writing, in that I’m writing the first five books from a single viewpoint, while all of the Discworld novels are multiple POV. But like Pratchett, I write funny bits in with the scary bits, the suspense, and the bits about what it means to be human in a big damn universe.
And like him, I try to keep my fiction relevant to real human beings living in the real world. So the “homework” aspect remains valid.
I loved Good Omens too.