Black Monster

This year I am once again planning to take part in GothNoWriMo, I am aiming for 50, 000 words this time but may have to do it all in long hand – boo hiss. This is mainly due to me having spilt coffee in my laptop and it being in for repair 🙁

I have a couple of ideas but no title. I was concidering trying to finish off past projects but I like starting something fresh especially as I do have so many ideas!

I am going to do this in conjunction with a Childrens Writing Challenge just because I like to make things difficult! The Children’s project is called The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry and was written three years ago and then revised last year with extra poems added. So my aim is to spend 30 hours on it this October and to illustrate and prepare it for publication. This will hopefully be enough time for me to bring it to completion for an electric version to be avalible for download for the 31st and for my little girl to have a hand bounded version to enjoy on All Hallows Eve. So far she has had one hand drawn version with 7 poems in it – the original which unfortunatly got water spilled on it. The following year she got the words printed on A4 sheets with a cover tied together – she decorated it with stickers galour. Then last year she drew her own pictures 🙂

Anyway – wish me luck and hopefully I will have my laptop back soon 🙂

It is October the first just and before I begin there are a few things I need to get straight in my head – like what style I am writing in. I’m going to go for the slightly archaic feel but not using oldy woldy language but it will no doubt be too heavy on description 😉

I am also going to be putting pieces of work up on this blog this year – I didn’t last year as I wanted to try and get it published. I will probably put up a 1000 word pieces. The actual length of the story? Erm well you know I’m not sure – do I go for a novella or a novel – I think this question can only be answered once I have started writing it and see what sort of story it feels like.

I also need to decide on the cast – and do I have a love interest or not?

Cast currently stands at:

Mum
Dad
Twin girls around 18
Younger brother 14
Younger sister 10
Fay 25
Aunty 72
Possible Love interest the gardener 36

I decided in the end that I will probably just sort of work my way through the list so I am starting with Dark Fearies. I am thinking that it is going to be a sort of teen novel but this depends just how dark and twisted it ends up.

I’m thinking of calling it Dark Fay and having one of the characters as the Queen of the faeries.

So what is the storyline?

Family move into great aunts place, it contains lots of fairy statues – the great aunt is apparently suffering from dementia. Her youngest daughter is still living in the house but is wrapped up in her own world – she is only a few years older than the kids of the family who have moved in.

As the family settle in they start to notice stuff about the fairy statues – they seem to move and twist oddly sometimes. Then things start going wrong – dead pet, missing toys etc… evidence seems to point at the nutty daughter and then one of the kids goes missing. They are to to be sacrificed. Ending.

Ending is there because I am not sure yet exactly how it will end – are they rescued aren’t they? Is it the daughter isn’t it etc… plus I feel even if I did know I perhaps should not put it down here as it might ruin the whole story for someone.

So I am now counting the days till I can start writing! Roll on October 🙂

Been thinking up more ideas 🙂

6) The Diaries
7) Jewellery From a Stranger
8) Space Milk
9) Tendrils of Love
10) Elements of Hate

These are basically titles unlike the first five which were concepts – though often I find the two overlap.

I’ve been wondering on which story to take forward and how to expand the ideas etc… I plan to write a story line and chapter outlines for these stories but that is just the thing – I’m still concidering all of these stories and more ideas keep occuring to me. So I am going to write the ideas down and expand them all. I’m never very good at picking one project anyway so what I may well do – just to see how it goes is to have a primary project and when I reach my set word goal/time limit for that each day if I am feeling bored or just not raring to go I’ll switch to working on one of the others.

I’m going to be building them up a bit at a time in a formulaic way so it might just work – we will see.

I’ve been letting the ideas incubate – and they are growing.

1) Dark Fearies – wonderfully crafted metal and laquer fairies appear to be coming to life and terrorising a family.

2) Daemons – a love story across worlds, dimensions transcending good and evil and light and dark (an expansion on a short story I’ve written which was a re-work of something I started as a teen)

3) Ghosts in the Machine – ghosts start haunting computers

4) Zombie Soldiers – the ultimate weapon but the memories of life were too strong

5) Warewolf Beast – warewolf hunters kill indescriminatly worse for part of the month you will join them in their bloodied hunt clocked in the hairless flesh.

I have decided to do GothNoWriMo again this year – the challenge I have chosen this year is to write 30, 000 words of a dark or gothic piece of fiction.

I am going to start by brain storming and thinking on story line this month and writing in ernest next month.

Ideas so far:

1) Dark Fearies
2) Vampire/deamons
3) Ghosts in the machine
4) Zombie Soldiers
5) The Warewolf Beast

I thought it would be a good idea to make a list of fairy tales as a sort of reference for story ideas.

1. Little Red Ridding Hood
2. Billy Goat Gruff
3. Cinderella
4. Beauty and the Beast
5. Sleeping Beauty
6. Repunzel
7. The Magic Cooking Pot
8. Rumple Stiltskin
9. Goldy Locks
10. The Princess and the Pea

Just thinking on what I said last week – the concept of sweet nice wish granting fairies came from the Victorians before that they were spiteful, mischeavious and often deadly. I’m thinking on working on my own set of fea pictures including ones with tails and horns ie taking them back to a more elagent troll, goblin, gremlin type creature.

These creatures may well find themselves in tales of a dark kind.

The world of Fairy Tales and Nursery Rhymes are a rich source of the darkly horrifying. One of the things I would love to do is write a series of dark fairy tales – as in take the traditional stories and turn them into an intense rollercoaster of imagery and the like.

Think of Little Red Riding Hood, or Billy Goats Gruff, Witches and ovens and deep sleeps.

When writing horror, or dark fantasy I like to listen to people like Tori Amos, Nick Cave, P J Harvey, God Speed You! Black Emperor and Cradle of Filth. This is along with things like the Solaris sound track, Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd plus some of the more dramatic classical pieces.

I find music is very important to the writing mood.