Progress on my novels

Warning: Possible Spoilers

As some of you know, I’ve been working on the sequel to Hell on $5 A Day, which has gone from a planned 3 novels, all featuring Alain, to at least 11 novels in a series I’m calling The New Heroes of Old™. As part of that, I’ve been trying to get myself back into a daily writing rhythm. I’m really happy that I knocked out 6,000 words in the past three days.

For those of you who need that translated: That’s ~18 pages in a standard paperback, though only about 5-6% of the expected total.

Sadly sinus issues have been messing with my ability to record my “As Read by The Author” audiobook of Hell on $5 A Day, which I was planning to podcast and time the end of the podcast to sync with the release of the second novel. If you’ve been following my music posts, the health issues that prompted “Come Take Me” may be causing the majority of my symptoms as knock-on effects.

Alain and Marie are in Los Angeles

The new novel, Sodom All over Again, takes Alain and Marie from the Ardennes to post WWII Los Angeles while introducing the concept of “mythological communities” to the universe-building. These are communities found in major metropolitan cities where vampires, werebeasts, ogres, and more support one another in existing in a world where they’re under threat from humanity. In fact, I had fun coming up with an honorific used for vampires in the Los Angeles community… Rosso (the Italian word for “red”). More importantly, it’s building Marie and Alain’s love story while building her out as a much more three-dimensional character with goals and unique qualities all her own. There’s a good reason Alain was willing to travel through Hell to be reunited with her and I have to flesh out their love story.

I’m 33,000 words into an expected 90,000-110,000 and they just arrived in Los Angeles at around 29,000 words.

I have a bad habit… I don’t plot every detail, every scene, every character in advance. I introduced a character on a whim whose mere existence creates plot ripples in at least two future books. Marie and Alain stay with her maternal aunt and her husband when they get to Los Angeles. I didn’t really know what either of them looked like or spoke like, until I started writing them.

My style is to write out broad narratives, then use them as guides as I go through. Every major event is a “fixed point in time” (to paraphrase “Doctor Who”), but everything else is flexible. For example, Mick the bartender on the second ring of Hell was made up as I went. Him cutting off his finger and giving it to Kurt was a spur of the moment idea. When I wrote the scene with Mick, I really didn’t know if we’d ever see him again. But we did. And we will again, but not until book 11.

Other things I’ve been dealing with are historical events I hadn’t even thought about until I had to start writing the Los Angeles arc. For example, people from the internment camps started trickling back to Los Angeles in 1945 after the orders to shut down the camps were issued in December 1944. The Japanese Americans sent to the camps returned to chaotic lives, many finding their homes and businesses gone or occupied by others. The other part is that I had Alain and Marie reach Los Angeles 5 weeks before Hiroshima. I’ve decided that the universe I’m building hews close to our own, historically, so I will have to account for both the returnees from the camps and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in more than a throwaway manner, but not as major plot points.

I’ve also spent a lot of time asking Google when words started getting used, when certain technologies were invented or popularized so I’m not introducing anachronisms.

In the upcoming chapter, Alain and Marie start working at the nightclub her uncle owns and Alain will be introduced to the Myth King of Los Angeles, who doesn’t even have a name yet… just a title… and that’s not simply me talking about the book. I can’t reveal the name or his mythological race because it was only yesterday that I realized that by creating a Myth Queen for the Paris arc, I now have to introduce a Myth King of Los Angeles or explain why one didn’t exist, and I have to decide how both this king and his potential successor(s) will influence the Los Angeles arcs of novels set in the 21st century.

Welcome to writing by the seat of your pants. But I can’t surprise you if I don’t surprise myself.