Even though I haven’t posted much lately, I have been planning the plot for Shadows and Stars. I am filling in gaps and looking for inconsistencies as well as seeking ways to make my major characters more complex. I haven’t actually added many words though. The count is now at 77,000+. My goal is to have between 80,000-100,000. I hope to have it completed this year. I will probably end up with around 90,000. The tough part is disciplining myself to sit down and write. Jotting down notes on the spur of the moment is easy.
Developing the characters is interesting. I need to find some bad in the good guy and some good in the bad guy and maybe have them share a few traits.
I hope the work isn’t too complex overall. Many of the great works I know don’t have a very complex plot: The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, etc.
I have been on the road a lot lately. I moved to Arkansas on August 10-11. Over Labor Day weekend I went to visit my wife in Dallas-Fort Worth. She lives in Midland (she has a teaching contract there) and DFW is about half-way. This is better than it was when she was in Midland and I was in Aztec, NM. There was no halfway point where we could meet. The two largest cities between Midland and Aztec were Roswell (yes, the Roswell of UFO fame-a really neat little town) and Albuquerque. Albuquerque was three hours from me and Roswell was three hours from her. The distance between us was ten hours. The halfway mark was out in the plains somewhere near Encino, NM, which is close to becoming a ghost town.
I have mentioned that on my way down from New Mexico, I listened to the audio versions of The Gunslinger (volume 1 of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series), some of the Just So Stories, and four of Edith Wharton’s stories. On my recent trip to DFW, I started listening to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. I am only up to chapter 5 (maybe 6). It is slow going. However, Sinclair’s description of the operations of meat-packing plants would be great in any horror novel. Note that Sinclair wrote this not so much as a novel as an expose of the meat industry in novel form. Therefore, there is not much in the way of interesting character interactions, at least in the first five chapters. Sinclair talks about a lot of characters, and they are interesting in their way, but because Sinclair was more interested in telling the story of the meat-packing industry, most of what comes to light about the characters is their background stories (primarily of the main character Jurgis). He describes in great detail how they came up with the idea of coming to America, how they traveled here, the conditions they found upon arrival, and how they were constantly swindled by everyone they met.
I will continue reading it, because it is interesting, but it won’t be among my favorites.
Stay tuned for more updates.
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 