I hope you like pirates and big fish…
I know this post is late. I am sorry. Time got away from me and I couldn’t settle on what to write about. But, with a little outside help, I landed on a brief history and intro for the project I’m currently drafting.
Before I get too far into this, I want to do a quick plug for a recent publication I’m in: Bloodlines: the Resurrected. For those of you into urban dark fantasy TTRPG’s with a vampiric twist, this is for you!
Alright, without further ado, I would like to welcome you to ‘In The Wake of Leviathans’.
This is a story about pirates and big fish, as the title of this post and the project imply. It started when my partner and I were walking to the grocery store talking about niches we thought needed more attention. Since we’re both into fantasy and science-fiction, I said pirates and he said mechs (big robots/robot-like creatures). After a single conversation about how to make pirates a little more unique in comparison to Pirates of the Caribbean, I couldn’t let go of the idea. A planet and it’s general history appeared, characters and their relationships to one another grew from there.
But that isn’t the version of the story I’m working on. After a couple of months wandering my way through a plot and the start of a draft, I got stuck. I’ve learned that getting stuck in drafting usually has to do with the plot not working. Something goes wrong in the sequence of events, and even if you don’t know what it is, it stops you (me) in your (my) tracks. So I had to go back to the drawing board. I was worried the story was boring (it was) and I didn’t know what to do.
A quick aside: most people think authors are solitary creatures whose stories come only from themselves. This is changing, recently, but I want to make it clear that we are rarely solitary. There are people coming along with us during most of the writing journey. From the people who help us through the initial ideas to make it interesting, to writing buddies during drafting, beta and alpha readers (nothing to do with wolves and everything to do with the stage of revising you’re on), to the final draft that gets a proofread by someone else.
This was the point in the process where I realized I’d been going at it alone and it wasn’t working. So, my lovely partner and I went on a walk. I info-dumped about what I had, what I wanted to do, and where I was feeling the weaknesses in my planning. He helped by pointing out all the plot holes, filling in those gaps (with a mind more logical than mine) and brainstormed additional storylines to help boost the interest of the story. Everything he suggested made sense within the context of the story, but were things I hadn’t been able to see on my own. He even wrote out a timeline of events for me, something which I am endlessly thankful for. If you’re a writer whose project has stalled and you don’t know what’s wrong, consult your most logical friend.
After that conversation, and several subsequent conversations about heists and pirates and magic fish, the current version of ‘In The Wake of Leviathans’ was born. Now, it’s a story about a character returning to something she loves, being scared of failing upon her return, and saving something she didn’t know existed. Without giving too much away, there are pirates, big fish (leviathan fish, in fact), ex girlfriends, stolen ships, personal growth, and merblins. If this story sounds up your alley in any way, I hope you stick around.
My goals are to query agents with this story, and hopefully, eventually, sell it to a publisher for traditional publication. But first things first, I have to write the damn thing.
So before I get back to drafting, I’ll say thank you for joining me in this update. I hope to see you again next month on the 15th, when I will definitely post on time (this is not a promise).
Content and hopeful,
Micaëla