I have been meaning to be more active on this blog, but the pages both in Word and in Mac’s Pages, stare back at me. Thank God, some of the stories I am working on are not completely silent when opening them up to work on.
The Voyage of the Jules Verne is almost done… Well, unless this last plot idea takes off instead of adding more to the story than a way to close it. The current word count is more than 73k words. Editing will have a say on the final word count. If the plot idea takes off, I may still end the book but as book one of book two, and to be honest, that idea is daunting. I have been working on the Voyage now for a few years and I need to finish it, not expand it.Beneath the New Moon is 47k words and I haven’t added a new word to it in months. Maybe I need to kill off a character to get the rest of them talking.
The Land Beneath the Rim has a word count that is a short story, 11k words. It is nowhere close to being finished. For now, it is a history of the people told from different times and places involving the myths of the rim that rings their flat world. The gods are feared by the old and the young, but the young are daring and worry less about the tales of the past. They want to find a way to climb to the top of the rim. Or, will they learn to find other ways to reach the top? For now, the story is slow in writing.
Not a Drop to Drink. The seed was planted for this story in the summer of 2014, below Horseshoe Meadows in the Eastern Sierras, by Pastor Fred, a friend going back to high school. He, his wife Cinda, my friend Jim, from work were backpacking, attempting to summit Mt Whitney. Fred and his wife Cinda, are experts on the history of the area. Fred talked about how the Owens Valley was not always dry and how it became such now.
The seed took most of two years to sprout and take root. And it has taken even longer to research
I’ve learned a lot about California and its history of droughts and flooding. The story is not yet 8k words, and I suspect when I finish it, there will be people that will dislike the portrayal of some groups of people.
Earth Freeze is another some will not like for some of the same reasons they will have for disliking Not a Drop to Drink. Earth Freeze is more research than a story at this point. The science is complex and not well understood. Or, should I say more political than science. But, that is the point. Politics is dictating science. Where it was once The Church sacrificing science to the altar of dogma, it is now Politics doing it. The story… nope. If I finish it, read it tell me what you got from it.
If you don’t know by now, you will when I publish them and you read them. I will be PC or Woke in my storytelling. I write to entertain sure, but also in the hope the story inspires the reader to think, to look at something in a new way.
This blog has suffered from so much going on, I can’t seem to settle on a subject. Even now, this article started as something else. Write, read, delete, repeat. It gets old and discouraging. And once again, politics plays a part. I hate to say this, as it now the cliché phrase of the decade, but I blame in part COVID-19. I did not realize how much our Writer’s Group helped me, until COVID… the fear of COVID, shut our meeting place down. Even now, with COVID waning away and the number of people being vaccinated, our County Library has not opened the meeting rooms to groups that depend on those rooms to conduct business. Maybe I need to make some calls on my own.
So, the feedback we give each other is not taking place, and I for one find I need the inspiration.