Sin Eater is a weight in my pocket right now. The thing I want to be working on, but that I’m not touching because I have things with deadlines to deal with first. There’s a 2,700 word essay I need to finish by Thursday, and I have upwards of 100 pages of reading a week.
I’m enjoying the work, don’t get me wrong. History is my thing, man. I’m even thinking about postgraduate work, if I can do well this semester.
….aaaand that means throwing all I got at it. Writing is taking a back seat, and it’s chafing. I’m still managing to scratch out the odd poem, but I’m stymied by stories at the moment. I have this idea, about this monster that lives in dark, gloomy spaces and uses iron to sharpen its teeth. It creates rust, see? It’s a rust-making boogey. I love this thing. But I have nothing to use it in. It’s so unfair. My poor monster needs, like, a picture book, or something. Hey, if you’re a picture-book author, want to collaborate? I’m pants at illustration. Anyway, for now the rust monster has to stay in a dark cellar in my mind, sharpening his teeth.
My two possible futures works-in-progress, meanwhile, are in the stage where you have the idea but not the drive, so they’re also sitting in my head (and in various notebooks) waiting until enough matter coalesces around them for something to be done. I finally have a setting for my “gang of five” characters, and an initiating circumstance, but not really a plot, so that one needs more work. The other novel is going to be more of a pantsing situation, I think. An adventure. I know how I want it to start, I know I want it set in Australia, and I know it’s gonna have, like, mystery and thrills and a rollicking chase across the country or some shit. Although now I think about it, a chase across Australia is mostly going to be 3000km of Outback. Maybe this idea needs some work.
“What about New York Sour?” Oh god, don’t ask me about that one. I feel guilty every time I think about it. It needs so much work. It has to sit back until Sin Eater mk. II has been completed, at the very least, and let’s be honest, then I’m kind of interested in starting my adventure thriller thing. I mean, no, I don’t know where I’m going with it. But unlike New York Sour, which needs some serious structural work, Unnamed Project is something I feel like I can discover as I go. I mean, it’s a first draft. They’re fleeing something, or hunting for something – probably both – and I’m happy to work out what those things are and why they’re involved as I go. The main character is going to start with a degree of retrograde amnesia, 28 Days Later style, and I’d like to work out what’s going on along with the MC.
But that comes after Sin Eater, and SE comes in the moments of silence between history essays. I’m frustrated, and with any luck, those frustrations will work themselves out in poetry and short prose. Either that, or I’ll go mad.