Preemptive Retaliation

November was hugely successful, to an extent. I sat myself down and wrote over fifty-four thousand words of prose. Some of them were pretty good words. I was trying something different than before. Instead of focusing on one story, I instead came up with multiple stories in a larger shared world. This is a world I’ve been thinking of for the past four years; a city built inside a computer, its denizens only purpose is to fulfil the needs of a demanding and unrelenting god.

 

This is a world I’ve built and destroyed many times when planning out my Detective Norton story. The idea of an anti-virus detective, skulking round the streets and busting the bad guys was too cute for me to let go of. The thing is, I’ve written that story a dozen times now, all in the same but different ways. I have a malleable but solid beginning, a bombastic ending… but no middle. In any good mystery there should be a tangle of threads that either get cut off or tied up at the end. I either have too many threads or too few. Either way they’re wrapped round each other in a great big mess.

 

This is the problem I’ve had with this piece of work. Over the four years, dozens of drafts and several notebooks dedicated to it, I can never really figure out the middle. Norton initially was a lone worker, sought out by the police of his town. Then he became sought out by the femme fatale instead. Then he had an ex-partner who may or may not be corrupt. Then no one sought him out at all, and he went to find a case by himself. All through this he has been a handsome young man, an old grizzled veteran, a scarred cynical character and a disabled alcoholic. The femme fatale has stayed mostly the same, which is nice, except for a few additions to increase her agency. The villains and supporting cast have been revolved and swapped and cut out one chapter to be reintroduced the next… only for me to suddenly remember that I’ve been working on this for over four years.

 

I never thought I would find myself agonising so much on this story. I’ve considered myself an agonising writer in the past – the romantic image I have of myself is hunched over a keyboard, wine reddening my lips and cigarettes staining my teeth, pouring darkness onto the white of a document – but I always thought I would agonise over something, I don’t know, soulful. I’d agonise over life or death questions. I’d dig deep into some personal fear and share it with the world in a deep and layered way. I never thought I’d have to agonise on something that’s more like pop-sci-fi than anything else. This story was initially written for fun, as a throwaway between projects, but now the idea has set up in my mind and I know I can’t get it out until I’ve done it justice.

 

That was what my last post was about. This love-hate battle with this bloody project I’ve got going on. When I was looking through my notes I found a comment in that margin exclaiming “When can I stop writing this fucking story?”. The notebook was from two years ago.

 

It makes me feel that I should just throw the story away. Lock up the notebooks and put them in the attic. Shuffle away all those lonely drafts into a folder that I’ll leave on an external hard-drive which will eventually fall between the cracks and lose itself forever. It’s had its chance and it hasn’t worked out. The End.

 

But. But. Buuuuuuuuuut.

 

That was only one part of the story. Norton’s saga is still over complicated, still way over the top, and still needs me to sit down and make a decision. However, the other stories to spring out of NaNo have really rekindled my fascination with this virtual city. I’ve written about a singer climbing to greatness only to have a tragic fall, and now I’m writing about a good program put into a bad situation.

 

I still need to fix what’s wrong with Norton – after ranting to Mike about it all he told me to bring it back, make it about the character, and now my mind is whirring with yet another draft – but I’m excited to see where all the rest of the stories go.