A Blog Post of Sorts | Future Work Updates/Chapter Fragment

Hello Patrons! This is not a chapter for What Will Be, but a blog post, of sorts, for people who might be interested in reading about some of my process and the things I have going on in the background.

I have recently transitioned to writing full time and, now that I am back to my regular posting/writing schedule, I have decided to start dedicating some of that time to tinkering with new ideas and projects. It is largely a way for me to break up my day, take time to reflect on a tricky scene that isn't quite  working for me, or just decide I need to step away from What Will Be for whatever reason and not feel like I am wasting my allotted 'author time'.

I once posted a rough as guts draft of a chapter here on Patreon for 'You Might Miss It' but I have since decided to shelf the project for now. Good odds I will return to it one day, but I realized the Idea > Story transition wasn't quite hitting the right spots for me and couldn't get beyond the ROUGH outline phase with anything I liked.

I have since been tinkering with a new concept; doing some reading, noting down some rough character traits and plot points, and have landed on something I am more confident will work. Over the last week I threw together an exploratory fragment, and I thought I'd share it here, a sort of peak at some real rough ground zero work. It even includes one of my big bold notes to myself.

Here is a not-blurb:

The game plan is an Urban Fantasy that leans towards Slice of Life. It centres on a school for some of the myths and monsters of the world, but the protagonist is a member of the staff who is searching for something, something that having connections to the broader supernatural world might help them find. The protagonist is a mage who has achieved immortality, but at the cost of their most powerful magics. They seek a way to reclaim their power without sacrificing their greatest achievement, getting wrapped up in the lives of staff, students and other strange things along the way.  

And here is the chapter fragment:

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Despite common consensus, it is difficult to distinguish medical-grade cooler bags from their commercial counterparts by sound alone. Henry Ward, however, had grown especially adept at the task, especially when said medical-grade cooler bags were dropped onto his table with a defeated thud. Such was his acumen that he could achieve the feat without looking away from the manga he held up to his face, the careful placement of a thumb all he required to keep the pages propped open.  

“Let me guess,” he said wryly, “tonight is the night you finally quit?” 

“Do. Not. Tempt. Me.” Diana Ionnescu warned, but there was no fire in the threat, even for one made in darkest of jests. It was she who ate lunch with Henry in the staff room most every night, when they were not rostered on to supervise the little monsters a less cynical being might refer to as children. One might argue it was, therefore, pattern recognition and not analytical hearing-based deduction that enabled Henry to identify Diana’s medical-grade cooler bag without seeing it. 

‘Might’ being the operative word, of course. It was unlikely anyone actually cared either way.  

Henry recognised the budding rant in Diana’s tone. A touch of her Romanian accent had survived the weight of years separating Diana from her motherland, but stress had a way of reigniting it. Reluctantly, Henry closed the manga and placed it on the table. It joined the half-finished instant coffee in his ‘basic witch’ mug and a small stack of cookies arranged neatly on a folded piece of paper towel. 

“Go on then,” he said. “Tell me who we hate today.” 

“One moment.” 

The dull clunking of the ceiling fan struggling to survive above them was briefly joined by the sound of Diana unzipping her lunchbox. Impossibly pale fingers retrieved a blood bag and a modified crazy straw. The latter was stabbed into the former and Diana drank deeply, a flush of colour briefly returning to her cheeks when the deep red liquid finished its spiralling journey and passed through her lips. 

A slight groan of pleasure escaped Diana as she drank, the impulse difficult to suppress even for one as old as her. Henry paid the slip no mind, knowing it for what it was. Instead, his eyes flicked back towards the manga he’d been reading. 

I probably could have managed another page while she- 

Still clutching the now-considerably-less-full blood bag, Dianna dropped her hand, letting it collide with the table as she let out a satisfied sigh.

“Gods, I needed that,” she said. “Apologies for the-” 

“Don’t worry about it,” Henry waved away the half-finished apology. “You were there when I ate that entire wedding cake, remember?”

Diana scoffed. 

“Okay, first of all, not the same thing, but I see your point.” She chuckled faintly at the memory. “Anyway. Yes. Hatred. You get one guess.” The flat gaze she levelled Henry’s way made it clear the answer was the obvious one. 

Henry raised an eyebrow.

“Ajax?”

“Ajax! Look, I get that Satyrs can get especially rowdy around his age but it is a lot.” Diana took another sip from her lunch and shifted her weight slightly. It was a movement born from decades of practice and manufactured habits as opposed to biological necessity, but there were few who had mastered that particular craft as well as she. 

“What did he do this time?” Henry had already dismissed the Satyrs as a possible remedy to his little problem. A shame, really, because they were among the rare few who literally could find solutions to their troubles at the bottom of a bottle - a bottle filled with magical liquor capable of making coachella look like a nunnery, but a bottle all the same. 

“The usual, unfortunately.” Diana leaned forward, propping an elbow on the table and resting her chin on her free hand. “He finds the work challenging but instead of asking for help he calls the work dumb and disrupts other students. Today that ended with a broken vase and a pile of tiny fragments I had to count before getting to enjoy my break.”  

EDIT NOTE: More frustrations in Diana's explanation. More specific behaviours. Do not need to educate the readers with broad textbook lingo - it dilutes the characterisation. 

“Strange that you were never able to kick that particular compulsion,” Henry noted offhandedly. 

“Every vampire has at least one they are stuck with.” She shrugged. “At least I can cross running water. Sewers made that one especially inconvenient.” 

“I always thought you had to be able to see the water.” 

“Apparently not.” 

Henry, who had been reaching for his coffee, paused, caught up in errant thought. 

“What about underground rivers? How close do you have to be to-” 

“I do not know how we somehow avoided this particular topic after all these years, but I can assure you I do not know who or what decides what type of water is okay.” She chuckled. “I appreciate the distraction, though.” 

“I have my moments.” A slight play on words, perhaps, when one considered Henry’s photo album fulfilled with moments carefully stolen from time. The album lay, largely forgotten, at the bottom of the drawer in Henry’s spare room. It shared the space with summer shorts and a pile of Tamagotchis, where it collected dust and attracted the occasional cosmic moth. 

Henry and Diana fell into companionable silence. The former returned to his manga, the latter to her smartphone. 

---

I am toying around with an omniscient narrator who mostly sticks to the script but goes off on the occasional tangent (that last couple of paragraphs highlights what I am going for somewhat). I feel like my prose is strongest when it can includes little asides and whatnot to address the reader - a personal touch, if you will. WWB gets it through the 1st person narration, and this seemed like a fun way to get it here.

Good odds I'll use a version of this scene when I start on actual chapters, but there is a good bit of fat to cut. Lots of sentences could be tighter, but all in all it was this little bit of work and progress that gave me some confidence in the bare bones of the story. I think it'll be a lot of fun when all is said and done.

I may be new to being an author, relatively speaking, but slowly writing this made me once again regret not making a start on writing earlier in my life. Even the odd handful of time here and there to jot down ideas and start playing around with prose and character is progress and it feels good. 500 words a week is still at least 25000 words a year, after all. I could have written so much more by now if I weren't somehow convinced I had to have everything figured out before just sitting down and putting words, even bad words, on the page.

I used to tell my students that having something is better than nothing, and it wasn't until I properly internalized the lesson myself that I started to find some success with my writing. I am not referring to readership or anything, but the literal act of writing. I guess what I am saying is, if you have an idea and a smidge off free time here and there, just start writing. Start tinkering. Even if you end up putting the idea back on the backburner, that is okay, you will learn lessons from the process that help you with your next one.

All the best and have an amazing week!

-Googieman