For some months I committed to my next big bit of writing, something I’ve had in my head for a long time.  “Story of an Unoriginal Boxhandler” was something I started coming up with ideas for while writing “The Crowd and the Merrimack” and I always planned on it coming after “Crowd”.  Unfortunately I don’t think it’s going to work out.

“Boxhandler” is about Darren who’s stuck in a rut at a dead end job, and also an aspiring writer.  His problem with his writing, because of his rut and his lack of confidence, is that he can’t finish anything he is writing.  He has a ton of ideas, writes when he can, but is never satisfied with what he writes and can’t complete anything.  The story gets going when he breaks his hand in a work related incident, his prominent hand, the one he does everything with, including his writing.

So after I got “Crowd” all figured out, published, and did some marketing, I needed to pick what I was going to sit down and write next.  “Boxhandler” was an easy choice, because I had been pondering it for so long, longer then most other ideas I eventually wanted to get down.

When I got the time, and felt I could take a break from marketing, I started an outline for “Boxhandler”.  I had compiled all my notes that had been spread out over some    years and started getting down an outline.  I had the structure I wanted in my head, had the beats to tell the story, had an arc and ending, but it didn’t end up coming out.  I got stuck.

The problem was the beats didn’t lend themselves to a continuity, I didn’t know how to get from one scene to the next.  I could have filled in the empty spaces with Darren brooding and being sad, but that would end up being grating (he’s a pretty downer of a character).  Conflicts and characters were being introduced but there still wasn’t enough to keep the story moving.

Usually when I’m stuck I just write through it and/or give it a day or two to figure it out, but that wasn’t working this time either.  There wasn’t enough for me to build on, plenty to build to, nothing to build on.  I like layers and layers, but they have to connect, every layer has to be necessary.

I’ll go back to it.  Writing this blog, getting this off my chest, looking at it through a different prism, it can be done, and eventually will be done.  It’s ultimately a fat (yet altered) portion of my life that I feel the need to get down.  Even now, talking about how I’m stuck on something, I can see parallels between me and the story, and the character of Darren (and his love of commas).  What I have in mind is in fact a satire on the writing process itself, so the whole situation is kinda funny in that respect.

What I’m going to do is another thing I do when I’m stuck on something, move on to something else, something that maybe I haven’t been rolling around in my head for as long, but I’m still intensely interested in writing.  I’m going to write a horror story.

“Pool”, in the simplest of terms, is about a guy who finds in the woods behind his house a pool of water that duplicates whatever ends up in it.  The more something is duplicated, however, the weirder it comes out.

It should be good, I’ve never written down a horror story before, so I feel it will be a fun exercise, to try my hand at writing something scary and weird.  I can thank H.P. Lovecraft for the inspiration, but this will be from my own style of writing.  I’m not even going to try to meet his level of eloquence he was capable of, that would just be silly for me to attempt.

For a while I’ve had the ambition to write a collection of weird tales and “Pool” would probably be the anchor of it. The story is not going to be very long I don’t think, probably 50-70 pages, so a collection makes sense.  I’m thinking I could perhaps publish it alone and get to writing the other ones (maybe after “Boxhandler” if I can figure that out) and come out with the collection, which would probably be 4-5 stories total.  My other weird tale ideas aren’t really full yet and not sure if they will all work at this point.

I’m anxious to get something else out there other than “The Crowd and the Merrimack”,  but I’m not going to just shove something out there.   It has to be polished.  We’ll see how this one goes.

Here’s to whatever comes next.  Thanks for reading.

-Bryce Ian