However, I think I may take advantage of the extra write-ins and the spirit of productivity that NaNo creates to work on expanding my Chuck Chaykin story into a novel. It’s already over 8,000 words, which is a little long to sell to a short story market anyway, and could easily be expanded. It’s the kind of story in which a publisher like Baen or Tor might be interested.

The trick will be weaving the two characters together. Chaykin is a rough and bitter mercenary, albeit one who is a bit of a softy deep down. His sidekick, Val, is a teenage orphan girl raised in a prep school for psychics. They have certain shared experiences that bring them together, and I know there’s a fun chemistry between the two, but their stories before they meet are so vastly different that it may be difficult to easily switch between the two plots. Or should I skip her story and not introduce her until they meet? I don’t want to shortchange her, but I’m afraid it would seem like two completely different books crammed together.

I’ll have to do a little world (or universe, rather) building. I have a general idea of how the setting works, but I haven’t worked out specifics.

More importantly, I’ll need to design the ship. In any setting where the heroes spend their time mostly aboard some sort of vessel instead of a particular city or planet, the ship becomes not just the setting but a character unto herself. I’ll need to work out how big Chaykin’s ship is, how many rooms, how it’s laid out, etc. The ship isn’t really featured much in the short story, so I didn’t have to worry about it before. Heck, I had a hard time even coming up with a name.

At any rate, you get the idea. I’ll probably spend the next few weeks working on these issues and if I can come up with a decent working outline I may go for it. I don’t know if I’ll go for the insane NaNo pace, but with a little energon and a lot of luck I’ll get a significant amount of work done.

I doubt I’ll get much else written in the next few days. There’s the mess of Thanksgiving, of course, and I’ve taken on a freelance copyediting project that’s going to eat up some time as well. It’s a fun project, the contents of which I will only hint at!

However…I think I have made an unexpected and delightful breakthrough as concerning the Asta the Android story I was trying to write previously and got distracted from. The villain featured in this section of the NaNo piece is heavily tied to Asta. It’s simply later in his career than the point at which our android detective met (and subsequently incarcerated) him. Now that I’ve firmly cemented this guy in my mind (well, mostly – I still need a good name for him), I think writing the Asta story should go easier.

So I’m going to set myself a goal for December – write the origin story for Asta the Android. The tagline: Murder! Robots! Mad Scientists! Lesbians?

Great. Now I’ve set myself up for all the “robot lesbian” Google searches. My apologies if that’s what brought you here. Your unnatural but intriguing desires can only go unfulfilled.

I would really like to go all superhero in December. Look out for some superhero flash as well. I’ve been neglecting that urge for too long.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Kenneth took another look at the man. He was an older gentleman, with a nose that seemed too small for his long, wrinkled face. He had bushy, grey eyebrows. Oddest of all, he had very little hair, just patches on the sides of his head. He dressed all in black, with a high collar. In his lap he held a briefcase, on top of which he placed a bulging leather bag. He folded his bony hands across the bag. This was clearly the strange man Kelly had been so worried about yesterday.

“What’s your deal, mister?” Kenneth demanded.

The old man turned his gaze on the boy. His eyes narrowed and Kenneth immediately regretted speaking up. Then the man relaxed suddenly.

“What have you got there?” The man’s voice was deep, with a hint of a strange guttural accent that Kenneth had never heard. The stranger snatched the watch out of Kenneth’s hands. Kenneth almost fought him, but there was a dark glint in the stranger’s eyes that cowed him into submission.

The stranger turned the watch over in his hands. His fingers traced the intricate, stained etchings. He pried open the cover and squinted at the face. He muttered beneath his breath, but Kenneth couldn’t make out the words. The stranger rummaged in his bag a moment and withdrew a small screwdriver. The boy found his courage.

“Hey, what are you doing?” he asked. “That was my dad’s! He was a hero!”

“Of that I’ve no doubt, boy,” the stranger said. “This is his blood, hmm?” Kenneth’s gut clenched, and he fought back tears. The stranger popped open the back of the watch and peered within.

“You see, boy,” the stranger said, “human beings are not so different from this watch. Everything in our lives is not really so different from this watch. We tick. We tock. We have little gears that must turn with perfect precision to keep us working.” He prodded the mysterious inner workings of the clock with his screwdriver for a moment, then turned it so that Kenneth could look within. A pair of gears, discolored by dark stains, had been jarred out of place. The stranger scraped at them with his screwdriver, and the stain flaked off. “And the blood of heroes can hold us all back.” Once the gears were mostly clean, he pushed them back into their proper position. He closed up the back panel and handed the watch over to Kenneth.

Kenneth glared at the stranger a moment, then cautiously wound the watch. It began to tick, and the hands on the face lurched into motion. Kenneth scraped at the stain with his thumbnail.

