There comes a time when a project needs to go from brainstorming and planning to the actual writing. I’m more than a little scared because ideas for books normally swim in my head for years, growing and mutating. However, this project, which has the working title of “Fool’s Gold”, didn’t exist a little over a month ago.

And of course, there’s always this story in your head that the words on the page will never match. But the style of the work finally came to me yesterday. It’s going to be fun, possibly laugh out loud funny in places, and whilst there are certainly a lot of very dark moments, I’m going to push back against the gritty.
Over the last few days I’ve taken extreme ideas and mashed it against the story, wanting to come up with something that feels distinctly me. They get dialled up and dialled down, trying to see if they fit the story I’m trying to tell. Sadly, they’ll be no full-on robots in this book, but there may be something half-way between that and a golem.
There’s still so much I don’t know, and I worry that starting now will lead to a project like Gods of the Wild Frontier where I wandered out into the wilderness and lost the trail of the story. No, I have to keep telling myself, I know how this one ends. I know what it’s about and where it is going. And besides, it’s not like Gods has been trunked, it’s just been shelved until such time as I can go back, plan the story a little and approach the project differently. It was an experiment in discovery writing after all.
But there are still many plot points that aren;t planned out yet, secondary characters that I’m not sure about. I’d like to have full character arcs for the Urchin and The Dandy. They still don’t have names, and when I came up with one idea for a name, Google told me it was from some obscure YouTube video I watched over a year ago. Still, at least my main protagonist now has a name, and I think it’s this more than anything that’s making me think that now is the time to start writing (after obviously procrastinating with a blog post about starting).
I have so many hopes for this novel, but it’s a challenge. I want to write this one fast. Real life really didn’t help with Gods, and I don’t want life interrupting Fool’s Gold. There are things I want to accomplish (in terms of both story and style) that are really going to push me as a writer, more than any project I’ve ever done. I’ve set the bar so astronomically high on this one that I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to come even close. It’s daunting and at this moment, stood at the bottom of the mountain I have to climb, I’m not sure any writer could do it, let alone me.
I guess all I can do is put one word after another.
Which I will do… after I’ve procrastinated some more.