The Secret History

I don't have a proper title for this story yet, but since I've been doing some more writing on it, I thought I would post another little wordcount meter and maybe do some nattering about it to get things straightened out in my head.

So:

3,657 / 150,000 (2.0%)

Right now I'm at the point of change. That's where the story begins every time, right? I know what the point of change is, what's going to cause the crisis, and even what that crisis will be. After that, though, things get a little hazy.


I got the idea for this story from a song. I blame owldaughter, toughlovemuse, ai731 and karine, not necessarily in that order. I don't know who suggested "Bonny Swans" as a song for my band to cover, but whoever it was, I blame them most of all. I'll post the lyrics here so that you know what I'm talking about.

( The Bonny Swans )

Okay, now that that's out of the way, you know a little more about this story. See, the song raised more questions in my head than it answered. How did the sisters' father go from being a farmer to a king by the end of the song? Why did the youngest sister find a young man before the eldest? As I understand it, betrothals and so forth usually went by order of age. I'd like to know who William and Hugh are. There's no mention of a brother at the beginning of the song. How did the girl turn into a swan anyway?

Clearly there's a great deal of magic, or something, afoot in this story. So I'm going to filch the story and try to answer all the questions rattling around inside my head. The song makes no mention of what happens to the middle sister. She's not important to the story, it would seem. I beg to differ. I have often found that middle children are ignored, to the detriment of everyone.

So this book will be the story of the middle sister. Her youngest sister falls in love and then gets murdered by the eldest sister, who we must believe is in love with the same man. I am loath to think that the story is as simple as that, nor that it can simply end with the murderess being revealed in court to her doom. It doesn't entirely fit, as far as I'm concerned.

I already have a number of ideas about the facts that don't fit in the story. My main concern now is what to do with the middle sister. The book is her story, about her quest to find what happened to her younger sister and to try and save her older sister from her fate. I'm just not sure what she's going to find at the end. Sometimes, quests don't work out the way we expect them to.

As I mentioned, I have a number of projects that I want to work on over the next few months. Before the end of summer, anyway. talyesin has already declared May to be his writing month, wherein he gets to go crazy and do all sorts of writing and post about it all the time in his LJ.

I don't post much about my writing in my regular LJ, so I have no qualms writing a lot about it in here. :)

So, here's what I have either on the go or as a near-future plan:

1- Beyond the Pale: so far, so good. I'm on schedule, I know where the story is going, and I have enough material there for a very, very long time to come. I'm going to continue posting it weekly on Tuesdays until further notice.

Status: up to date and ongoing


2- Conflation: as mentioned, this will be going up every two weeks on Thursdays (possibly Wednesdays if that turns out to be a better day for more people) after May 18th. I have no idea where the story is going, except for the next two installments, possibly three. I'm basically winging it, but so far it's turning out to be pretty fun.

Status: four installments behind and catching up

3- Into Temptation: this is my NaNoWriMo novel that I basically have to rewrite in large chunks. I wrote myself into a corner, pretty much, and I don't like where the story was ending up. I also misunderstood my main character in a major way, and now that I have a better handle on his motivation, it means a lot of establishing scenes have to be changed.

I've been avoiding the novel since December 1st, but it's time I got back to it. I'm thinking of doing the same thing I did in February, and write every day in May (that's 31 days of writing), concentrating on the novel. I'll still have to work on both my serials, so I might not hit 50,000 words, but that's okay. I really don't want to abandon that novel. I think it has the potential to really be good. It needs some more character development, a better subplot or two, and some tweaking of the plot.

Status: on hold since December 1st.

4- Untitled: as you can tell, this project doesn't have a title right now. I think of it as "Cal's Book," but that's not what it's going to be called. I have a little less than 2,000 words written, but it needs a little help. It's supposed to be a YA novel, but as I've never written anything like that before, my tone and register are a little off.

I think this might end up being my summer project. I have to write an outline for it, figure out some subplots, and write up my secondary characters so that they're not as one-dimensional as they feel right now.

Status: on hold since Feburary.

5- Also Untitled: this is a more recent idea, to write a collection of short stories. I'm thinking of asking all my friends to give me a spark of some kind from which I'd write a story, and hopefully that would give me enough material for an entire book's worth.

I'm considering doing this as my august_writing community project this summer.

Status: percolating



Anyway, that's what I've got on the go for now. I may be posting word counts and random musings as the time goes by. Just a friendly warning. :)

As a start:

Beyond the Pale: 140,613 words

Conflation: 8,657 words

Into Temptation: ... huh, I just realized that I don't have a full copy on my computer. It's still on my mother's computer. Hope she hasn't deleted it. That would suck. Rough word count is a little over 50,000

Cal's Book: 1,980 words


More at a later date.