Lieutenant Gary Talbert crouched beside the body, grimacing. The man shrouded by alley shadows had not died quickly, or painlessly. He counted off with his pen.
“Yep, twelve,” he called. Talbert cut a tall, lean figure a crisp brown suit. His clean, chiseled features matched the neat lines of his clothes. A service revolver bulged conspicuously under his jacket. The detective kept his blonde hair short, a habit left over from time spent in the military.
Rich Masson, his partner, stood back on the sidewalk, well within the early morning sunlight as it crept across the lake. Despite two decades with the Chicago Police Department, Masson had never been good with dead bodies. His stocky form tilted away from the carnage as he pretended to search for tracks at the entrance to the alley. The beat cop who had found the body on this warm morning stood close, face wrinkled in disgust but apparently unable to tear his gaze from the mutilated body.
They’d instantly recognized the corpse. Jack Gerard, highly trusted advisor to the Mayor. He’d been a friend to the CPD on more than one occasion, channeling funds and helping cover up embarrassing blunders. Now he lay in a lumpy puddle of his own blood, a dozen screwdrivers protruding from his torso. Gerard’s vacant eyes stared skyward, his mouth agape in a silent scream he’d never finish. His salt and pepper mustache was flecked with blood. Talbert gently pressed against a clean patch of skin on the man’s wrist. The skin was still warm. He prodded the clothes as best he could without disturbing the tools.
“Wallet’s still here,” Talbert said. “No way to get to it without removing some of these screwdrivers.”
“Are…are those powder burns?” the patrolman leaned close and pointed at a dusting of black marks on the screwdriver handles.
“Little early in the morning to be drinking, son,” said Masson. He finally ventured forward and peered over Talbert ‘s shoulder. “What’s that on his wrist?”
“Handcuffs,” Talbert said. “They’ve been cut. He had a briefcase or something cuffed to himself. Who knows?”
“Jesus,” Masson muttered. “Daley is going to have the whole damn US Army in town for this party.”
Talbert stood and brushed alley dirt from his trousers. His gaze drifted up, between the grey brick walls that loomed on either side of the alley. In the gaps between the buildings, he spotted the elevated train clattering past. In the street beyond Masson, a street car rattled, mostly empty as it moved by. He mentally traced the local bus routes. This close to Comiskey Park, there were any number of ways the killer could have escaped the area. He could be half way to Milwaukee by now. Or he could be in the restaurant two doors down.

#

I’ll be setting up a new page of the blog for this year, and I’ll set it to fall in chronological order. Each day I’ll post an excerpt of what I wrote that day, just a couple hundred words. Posting here on the main page will probably be sparse. I doubt I’ll have much energy for it.

Just a couple of days to go!

Edit: Oh, hmm. Apparently I can’t make posts to Pages. I’ll have to give this a little thought.

I’ve obtained so far, a few books for NaNo:

Chicago:  A Historical Guide to the Neighborhoods, produced by the Chicago Historical Society in 1979. This was written right around when a lot of the novel is taking place, so that should be very helpful. I know absolutely nothing about how Chicago is laid out or where people live or anything. It seems like a lot of films, for example, of Chicago focus a lot of the architecture and what not, but don’t really talk about the geography or neighborhoods. It’s very different from stories set in New York, where the burroughs are very well known.

New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities, by Janet Abu-Lughod. This is kind of a sociologist’s view of these big cities. It’s looking at the big picture and large events. Looks like it’s a good mix of history, politics, and cultural demographic information.

I have a third book about Chicago that’s a history book (don’t have it handy at the moment).

Startlingly handy little tidbit I discovered: Chicago’s first and only female mayor was elected during this era. That dovetails very nicely with some of my themes. I’ll need to look up some more stuff on this lady.

Needed still: Greek gods, women in police history, Chicago public school system

The more I’m looking at all this, the longer I think I’m going to spend on Kelly’s childhood.

I have a set of characters I love and a general idea of how I want the story (or stories, probably) to go, so I have a lot of hope for this year’s effort. I really need to get to work on a solid outline, though.

If anyone in the Fort Worth area wants to join us for write-ins, let me know and I’ll post the relevant info. We’ll be meeting at least once a week.

It’s still over a month away of course, but I think the biggest thing that kills NaNo attempts (or at least mine) is lack of preparation. If you’re writing a fantasy/science fiction story, you’d better have your world pretty well built by the time you sit down to even outline, I think. That can take a lot of time. I tried to do all that on short notice two years ago and it didn’t work out so well.

I’m determined to get a lot of material written for Kelly Sienna, The Scarlet Ranger. I’ve already got one published short story about her, plus several short exercises (mostly posted here somewhere, if you look around). A lot of her life story is written out in my head, so I think I can put together a pretty decent outline. It might be roughly broken down into something like this:

Part 1 – The Early Early Years, about Kelly as a young girl, when she first receives her powers and massive events that will shape the rest of her life happen.

Part 2 – The Teen Years, when she discovers just how different her powers make her, and must decide what to do with them.

