Today, the final two chapters of Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain are in the posting queue. I didn't realize it until I checked my posting schedule this morning (at 5:00 a.m.). I've been so incredibly busy this month that I wasn't paying attention to my currently posting stories except to respond to emails.
Dark Side was something I conceived of a couple of years ago and just stewed in my brain until I finally came up with a story. I remember clearly driving through some little town in Oregon or maybe Arkansas and seeing a sign on top of a converted gas station for Jett Blackburn, Attorney. My first thought was 'What a great name for a character!' But I had no idea who the character was or did. He sure wasn't going to be an attorney!
And now here he is, finishing his first year of college, living with half a dozen girls who have adopted him as their own as he paints and displays their bodies.
I love to write about art and artists. I suppose that's because I always wanted to be one but just couldn't draw worth a damn. So, I started describing what I would paint with words. There's more than a little of me in the Pygmalion Revisited story, "1,000 Words". That story, in fact, was inspired by a review of Triptych by Teloz that began, "'If a picture paints a thousand words...', a phrase from a 70's hit from Bread; aroslav turns that on its head, and uses thousands of words to paint a picture."
Whether the artist was Doc Peters, Tony Ames, Art Etrange, or Jett Blackburn, the best I could do is try to make people see the vision of artwork that was in my head.
The challenge has been to give each one something unique in their art. Doc painted canvases. Tony painted murals. Art painted the blackness of his vision. Jerome Z sculpted in bronze. Grant Smith welded sheet metal. And now, Jett Blackburn does performance art in his underwear as he paints on the bodies of his girlfriends and models. Just another medium.
I certainly left room to continue Jett's story at the end of this. He and his girlfriends are just completing their freshman year in college. I have several courses of action for him to follow as he looks at a future where he creates great art but can't sell any of it. Well, thank goodness he's a meat cutter! I am so deeply involved in other projects right now that it will likely be at least a year before I get back to Jett.
Two major "other projects" are underway right now during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Under my penname Wayzgoose, I'm writing Wild Woods, the sequel to City Limits. I'm five chapters and 43,000 words into the story and feeling pretty good. Of course, it's rough draft material and like its big sister will probably require an 80% rewrite before I even start posting it here on SOL in May or June. Those who have subscribed to read it as it is written (daily drafts of new material) get to wade through the parts where I'm trying to prime the pump and get the words to flow. They are ahead of even my story editors.
So far this month, I've written 23,000 words of my new do-over, Double-Take. My subscribers are getting a first look at that story, too, as the total draft is now over 100,000 words and 30 chapters. First look from Pixel the Cat as my editor shows that this story needs a lot less work than Wild Woods. I'm planning to begin releasing the first book of that serial in January. I'm really enjoying writing it as my character is sent back sixty-six years in age but into a timeline where nothing he knows about 'the future' helps. But his past experiences do.
Back in 1967, I had a heated exchange with UAW president Walter Reuther in Detroit. As a smartass teen, I said that I regretted not having his years of fast-talking experience. He responded, "I wish I had my experience and your years." Well, that's this story.
Since the first book (four parts and somewhere near forty or forty-five chapters and 150,000 words) will only get him through freshman year in high school, I expect I'll just keep writing this one from that point without a break. Expect an epic.
This also means that all my other stories will be concluding before the end of the year. Dark Side concludes today. Living Next Door to Heaven 3: What Were They Thinking? will conclude on December 28. Wayzgoose's The Gutenberg Rubric will wrap up on December 11. We'll start the New Year with a fresh clean slate and new stories. I'll post in the Wayzgoose blog about what to expect next there.
I don't expect to have a chapter posting every day in 2019 like I have had the past few months. If Double-Take progresses the way I think it will, it will be my primary focus for the next year or so. It's currently consuming me the way Living Next Door to Heaven did four years ago. That means I might have no stories concluding in 2019! Amazing.
The same is not true of Wayzgoose. There is another Dag Hamar book, For Blood or Money, that I will start posting after the first of the year and two more unpublished works in that series that I'm thinking I'll post as serials without going to print or eBook. Why not have new Wayzgoose stuff as well as new aroslav stuff. Yes, I'm sorry to say that none of the computer forensics stories have a particularly happy ending. Maybe For Money or Mayhem was the most depressing, but that's also the reason I started writing under the name aroslav. That's where happy endings are found.
And sex.
People are already asking if there will be another sequel to Living Next Door to Heaven. That's a definite maybe. Volume three has been all about the parents of Brian's clan. I have been making notes for three years about the children. Too early to tell if the muse is going to grab me by the balls on this story yet, but just think of all the kids that were born on the ranch and the stories they could tell. Don't know yet if this will be a single POV story or bounce around. We'll see.
I've written over 700,000 words so far this year. At least half of them are worthy of reading. I just need to decide which half. I doubt I'll be quite as productive in 2019, but one never can tell. I've kind of gotten in the habit.
Well, time to get back to what I do most. Writing.
Enjoy!