Idea Soup

iamaikencom on 25 July 2024

The 2027 novel sloshes about up there. Holding is like holding soup. Shaping it remains out of reach yet.

In my thoughts, I don’t think much about past stories. Doesn’t do me any good, especially when it was good. I attempted to do a short-form video that shows me writing out the opening paragraphs of the 2024 novel, The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County.

I left public service several years ago. Yet with the perversity of the Fates, I still find myself standing next to dead bodies for hours. I still find myself driving to car wrecks. And like yesterday, standing in a house being destroyed by violence, fear, alcohol, and incurable illnesses. The events echo a life’s work. Someone dials 911, and then I walk in.

In the video, you’d see my hand holding a fountain pen writing these words out. While you guys may not know the story, yet, I do. I am able to see the entire structure of the story in that graph. It has form, structure, and is firm. Not sloshy like soup.

2027 novel behaves like fine beach sand from Cranes Beach, north of Boston, it spills between the fingers. I have this drawing booklet with wee sketches in it. At one moment, I have an elderly New England woman who lives alone in the woods. Grandmotherly, but not. Hansel and Gretel or a small lass in a red cloak? Likely neither, of course. The little treatment, sketch, I did up let me explore my native woods with spring ephemerals that grow on the forest floor just after the snow clears.

Floating in my soupy thoughts is a love story with two teens, and for fun, I think they’ll be straight. Why not? I’ve heard that love can support the arc of a novel, and rather a few dramas.

And of course, I have my normal add-ins: Alex Flynn, Sarah Ann Musgrave, Brighid Doran, and Harry. And this crew bring their own kit-bag of chaos: death, suicides, car wrecks, arrests. My sketchy notes tell me stories of medicine and crime that I can use to season the story.

As I get the characters developed, I need to let the plot and subplots find me and I put fingers to the keyboard. I should not admit that I am impatient to get started. For now, the soup simmers.

The End is just the beginning

iamaikencom on 2 July 2024

Captain Henry is a novel that has a foothold in at least three wars spanning 150 years. Told primarily as first person and present-tense accounts from members of one family.

Stolen Mountain

iamaikencom on 19 April 2024

The story of Trowbridge Vermont looks as messy and chaotic as the forests here. The first novel in the series helped me scrape the rust off the process of writing novels freeing me from the structures of technical writing, but I stuck too close to exposé. When done with the novel called “Trowbridge Vermont”, I called it a flop.

I jumped into a second book about Trowbridge. This book, being released in September of 2024, starts in metro-Boston then lands in Trowbridge twenty or more years later. That book earned the name “The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County“.

Needing a book to release in 2025, I put my focus back onto the flop called “Trowbridge Vermont”. I re-wrote it from scratch. I think I kept part of one chapter. When done with the manuscript, I looked at the nameless digital manuscript. T2 is a terrible name. I don’t need Arnie Schwartzenegger telling us all he’ll be back

How to Create a Title

Me, I had a lot of bad ideas before a good one. In a book about fraud, started thinking about stealing things. Fraud is theft. Theft of confidence. Theft of property. Theft of money. I played on that idea. Stealing Monday. Stealing Tuesday. Tuesday’s on the phone to Wednesday. Wednesday was in a movie I watched recently. I wonder what we can watch on streaming tonight? The following day, I recognized that the bad guy(s) stole a mountain. I pictured it like those magicians who stole Lady Liberty and the Eiffel Tower decades ago. Poof, you’re mountain is gone.

Then because stream-of-consciousness, I wondered what a Stollen Mountain may taste of look like. Even that image worked for me, a lumpy fruit bread with icing and icing sugar. It isn’t a festive bread served during the yule tide, it is a novel about the woman who chased a guy who stole a mountain from the good people of Vermont.