This new project is challenging me in so many ways. I have always been a sequential writer. A story comes to mind and I work it out sequentially.
My last book, Fragments of Humanity, that was one that was different as it was not entirely sequential, but it was concurrently sequential. What I mean by that is the story was the same story repeated four times by four different primary characters. Each of their accounts could be put side by side together (concurrent) and they would start at approximately the same time and they definitely all conflate back to a single story near the end.
This time, though, I am jumping all over the place. There will be an idea for a part of the story and I find it important to capture that story and get it down onto digital paper. At some point I am going to have to put this all together in a fashion that makes it all coherent in a way that it may not be at the moment. But I think that it will be fun to do it this way – it is creating a different kind of art, one which requires me to put together a puzzle. It may ultimately make this a better book because it will force me to reconsider everything as I try to organize the book.
When you write a sequential story from beginning to end and it flows, it becomes more difficult to deconstruct the work and remaster it because the story will not flow in your own mind. It is irrelevant what others think because your mind is made up – the story works best in the order I wrote it dammit!
This time that is virtually impossible. Now, fair warning, this book is going to be long; longer than Middle of Nothing.
It is going to tell some stories about the deconstruction of not just a community, but a nation and the world. It is beyond just dystopian, it is apocalyptic. But I do not see the “end” as a single event, I see it is a quick deterioration on several fronts. Let’s just say that my approach to the end is a multi-factoral attack on everything and everyone. Think of my apocalypse of the Earth having occurred much like death from AIDS occurs. It is an infection on so many fronts that it is much more complicated than “a nuclear war” or “a meteor hits the earth.” No, that is too simple. Not even a worldwide plague or natural disaster will suffice for my vision. It HAS to be multi-factoral – that is real. But to get there, from a guy in a hospital bed with amnesia is going to take some work; complicated work.
These are exciting times indeed as I continue to work on my craft!