InsaneJournal

Current mood:	excited
Current music:	"Stockholms Pärlor" - Ebba Grön

Writing season rolls around again
Yes, I know that writing doesn't really have a season - but if it did, now would be it. NaNo approacheth, and all that.

NaNo is this vague, shapeless and kind of scary thing for me this year - I'll be in college, it's my sixth year, I have no workable novel-length plots, I'm incredibly busy, etc., etc.

So I've decided I'm going to write short stories. Mainly steampunk-verse shorts, but it'll be all over the place, setting-wise. It'll be healthy exercise for me, too, because I rarely write short stories, and rarely have ideas that aren't expanded to something novel-length. But this year I'm going to do it - I get to play around with characters, get a feel for them and play with the setting before I commit myself to anything longer.


So far, what I've got is this list:

1. To The Seas Again
Ghost-story-cum-murder-mystery, based partly on the poem The Ghosts of Flannan Isle, and partly on the actual event the poem is about - the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers on Flannan Isle in early 20th Century. No one knows what happened to them, or where they went; it looked as if they had simply stood up and walked out and disappeared into thin air.

I'm taking this incident and translating it into my steampunk world, with fish-people and magic and malevolent ghosts and whatnot. I'm sure I'll come up with a proper plot as I go along.

2. 2.19 to Underfall Yard
Steampunk-verse again, a story about the horrible incident in which a train full of people drowned while travelling on an underground line, which was accidentally flooded by the discharge of a nearby dry dock. Not entirely sure how I'm going to tell it - as a flashback, or as it happens, or even as a fictional newspaper item. We'll see.

3. The Raven Underground
Steampunk-verse. Born from a prompt, it might be a short story, it might be novel-length, it might be nothing at all - exploring the underworld (both literal and figurative) of my principal city, it features river rat boys, fish people, people who make a living by selling the dead bits of other people, and so on and so forth.

4. Untitled 1-3
Steampunk-verse. Stories focusing on the lives of my airship crew(s) - conflicts, backstory, character exploration, etc., etc.

5. The Bus Stop at Twilight.
A story that takes place in the actual real world - gasp! It's... I don't really know what it is. It's kind of kitchen sink realism, kind of dreamy, kind of magical realism, all at once.

6. The Very Last Letter to Kindling Street
Real world again - amazing, considering that short of TWWD, I've never written anything substantial that takes place in the real world. This one is so far nothing but a jumble of images, colours and moods to go with the title, but I'm sure it'll work itself out as I'm writing. It usually does.