Progress Report From Castle Diablo

Hello there

It’s one of my patented middle-of-the-night written posts for you today, as this week has gotten away from me somewhat.  

It’s been a rather stress one for one reason or another, and my physical reaction to that has been near narcolepsy.  Genuinely been falling asleep at the drop of a hat, and could do it right now if I wasn’t typing this.  Earlier on, I parked the car, and rather than get out I just sat with my eyes closed and dropped off immediately.  Maybe I am officially an old man now.  I might get a chair that I can nap in.

Anyways, today I thought I would get down a few thoughts about the Tales From Castle Diablo writing that I’ve been casually proficient with off-screen. I’ve also been having a bit of a Patreon quandary about them too, as I tend to utilise everything I am doing creatively into content for here, so everything is multi-purpose.  

So if I’m doing new art for Etsy, there’s a post of me drawing it, or if I’m building a tombstone, you’re sitting through a video diary of the process.  I’ve actually made a concerted effort to come away from incorporating other folk into patreon too much, as I suspect that could be something that gets irritating for those around you.  When you’re constantly reaching for your camera or Tascam, when you’re just meant to be visiting your mum, you know? It’s all well and good for me to decide how much time I personally devote to this, but maybe a bit unfair when that’s imposed on others.  Dunno, they might not be bothered at all, but I do sort of want this to be reliant primarily on my work rather than others having to do lifting for me.

That said, Jon Williams' involvement features here today.  I’ve just not asked him to write the post for me.  Which is an opportunity missed.  I could have had a nap whilst he was doing it.

So my quandary is that I am definitely publishing this book.  In what form, I’m unsure, but I’ve a couple of options and I’m hoping to increase that to more options as I gain confidence with the writing.  Should I essentially publish those stories on here ahead of time, I may well be chopping down the future possibilities for something that is already gonna be a hard sell.  A portmanteau/anthology collection of unsettling/ghost/supernatural stories, that is attempting to capture the mood of the seventies books of the same sorts of themes, is not currently top of every publishers dream project.  On the other hand, what is patreon if not a place where I can chuck stuff out to get a vague gauge of response? And as you are subscribed for the privilege, it’s not as though doing that writing work isn’t justified in its inclusion here.

Another thing I’ve thought about is how fed up I got with keeping aspects of the movie secret. Having such a massive project that I had to keep being creative with the secrecy of, whilst attempting to maintain an interest as it fell victim to postponements and rearrangements and the like.  It was a very wearing process that, really tiring, and – to be blunt – the support on here for the stuff I was sharing/teasing was all that really kept my head in the game ultimately.  I think there’s a possibility I’d have surrendered if I was just totally out on my own without any temporary validation.

I like putting stuff up that’s patreon exclusive and finshed-ish work, as well as the progress stuff (it’d be some ask for me to populate daily posts exclusively with finished work). The loop hole I’m pondering, is the fact that the stories in the book are finished-ish work that can stand alone.  The later publishing will be them included in a collection where they also justify their belonging.  So, I’m potentially dealing with a situation where the work is justified in serving two separate purposes.  One on here, as a standalone story, and then again in the book where it is a component part. We could look at this as tailor-made for this exact situation. There’s a linking story that I’m not going to share ahead of it being published (and goodness, that story is difficult to negotiate the writing of), and this story gets cross-referenced in the stories themselves.  Often rather cynically/crowbarred at this stage, which I was going to work on altering but I’ve grown fond of the knowing wink inherent in that.

I’m certainly going to be showing you my working out, but I really want to show you the plot process of some of them as I think it’s genuinely interesting how something finds its final form. That’s got to be after you’ve read the story though. These stories would certainly suffer if you’d seen all the machinations behind them ahead of time. I did actually toy with maybe writing one in plain sight, and taking you through that process in real time, but it just ruins things.  It doesn’t have to be in that order.  You’ll be more than aware of how much I like to cut you into stuff and let you in on the secrets, but I can tell you all the same stuff retrospectively, and nothing would really be lost.

The process of finding these stories was beginning to give me a bit of a headache, until I mentioned it to Jon in our general writing meeting last week.  I came out of the other side of that with a real excitement for it, and have written a fair few bits since.  It was pretty funny to begin with, as I’d been making notes on my phone a lot, but hadn’t really read them back before telling them to Jon, so there was much sneering and embarrassment at how half-baked/nonsensical some of the notes were.  There was one moment where I was talking about a clan of “cow people” and was desperately searching through my notes to see if I had further elucidated on that.  “Then they can meet some cow people if you want” became a catchphrase as we worked through the stories. I sincerely still don't really know what it meant.

Once we stuck with one premise though, the plot came through really quite quickly.  I had the premise of a driving examiner who keeps falling asleep when taking driving tests, who has concocted the cover story that he pretends to be asleep to put the students at ease.  Then, on one occasion, he wakes up to find himself in an unusual situation (I did have what that situation was, but not gonna spoil it here as that bit has remained the same).  Jon and I spoke through why he was there, what had happened, and more crucially, what then happens as a result of it.  A lot of the story ideas I currently have are just a premise, and I think I sometimes write as though that is enough.  Here’s the person, here’s what they are like, here’s what happens to them that is weird, the end.  Which, in my defence,  I think you can sometimes get away with, if the idea is gripping enough (indeed, a fair few of the old anthology horror stories are just that), but if you can find the layers too, and a few little twists and turns, it’s more satisfying.  That’s definitely what we managed to mine from our conversation, to the point where it had a full and satisfying plot by the end.  I was slightly surprised myself that we achieved it in one go, but very grateful for it too.  As a result, I’ve written another complete plot for a different story this week too (it’s about a lady in her house who has an issue with flies), which definitely benefitted from the lessons learnt when Jon and I did it collaboratively.

So, point is, I’m gonna finish off these two stories relatively soon and show them to you on here, so you can have a read and give your thoughts if you wish too.  I am working towards having a minimum of six stories and maximum of ten in this collection.  The wraparound story that runs throughout will most likely inform how many there are in the end, depending how vast that becomes.  I’m still not entirely ruling out that it stops being a story and just stays a motif/touchstone of familiarity, but we shall see how that pans out. The main thing I want from that is it is kind of fun/funny.  Like a sort of Creepshow/Tales From The Crypt  feel.  I'm working on it.

That was all really.  Just wanted to write my thoughts down as I was having them, for my clarity and your information.  Which I’ve just done.  

Could have been worse, I could have sang/cried at you again.

Hope all is well and happy there and that the weekend is looking great for you.  Do please have a lovely one.

Much love from here

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