The New One

Since I am now three chapters in and have reached double digits on the progress percentage, I have officially added the new project to the progress meter.

I mentioned that it was different from what I've done before, and I think the title reflects that. For now, I'm calling it The Ideal Companion Journal. It is still a working title, and may change as the work goes on and more is developed, but that it for now.

No story details as of yet; I'm going to keep this one close to the chest, just because I'm not sure where it's going to end up. But with the writing I did on it tonight, I think I've found the stride for it so I'm at least confident I won't be shelving it any time soon. Will I actually push to publish this one? That I'm not so sure about yet, for a couple of simple enough reasons.

With any book, be it horror or science fiction or fantasy or whatever, the author needs to sum it up in a couple of sentences, and needs to provide a synopsis of it to any publisher they submit it to. With this one, I'm not sure if I can do that.

For all the rest, even if I haven't written them on paper yet, that description was pretty easy. It's the same as what you would see if you walk into any bookstore, pick up a paperback, and read the text on the back cover. With this one, I have no idea how to even begin to describe it. Maybe it'll come in time, as it gets further along. It's just that with the others, I could do it from the get-go. Maybe it changed slightly as it went on, as was the case when I was calling Consequences "Graduation Summer", but at least I had something. Here, I've got nothing.

For those who don't know, the synopsis a publisher wants is a two or three page document that tells the basics of your story from start to finish, twists, turns, and all. They want the beginning, middle, and end. There's no such thing as consideration for spoilers in one of these. For an example, go to IMDB, look for a television series, pick a random episode, and look for a synopsis. See how it gives away everything? Yeah, same goes for this, just longer.

As you can tell from the title, this one is written like a journal, or a diary if that's an easier way to look at it. That makes a synopsis difficult to write, because just like a journal, the main character jots down some pretty random thoughts. Again, this might be easier once the story's more developed, but right now it's a pretty daunting thought.

Another side effect of doing it this way is that it doesn't have traditional chapter breaks. Yeah, I know I call them that, just like I did in the intro to this post, but that's just to make it easier to explain. What it has are a progressive series of dates and times which comprise the journal entries. That makes things rather... interesting... yeah, we'll go with that. It makes things interesting when it comes to how the book is broken up.

So I don't know where this will end up. You'll know once I know, that much is certain. I will say that just from what I've done so far, this is one of the most difficult things I've ever written. Not just from the technical details, either. The story itself is already pretty damned disturbing. Of course, that's what makes good horror. If it freaks me out, odds are it will you, too. That's why I'm not stopping, and why I'm determined to finish it. Even if it never gets out of the beta reader stage, I think the results will be pretty interesting.

And now, sleep. Tomorrow, that long-delayed day off from the writing. Being inside this guy's head is, well, troublesome. I think I need a day to make sure I'm not slipping too far into him. Remember, I already know what this guy's planning deep down. It won't be pleasant. I'm starting to wonder if that goes for both of us, or just him.

Not really. I'm pretty stable, mentally, or at least no one seems overly concerned about me yet. But I keep remember Mark Ruffalo from The Avengers when he described Loki: "...his brain's a bag of cats." Yeah, that about sums my main character up.

Anyway, sleepy time! Good night, folks. Pleasant dreams!