Blogtober 9 – About Spellpunk
I’m not posting the rant I mentioned in yesterday’s blog tober post. It’s written in my journal, but I’m thinking I’ll hold off on that one. Sometimes we shouldn’t put some of the things we write into the world. I have some soul searching to do on that one period so, possibly to be continued…
Instead, today I’m going to write about SPELLPUNK, my very first novel that I am now rewriting and posting on Patreon.
If I remember properly, I started SPELLPUNK when I was 22. It started as a novella for a creative writing class. Well, I originally intended it as a short story, but it got too big. I fiddled with it for the next couple of years, adding to it now and then. When I was 26, I joined a writer’s group and dove into it with the intent of it being my first published novel. The works that inspired that crazy mess of a wide-sweeping novel were: Stephen Bruce Vlad Taltos series, Glen Cook’s the Garrett Files (this was years and years before Dresden), Charles deLint’s Newford stories and novels, and White Wolf’s World of Darkness games. When I finally got to the end of that first draft, it was pushing 300,000 words and somewhere along the lines of 750 to 800 single-spaced pages.
I won’t go into completely how completely appropriate it was. Back in the 90s, the appropriation conversation hadn’t reached my mid-20s ears. I was too busy immersing myself in swing dancing. Back then, I thought I was being diverse and inclusive. Going back over the original manuscript… well… I cringe. A lot.
However… I’m seeing a lot of good stuff too. Some of it is really good stuff. By the time I turned 30, I knew spell punk wasn’t right for publication. Thank God self-publishing wasn’t as viable a thing then as it is now. I would have totally self-published that mess of a novel. And, as I am known to say, just because you can self-publish a book, doesn’t mean you should self-publish a book. The original draft of SPELLPUNK is absolute proof of that truism.
On my 30th birthday, I started work on a new project: Tears of Rage. SPELLPUNK got shelved. I dusted it off every once in a while, but each time, something in me knew it still wasn’t time.
In November of 2017, I decided to do NaNoWriMo. My plan was to have no plan. At 12:01 AM on November 1st, I would just start writing. A little before midnight on Halloween that year, I saw a video on YouTube. The Postmodern Jukebox did a cover of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” with Wayne Brady on the vocals. It’s glorious. Howling mad fun. Watch it. I decided I wanted to write something as zany and awesome as that video. Oh, and I had a couple of names for characters: Madison Greenrise and Arden Sunback. (Those names have an origin story too. Ask me about it sometime.)
I didn’t win NaNoWriMo that year, but I had the beginnings of a couple of interesting story arcs and five amazing characters: Madison Greenrise, Arden Sunback, the black-nailed man, Truxel Rhode, and Mr. Suit. One thing I was lacking was direction. I had no idea where everything was going or how things might eventually connect. So… and let it simmer on one of the many burners in the back of my mind.
In 2018, in one of the last classes of my MFA in fiction, I wrote a single-page vignette about a human and a bipedal, sentient octopus trying to figure out a math problem despite a lack of a shared language. I loved writing that piece. But I didn’t have anywhere to go with it. So it just lingered as one of those cool prompts I wrote…
Until…
Something clicked…
And…
I can’t really recall the moment they all came together in one story. Maybe it wasn’t one moment, but a series of moments. I first dove back into SPELLPUNK during COVID. I was writing chapters (or rewriting them in some cases from the original manuscript) and reading them on Thursday nights on my Twitch channel. When things started opening up again and the audience shrunk, I stopped reading on Twitch. I also stopped working on the chapters.
The various sSPELLPUNK storylines lingered once again. Though, this time I had ideas on how they all connected. I needed to let them all simmer next to each other until they boiled over into each other, making those connections stronger, and becoming a wonderful imaginative stew. And then… As happens when the time is ready… the various storylines of SPELLPUNK erupted into each other, and my creative spirit said, “It’s time.”
Like with The 9/10 Memwar, SPELLPUNK is me riffing and experimenting and having fun with the new kind of storytelling. Instead of playing around with language and voice as I did with The 9/10 Memwar, with SPELLPUNK , I’m playing around and experimenting with genre conventions and different kinds of story structures. And I’m not talking about basic structures most writers talk about like the three-act Hollywood structure, the hero’s journey, or the seven-point story structure. I’m talking about structures far outside popular Western media. I’m talking spiraling stories, a modified 8-legged Essay for fiction rather than testing an imperial China, Theater of the Absurd, Narrative Keystone Theory, and a full exploration of writing into the Plot Algorithm, along with any others that look cool that I have yet to discover. I’m also going to toss in some layman’s understanding of chaos theory into the mix as well. Because, why not?
When I started posting The 9/10 Memwar to Partreon, back when it was The 9/10 Project, I wasn’t thinking about publication. I was writing it just to see if I could do something I hadn’t really seen anyone else do. I’m glad I managed to pull off The 9/10 Memwar as a thing I could publish and that people like. I’ve received some really kind words about it. I’ve also received some confused looks. That’s part of the joy of it. The thing I love best about The 9/10 Memwar is all the memories I have of writing it, the doing of it. That’s what I’m hoping for with this new, and hopefully last foray into SPELLPUNK. I want to love the doing of this as much as I love the doing of The 9/10 Memwar.
I’m all in on this crazy story that I wasn’t ready for in my 20s. I was ambitious and creative back then, but looking back, I did NOT possess the chutzpah to go all in everything that this story needs to be. I let some people browbeat me out of some of the more daring elements of my original vision of the novel because, “That’s not the way a science fiction or fantasy story works.” I also didn’t have the technical skill to earn everything I was trying to do. Well, now I have the chutzpah and the understanding of writing to pull it all off. Or, if I don’t, to have a really good time on the first go. I’ll have to see about pulling it off on the 2nd, 3rd, or 10th go. (Hopefully I don’t need that many drafts, as I’ve already gone through several already.)
I hope you’ll check out SPELLPUNK on my Patreon. Unless you’re allergic to awesome. Then steer clear. You don’t need to support the Patreon to read it. I’ve got each chapter available to everyone. Read at your leisure. It’s got magic, spaceships, secret societies, alternate universes, a cosmic dragon trickster god, mystery, adventure, weird techno-magic, and sentient, bipedal cephalopods. Think Borne Identity meets Goonies meets Fringe… if written as a collaboration between Phillip K. Dick and Sir Terry Pratchett. But also totally not any of those because Gallowglas’s weird mind may take things in a totally different direction with any given chapter.
And you can read it, FREE!!!
