Saturday 6^th June 2020

I have a new idea

I can always tell the good ones because they linger long after you’ve written them down to look at some time in the future. You find they invade your mind when you haven’t invited them in. They take shape.

I’m not short of ideas at the moment. Indeed, one of my sources of anxiety is being able to write all these books. Yet this one has come along and it continues to stick around.

This one has very much been driven by aesthetic. I’m thinking of those movies where it cuts to all these glamorous locations all across the world. One minute it’s an aerial shot of Monaco, then they are in the streets of Brazil. Perhaps this is being driven by the current lockdown and my need for adventure.

But I want a story where the characters travel, not so much on a quest as in Lord of the Rings, but where the chapter starts and the protagonists are now in these amazing places, like those films that are inspiring me.

The locations would be fantastical, because I want to write a fantasy novel, but instead of grim and dark, they’d be bright and full of wonder.

I also want to play around with the setting. We have a load of medieval-inspired fantasies, steampunk Victorian-inspired, Napoleonic-era , and more. I want to do something a little different.

There’s an era I want to do that’s never really been done in fantasy before. Like the aforementioned eras, it’s clearly distinguishable – which kinda works to get the reader to establish the world in their head.

Of course, this setting asks more of the story. Without saying too much, it sets up a conflict. Not so much a character conflict as an event into which the characters can be placed. It’s given me an idea of what they could be doing.

It started out with the idea of a heist, and there may end up being elements of this in the finished story. I like the idea of a small prologue showcasing this ‘heist’ – I don’t even know what it is they are trying to heist… all I know is that it goes very wrong.

Unlike Black as Knight which is a single POV, I’m attracted to the idea of a team. Whether that means multiple POVs or not, I don’t know, but the want of doing something different means, at the very least, I won’t do first person present.

I’ve thought about other teams I like: GI Joe, X-Men, and others. I’ve taken elements I’ve liked about all of those and thought how those elements would work in this world. I’ve thought about other books I’ve read that have done something similar and what I didn’t like about those books. I want to try and come up with something fresh, so I’m trying to avoid the perceived faults of other books.

There are some ideas I like that just don’t gel with this world. In other books these could have been core ideas. They still can be, but they don’t work here.

From this I have a very, very rough plot. I have a strong beginning and I have a rough idea of the climatic twist. I have nothing else.

Interestingly, characters are still not here. There are some rough ideas but everyone is expendable right now. I think I need to understand the themes of this story to drive character generation.

But interestingly, I’ve found a soundtrack to this project.

I’m big on listening to music as I write. I have soundtracks for different moods, for different books. They are often movie or videogame scores, as I struggle to write to anything with lyrics.

Yet, this project is telling me that its soundtrack is Deadmau5 and I’m not entirely sure what that means to the project. It’s certainly very different.

And none of this is welcome. I’ve not asked this idea to develop in my head.

It’s still a ways off being a book, but it seems this idea has legs.