An Experiment in Writing

As promised, a bit more about the manuscript I mentioned having finished over the weekend. Normally, I don't try to get any real work done while I'm attending a convention, but I was in the middle of the final chapter and I knew the ending. I was thinking about it for the entire 3-hour drive to Baltimore. Not finishing it was impossible.

So what's this one about? Four words: djinn, vampires, Necromancy, hostages. (Oh my!)

Yeah, I know, it doesn't tell you much. Writing this one (and I'll call it DVNH, because I can't come up with a title I like yet) was a bit of an experiment for me. I brainstormed the initial idea in the wee hours of a Friday night sangria-and-movie fest with my best friend. Ever seen the movie Feast? It's an awesome horror film, so go out and rent it (but avoid the sequels, they kind of sucked....no, they really sucked). There's a line in the film, in which a character says, "We're being held hostage." Something about it clicked--monsters holding people hostage.

No, wait, vampires holding people hostage! But where? And why? And who would deal with such a crisis?

That's how it started.

I woke up Saturday morning (May 2, as a matter of fact) amazingly not hung over, spent about three hours doing some basic research on a few things and coming up with a handful of characters. Then I started writing it. I wrote almost every day for the entire month of May and banged out 50k words (it was like my own NaNoWriMo). In June, I put it aside for a while to do some revisions on other things, and came back to writing it again around the middle/end of June. It was hard getting back into the story, but once I did the last 35k poured out.

Granted, it needs some work, because I allowed myself to do something a little different while writing this draft--I used placeholders. If I didn't know a location, I wrote PLACE or TOWN. If I wasn't sure about a specific detail, I left RESEARCH in the paragraph. So the draft is littered with little roadsigns, places I need to return to and expand on. I need to expand on the world building quite a bit, and add tidbits of backstory now that I know my characters better.

I have a different book with my agent right now, so I don't have any immediate plans for DVNH, beyond shaping it up and coming up with a title that actually stands for something. Fortunately, I have an awesome crit partner (*waves at Nancy*) who's listened to me blather on about this book since I started it, so knowing she'd waiting to read it makes me happy.

So I chalk this up as an experiment gone right. We'll see what the end results bear in the future.