Eddie Whitlock's Blog: Reader and Writer - Posts Tagged "novel"

I love the whole post-apocalypse scenario. It's a chance to have epic stories in worlds with fewer people and, thus, fewer complications.

For example, one of my side projects is called Worst Murder Mystery Ever. I set it in 1968 because I needed it to be a simpler time. Still, because legal matters are involved, I am running into complications that limit the plot.

Even 1968 has too many people and too many complications.

My novel Evil Is Always Human was set in 1912 and has pretty limited involvement with legal matters. Well. Other than the murders of a few people and the prosecution of the innocent. Still. I could have injustice in 1912 without worrying that it would be illogical. It was 1912, after all.

So.

The idea of a novel set in a post-Apocalyptic America is appealing for that same reason. I think Cormac McCarthy's The Road is one of the best of the genre. It is a simple tale surrounded by horror, rooted in reality and yet unbound by our world.

So, yeah, I'm thinking about that.

Although I had several chapters of a zombie apocalypse novel going, I think there are too many zombie books out there right now. Showing the world after a different disaster would probably be better. The unfortunate truth is that there are a lot of ways things could get worse and relatively few ways things could get better.

I would also like to consider the medium itself as an opportunity to create. Rather than simply telling the tale in third person -- or even in first person -- I think it might be interesting to combine some different narrators as well as some different ways of introducing information. It could be fun.

With November rapidly approaching, I am thinking that I want to do another book, but do one totally different from the last one. We'll see. We'll see.

I have begun - sort of and for the fourth or fifth time - writing my NaNoWriMo book for the year.

NaNoWriMo is NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth. You can sign up online to take part. It greatly helped give me structure (of time, not plotting) to get a book finished. The goal is to write a 50-thousand word book in 30 days. I did it, thanks to NaNoWriMo.

That book was tentatively titled HANGING. My editor, Vally Sharpe, suggested a change using the W. H. Auden quotation that opens the story and the book wound up as EVIL IS ALWAYS HUMAN.

This current work-in-progress is going under the name WORST MURDER MYSTERY EVER or WMME for short.

I am calling it the "worst" murder mystery ever because I plan to lay out whodunit at the very beginning. Yeah, the book starts by telling who killed whom.

When I planned to try to do this (I'm still not sure I can do it; I'm trying), I knew that most mysteries follow a typical pattern. I didn't want to follow that pattern. As I did a little research of real mysteries, I discovered that quite a few real-life mysteries are far more than just "whodunits."

The big questions, imho, are WHY? and WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ONES LEFT BEHIND?

I started writing the story from the beginning of the investigation, at the moment when investigators arrive on the scene. I came up with a pretty good (imho) plot twist or two for that scene.

Then I realized I didn't really have a good whodunit because I had not written the actual murder scene. So. I put it aside and thought about it.

I also did some research, reading a novel from 1955 called VANISHING LADIES (I think) by Ed McBain. That book was supposed to be a police procedural, but it's really more of a noir-ish tale of prostitutes and bad cops.

Now I am writing again. This time I've started drafting the murder as well as doing back stories on my two protagonists. I'm hoping it works out.