Writing Blog 1- September 2020

 

I have decided to write a blog series about my experience of writing my new novel, The Obscurati Chronicles; this is the first. Writing is said to be the loneliest profession and so this blog will ease some of that. Based on my notes and the structure of the story so far, I think this new project is going to be very long, possibly on the scale of Evan's Land. Therefore it will take a long time to write; Evan's Land took me more than two years. I was shocked and dismayed when reviewing old Ben's Bookcase entries to see that I started the first draft in August 2019, over a year ago, see: https://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2019/08/new-novel-2019.html. I published the first sample chapter just before New Year. I have currently just finished Chapter Four. So it's taken me thirteen months to write four chapters! How long then is it going to take me to write the whole book? Well, the good news is that my pace has speeded up. I published the second sample chapter on the 5th of May and since then have written two more chapters making up almost half the entire length of the draft up till now. I could probably write the entire book in a few months if I had to, but that would mean abandoning everything else I do on HPANWO for all that time. I can't do that. I have a commitment to research current affairs and the world does not stop for my convenience. Therefore my fictional work has always been something I have to squeeze alongside everything else I do. The lockdown has helped, ironically, because I'm still only working three to four hours a day, which might explain my acceleration. I'm glad I'm putting my extra free time to good use. (I am balancing my books financially because those three to four hours I do weekends as well. There's also not much to spend my money on right now apart from bills and groceries.)
 
I have enjoyed the The Obscurati Chronicles writing experience so far. I have had fun exploring new ideas for the story. I will try to avoid spoilers and at present do not intend to publish any more pre-publication sample texts, but I will reveal a few titbits. One of my favourite antagonists from the Roswell trilogy was Karl Dennison. Unfortunately Dennison was an unseen character who did not feature on-scene anywhere in the three books other than as a dead skull, and was only actively referred to in flashback. I always wished I could find a way to make him an active and seen character in the story. Now I have. I will not try to hide the fact that I have created a character for The Obscurati Chronicles called Cassius Dewlove who is virtually a carbon copy of Karl Dennison. Like Dennison he is an extreme and undeniable villain. I'm having great fun creating a role for him in this new novel. I've also been contemplating a fascinating question. What if somebody like QAnon existed in the early 1920's? What would he/she/they do? Obviously there was no 4Chan in those days for them to post on. I worked out that probably such an individual would place ads in newspapers. I've devised two already for the draft so far: G.W.A., dig your own grave and spare us the work. Signum. WYAGIGA. And: The time of change is coming soon. Signum. WYAGIGA. "Signum" is a Latin word that means "Sign". A synonym of "Sign" is "cue" which is of course a homophone of "Q", you see? "WYAGIGA" stands for "Where You All Go I Go Also". You will probably realize that this is the equivalent of the real life QAnon slogan "WWG1WGA- Where we go one we go all." I now have to start Chapter Five which, being an odd number, is narrated by Robin Ursall. I will post another blog article at some point; I'm not sure when. In the meantime, if you've not seen it already, I have posted two sample chapters on Ben's Bookcase.
See here for Chapter One: http://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-obscurati-chronicles-sample-first.html.
See here for Chapter Two: https://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-obscurati-chronicles-sample-second.html.