While Together in Percival is off with its beta readers, I’m trying to get some work done on the next thing. I think of it as the Rowhouse Book, but the currently planned real title is “Other Duties As Required,” though that’s subject to change.
It’s being a bit difficult. I think there are three reasons for that.
- The beginning of a book is always the hardest part. (For me at least; I don’t know if that’s true for other writers.) Usually that’s because I know less about what’s happening in it, but it’s still true here even though I have more notes on it than I’ve had for previous books – though, granted, they’re still random notes, not an outline. I am a ‘pantser’, as in ‘writing by the seat of my pants’, making it up as I go along. No, real authors don’t necessarily do outlines – Stephen King and Matt Dinniman (Dungeon Crawler Carl) are two famous ones who don’t. Different people work differently.
- The beginning of this book are a bit depressing – I need to put my main characters in a difficult situation in order to push them into taking the drastic step that kicks off the rest of the story. I’ve just now gotten to the point where things start to open up.
- My first book was partly based on several real-life events, and partly just to see if I could write long-form fiction at all. The beginning was hard, but I expected it to be. The next two were continuations, logical developments of the world I’d set up. Yes, Macrina has a lot of me in her, but at first she was just reacting to things that happened to her. Then the next two books were about me getting better, Macrina taking more agency in her own life, and generally, things developing from the situation. This new series is closer to me in some ways. It’s sparked by a recurring dream I had for years, by the sense of everything being just too small I had whenever I returned to visit family in the house where I grew up, maybe even by the sense of relief I had when I first read The Magician’s Nephew and found a very similar series of connected houses where there were unexpected connections between the houses and an escape to another world, instead of little boxes to live in where you could hear all your neighbors.
(Here I should note that being able to hear your neighbors (only when they’re loud) and not being able to step foot outside your house without talking to someone is both the bane and the glory of row house life. I’ve never lived anywhere else, including my current tiny town, with such a sense of community, of there always being people nearby you could rely on if you needed them. It’s the tiny houses that make me feel trapped, and the lack of green, more than the people. Though also, there were a lot more trees around in NE Philadelphia in the 1970s than there are today!)