What I Am Working On

I was tagged by Jill Domschot, who wrote Anna and the Dragon (read my review here), to write a post on what I’m working on. I barely talk about current book stuff so I badgered asked her to tag me when she was soliciting to be badgered asked for participants on Facebook.

1. What am I working on?
The one sentence summary, as written on the “A book I’m writing” link above:
A chainsmoking nun and her reluctant protege seek out a fledgling time travel technology and its exiled inventor, in alternate-history San Francisco.

The period is early 19th century with a subtle Wild West patina, taking place in the Bay Area at a university. There’s a few different cultures that have settled there: Roman Catholic, Scandinavian/Northern European, Franco-Arabic (a la Algeria), in addition to the native tribes that were in the area already.

The “alternate” event that happened in the past (not saying what it is) started a chain of events which seem entirely plausible to me. Part of the end result of those events is that technology was able to develop much more rapidly compared to the history of our world.

There’s also a deaf one-armed man with a large following who doesn’t seem quite right in the head. It all sounds very gimmicky but it’s quite normal as far as alt-history novels go.

As a kind of brain dump here’s a list of books/movies/TV series that I think help describe it: The Man Who Was Thursday, Children of Men, Firefly (series and movie), The Time Machine, Anthem, Escaflowne (series and movie), The Velveteen Rabbit (not a joke), The War Against Miss Winter

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?
It’s not YA, it’s not dystopian—it originally was the latter but I couldn’t make it work with the actual story without it becoming derivative. One protagonist is a female who carries weapons but she’s not young nor a “badass.” Despite the time machine element there’s not much of a science-fiction presence. If anything it’s a light mystery with a good measure of philosophical navel-gazing via the dilemma of the senses vs. natural philosophy (“science”) vs. religious belief. I don’t know a tidy word to describe that. Regardless, I’m not receptive to current book trends to know if this sets itself apart, so this is all conjecture.

Fun fact: There’s a perfect quote I plan on using for the beginning but it has two very useless, awkward adverbs in it that really kill it for me. I may not use it because of that.

3. Why do I write what I do?
This question makes little sense but I’m assuming it means “Why do I write what I write?” I think it’s because I see so many disparate things in other books or movies that I like that combining them all into one handy package seems more efficient. When it comes to philosophy I’m still at the amateur level; I just know the basics and maybe then some.

The parts of the narrative that work through dilemmas are really ones I had worked though personally, or ones that I’m still working through. There is a danger in doing that because one can reduce characters to mere mouthpieces, or ramble too much, or risk turning a story into a didact, and I didn’t want to waste readers’ time with too much thinky and not enough doey. I’m still working on mitigating those risks.

4. How does my writing process work?
There’s no magic. I just write when I can. For a short spell I used to go to a coffee shop one night a week to write, but that fell off my schedule because of “real life.” There were a lot of collegiate kids there doing the same thing, so the atmosphere was conducive to studying and quiet conversation rather than airing that pent-up whinefest about your iPhone.

I’m tagging:
Katherine Coble – I feel bad because somehow Facebook unsubscribed me from her updates and I didn’t notice until she commented there that she wanted to be tagged. Her blog is here. She should write more on her blog but that’s my preference.

Ed Hurst – the only pastor-type blogger that I really care about these days, even if I don’t agree with him on everything (if you agree 100% with someone, they’re not saying much of anything). He’s written plenty of free books you can check out here.

Mark Rivett – Don’t know if he has a blog but here’s his Amazon author page. He’s a fellow pixel jockey who works a few rows down from me, and I have the pleasure of sneaking in writing talk with him and hearing about his zombie book when it’s convenient.