I’ve forgotten everything I know

Not that I knew a great deal to begin with – I’m not published, or even well turned-down. I am, as Jamie over at HowNotToWrite likes to point out (not the first, to be sure, just the more recent), someone who is infatuated with the idea of being a writer, but not actually accomplished at finishing the task.

Well, not entirely true. I’ve written short stories. And even first (and a half) drafts of novels. Just nothing that is completed enough to send out for review (of any kind).

So here I sit. My brain is actually turning (and churning) out new ideas again, which is both refreshing and nerve wracking, mostly because it chooses that midway point in my 1 hour commute to spew dialog across the dashboard, at which point I have to capture enough in my short term memory to be able to repeat it, so I can drive the rest of the way home repeating the same dialog over and over and over again so that when I hit the house in a cold panic, I can pull out a keyboard or a pen or stab myself and use the blood to write down the mantra I’ve developed, by which point whatever it was has gone from making sense to being the mad gibberish of a Lovecraftian hero.

Needless to say, progress is slow.

I must say, though, I am somewhat inspired by a style I hadn’t seen before. I’ve started reading the Kevin J. Anderson Saga of Seven Suns series, and Anderson takes an approach to a huge cast (of necessary) characters that I’m rather taken with. Most epic novels that use tons of characters try to slip them in one at a time so that you build your cast over the course of books (Jordan comes to mind). What Anderson does, though, is to slam you with new characters one right after the other, but to keep sanity by linking them together from scene so that one builds on the intro of the previous. I’m not doing it justice here, but its a pretty cool technique if you ask me for introducing large numbers of characters without bewildering your reader (helps they all don’t have similar looking names – curse you authors I won’t dare name here!!).

Which in a round about way takes me back to my current stab at the writerly craft. Not even braving a working title yet, too busy trying to get everyone’s story lined up so they can all play nice with each other before they start lobbing novabombs or what have you. Mostly in the research phase right now – I don’t want it to be dry and overly done, but I’d like to at least be able to say things right 🙂 But writing has begun, slowly, as my poor wife will attest.