Proof of My Novel’s Life - 2/20/26
Hello, friends! This is a post for those of you who have been very gently (and not so gently) helping to get the gears in my head grinding, and to start getting the words popping out on this here book I’ve been poking at for a bit. I thought I could do a double whammy with this post, both giving a little progress report to those of you cracking whips at me, and also to use it as a bit of public accountability with regards to my progress.
Isn’t the internet fun?
So, here we are at this first marker on the road to a finished book. This week was about fleshing out characters. There are quite a few in the story so far, and it’s been all about histories and backstories and voices. Know your characters like you know thyself, after all.
I’m not ready to talk plot yet (if I even do here, because I don’t want to really give away spoilers or anything like that for future readers), but I’ve been running a mental string from points A to B to Z, just to get a feel for where the beginning is, and where the end point might be. I will say that it’s starting to shape up as a sort of Terry Pratchett/Douglas Adams/Jonathan L. Howard vibe about the broadcast news business in the late 1990s. If I were pitching it to Netflix, I’d call it a mix of Anchorman and Brazil with just a touch of Zodiac for flavor. Mmm… delicious, delicious serial killer zest…
Anyway! I don’t have a page or word count for this update, since it’s mostly been laying the foundations this week, but the momentum is building! I don’t know if that means that I require more whipping or less. As is said in the broadcast news business: only time will tell!
(We hate cliches in the news business, which is why we use them almost ceaselessly; there is so much self-hatred in broadcasting.)
(It’s like déjà vu all over again.)
Latest 3 posts
Older Posts I'd Like You to See