A Year of Writing: Days 61-70

Day 61 of #ayearofwriting and I am considering the art of drafting

Day 62 of #ayearofwriting and The Tin Grasshopper story is complete.

 

Day 63 of #ayearofwriting and I am not feeling the new story. I know it’s a good idea, but it’s too Ballardian in tone, the idea of permissions, data protection and shopping. I need to put this one on the back burner in a tower block somewhere to soak up the fears more. In the meantime I rifle through my note books and find this:

The Cosmology of Acorn

Cosmology (kɒzˈmɒlədʒi)
noun
1. the science of the origin and development of the universe. Modern cosmology is dominated by the Big Bang theory, which brings together observational astronomy and particle physics.
2. an account or theory of the origin of the universe.

Acorn (ˈeɪkɔːn)
noun
1. the fruit of the oak, a smooth oval nut in a rough cup-like base.
2. the origin of the universe.

I then draft out the story beneath, and the story has just sat there. Something here fascinates me, so that is my new project and the things that could burrow into such universes.

Day 64 of #ayearofwriting and I am reading, mulling over ideas after a hectic few days that included this.

Day 65 of #ayearofwriting and I am in that moment where too many ideas creates a bog beneath your feet. It’s a fine line between sinking and leaping from dry patch to dry patch. It’s like being in orbit, trying to get closer to the sun to get warm but if you leap too far you’re Mercury. I have decided to get back to the universe of my novel to create a pensee moment in my fiction where I will collapse slowly in orbit towards an idea.

Day 66 of #ayearofwriting and I am trying to find away into the year of my novel, I have several characters to go at, a water-man (we have met them earlier in two stories but never really heard off one), a preacher, a humanitarian and an refugee. These are all very broad strokes and I am struggling to find the story for each, I know what the themes are, but this is not like the earlier stories I drafted out. This is a world of water and disease, of flood plains and abandoned city centres, of the suburbs gone rotten in the heat. I can’t help but think of Ballard and Aldiss, of the heat and the cold that flowed in their stories, of the end of a dying race.Day 66 of #ayearofwriting and I am trying to find away into the year of my novel, I have several characters to go at, a water-man (we have met them earlier in two stories but never really heard off one), a preacher, a humanitarian and an refugee. These are all very broad strokes and I am struggling to find the story for each, I know what the themes are, but this is not like the earlier stories I drafted out. This is a world of water and disease, of flood plains and abandoned city centres, of the suburbs gone rotten in the heat. I can’t help but think of Ballard and Aldiss, of the heat and the cold that flowed in their stories, of the end of a dying race.

Day 67 of #ayearofwriting and I am looking at the river maps of Manchester. In the event of global warming, rising seas, how much of the north-west would we lose? I am tinkering with an app here http://www.floodmap.net/. It helps you see how rivers and seas will act through rising sea levels or flashfloods. This could be the worst case scenario in my stories in the second image. If we zoom right into Manchester, and bang, it’s gone.

Day 68 of #ayearofwriting and I am very addicted the flood map app. If all the ice in the world melted we’d have to deal with around a 70 meter rise. That’s a fascinating re-imagining of the North, Preston has become Atlantis, and Bolton is by the sea. Now, all I need to do is get back to writing about it.

Day 69 of #ayearofwriting and there’s a suprise. I am typing away trying to find a voice and who crops back up, The Tin Grasshopper narrator, except his voice isn’t as broad, his Cornish dialect watered down until only a few choice words are left. What does he say?

‘I tells them of places I have seen, of cities like Atlantis, where flag markets where swallowed up by waters and grieving mothers. I tells them of towns full of mermaids and eels, of snails the size of my fist and fish that hold the corners of my nightmares. I tells them of dead sailors begging for home but no map shows them the way, only monsters are there now.’

Day 70 of #ayearofwriting and who has my narrator from The Tin Grasshopper become? His is Tiresias, the blind prophet from Greek legend, well every good piece of speculative fiction needs a blind prophet with a Cornish twang. Christ, Eliot used him too, I am forever caught between Eliot and Coleridge.