The Scrawls, Continued
The next scrawl is here: The Ennead. It continues the Into Namarhel story.
This one includes a quick sketch I made of the starfish emblem, many, many years ago. I keep meaning to sketch more, but there's just not enough time in the day.
Into Namarhel
A long, long time ago, a good friend and I wanted to create a graphic novel. The year was 2008. I had a story in mind, and he would draw the art. We were planning 12 issues, and to self publish. Life got in the way, as it does. We still talk about it, occasionally.
By the time we abandoned the project, my friend had a few sketches done (the one above is his), and I had written a rough draft of the manuscript for the first issue. I also had a few storyboards, and copious amount of notes; character descriptions, the beginnings of a plot, and some beats for the beginning, middle and end of the story.
That story has never left me. I've always wanted to come back to it, to tell it, to share it, but I never knew where, or how. Between all my other running projects, I can't dedicate the amount of time needed to turn this into something like a novella, at least for now. That's where the scrawls come in.
Into Namarhel will be a running series. They will still be scrawls. A scrawl, as far as this website is concerned, is a scribble, a passage of undetermined length, a story fragment written and shared with little revision. Into Namarhel will be built that way. There are four pieces now, that introduce the story, with more to follow. Eventually, when put together, the individual pieces will form a whole.
An Orderly Mess
The next scrawl is now up.
I'm going to organise that page a little better. There aren't too many scrawls there yet, but soon enough it'll become confused and unwieldy, much like the archives where our nameless researcher is finding all these texts.
You Are Advised To Go Beyond This Point
I've enjoyed the more structured approach to writing the scrawls this week. I've got several projects on the go. I'm revising and editing a short story, I'm chipping away at the draft of my first novel, and I'm developing an open source ODM for DynamoDB called Spark (which this blog runs on). I'm also planning on launching another blog, one which will focus more on technical and web development subjects such as the aforementioned ODM.
As such, but not entirely due to, I take a long time to write and finish anything. My short stories can take months (and admittedly sometimes years) to write, so I don't get to share things very often. I've always found sharing to be very important, however. I don't think I'm ever as inspired to write as I am right after I've shared and received feedback for something I've written. Sharing these snippets has recaptured some of this. No one will know you're a writer if you don't share anything, and with this Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule for the scrawls, I have something to share a little more often than once in a blue moon.
See you next week!
No Way Back
Here's another discombobulated story fragment.
I'm going to try something slightly different with these going forward. I'm going to add a dash of order and perhaps a pinch of continuity to the chaos. This will come in the form of regular updates. One new scrawl every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, starting today. I might even try to string together some of these into a complete story.
Old Haunts
As I was rewriting the short story I'm currently working on, an old short story I wrote nearly ten years ago popped into my head. I took a detour to dig it up. My archives are a mess, so the quickest way for me to find it was to search my email. A few quick keystrokes and there it was, nestled soundly in one email to my then writers group, and another to a literary magazine, followed by their rejection.
There are a lot of problems with pacing in the story that can be worked on. It starts too slowly, and the perspective is confusing to the reader. You need to engage the reader with more dramatic tension to make them want to continue reading.
Ouch! I re-read the story. I remember thinking it was great when I wrote it. The perspective immediately confused me. I wrote it in third person present tense. I sprinkled in third person past tense flashbacks for good measure, without any sort of clear demarcations between the two.
Once I got past the beginning of the story, and understood the perspective, I was sucked in. I know what I was trying to achieve, but it definitely could have been written a lot better. All of the feedback was right, and there were other problems still. The dialogue was stilted, and some of the narrative descriptions made no sense. Nevertheless, once I reached the end, I couldn't help but think the story had a lot of strengths, too.
Maybe one day I'll have a go at re-rewriting it.
Disorder
Whenever I start writing something, I lose all semblance of control. New characters constantly barge in, wanting their story told too. The plot thickens until it becomes something resembling a solid. All I can do is write and try to keep up. Sometimes it feels like an exercise in futility, but I wouldn't have it any other way.
I wrote another scrawl. This one's titled Unearthed. Now, I've got a short story to finish.