Part 3 – Early Hero Years, involvement with the second generation Liberty Gang

Part 4 – The Experienced Years, as she comes into her own as a hero and her rocky romance with The Chicago Defender.

Something like that, anyway. That would be 12,500 words per section. 

 So now I’ve got to decide on a couple of things. Do I want to write it as several novellas? Should I avoid the decades-spanning story and focus on just one of those periods? If I decide to write a later period, will I regret limiting what I can do with the earlier times?

I’m leaning toward a novella of each time period. This way I may be able to avoid Star Wars-style continuity issues, and if I feel like there’s enough story in one, it can always be expanded. I may add another Part, which would give me five 10,000-word stories. If some fall short I can always fill in with much shorter one-off adventures. I don’t have a solid villain for her yet, so I could maybe do little flash pieces about whoever that turns out to be to fill in the gaps.

Anyone else out there doing NaNo? It’s daunting, but as I understand it, it becomes easier once you get it done once. That’s what I’m hoping for, anyway.

So when Jens sent out this prompt this month, it got me a little excited (and I didn’t have to grab a dictionary to understand it ):

Prompt: Write a story with the best dang fight scene ever. But it also has to mean something. Within the context of the story. A spectacular, mind-shattering fight scene, but with emotional heft and moral repercussions, in under a thousand words. Yeah!

So I took the opportunity to fledge out a little more the Scarlet Ranger’s history. With some expansion, I think this might might a pretty good stand-alone short story, so I’ll just post a brief bit of it here. This is set in the early days of her career, before Kelly even took the mantle of the Scarlet Ranger. A member of the Liberty Gang, Lieutenant Governor (formerly sidekick to the Governor, of course) is featured as well.

The more I think about it and the more I write about her, the more I want to NaNo Kelly’s story. I enjoy writing her enough that I think I could keep it up for a month, and portions of the story are already rolling around in my head.

Anyway, on to a dark, dingy Chicago alley, mid 1980s…

She licked her lips and picked at her mask, hoping she’d applied the spirit gum properly. “Okay, yeah. What do we do?”

Lieutenant grinned, and Kelly saw the wrinkles in his face deepen. None of those wrinkles had been in the posters she’d had as a kid. “Just follow my lead.”

He sprang from the rooftop. As far as she knew, Lieutenant had no powers, but the man was fearless. He grasped the rusty metal rails of the fire escape and swung out, his cape billowing.

In the alley below, Lieutenant’s appearance did not go unnoticed. The five men unloading boxes from a stolen armored truck cried out. Two broke and ran, but Lieutenant would have none of that. Even as he plunged the last ten feet to the damp floor of the alley, one arm lashed out, casting a pair of weighted lines around their legs. As the runners crashed to the ground, their more foolish comrades drew pistols.

“I think that’s my cue,” Kelly muttered. She hopped off the roof, reaching for the fire escape. She missed, misjudging her own strength; her fingers swiped open air several feet from the rail.

“Fuck!” she shouted, tumbling gracelessly to the ground. She slammed into concrete, cracks splintering in every direction. “Ah, God-” she lifted her head to find that she’d fallen amongst the three gunmen. Kelly froze, terror overwhelming the rational part of her mind screaming that their bullets wouldn’t hurt her. They stared at her in confusion for a moment. They exchanged glances, and grins split their faces. They raised their guns.

Anyway, rocky start today. Maybe I should have gone with something different. I’m not sure I’m feeling this book right now. We’ll see. I don’t think I’ll get anything done this weekend, since I’ll be out of town, so I’ll have a lot of catching up to do next week. I also still have to finish up my Secret Santa story. Ugh.

End word count today: 1,535, just shy of the minimum goal per day. Here’s the first couple hundred words.

Mori Katsuro was at a funeral when the event began.

His employer’s grandson, little Schichoro, had fallen to leukemia. A somber, silent funeral, attended by hundreds of the grandfather’s employees and relatives. Schichoro’s parents walked about as though in a daze, their faces tight, expressionless. Katsuro watched them and gripped his own son’s hand; Naoki had been a classmate of Schichoro’s, less than a year older. Naoki’s face was a mask of composure, but Katsuro suspected he’d be cradling the boy to sleep that night. Katsuro stifled a proud smile when Naoki glared at a small group of children huddled around a Nintendo, rosaries draped around their necks.

The funeral disrupted the streets of central Nagoya for a full hour as the guests arrived at the temple. Katsuro and his son sat on the third row, just behind the family. Mr. Maeda sat near the casket, beside his daughter and son-in-law. He gave tight nods as visitors walked past, bowing. The priest chanted as dozens of people approached the altar and offered incense for the boy’s urn. Katsuro watched the urn, the future resting place of the young man. He thought of the family’s duty to pick through the boy’s bones after the cremation. What would the bones be like? Will the cancer have left enough behind? Or would they be too brittle and crumble between the chopsticks? He suppressed a shudder and looked down, ashamed at his own thoughts.