It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas.

Thankfully, because I don’t really care for the stuff, this snow didn’t last more than a few days and just resulted in the kids getting two days off school. However, with the weather and my cough refusing to go away, my activities have been curtailed. There’s been a lot of pressure put on my nascent time-management scheme with so many projects and tasks having to be rescheduled, along with my not feeling like doing anything anyway.

So, since I haven’t done much, what are my future plans? After all, it is nearly New Year, right?

Future Plans.

Leaving aside the obvious plan to work the Old Man through toward hopeful publication, I have a couple of other writing plans. ‘Plans‘ is perhaps the wrong word since there’s no flesh on those bones and all I really have at the moment are plot ideas.

Black Box Factory.

This story could easily be set in the same world as Old Man since I’ve been careful in the revision to imply the kind of social structures necessary. It was inspired by the true story of Shin Dong-hyuk told by Blaine Harden in Escape From Camp 14.  John Green does a great job of capturing the spirit of the story, so I won’t go into it here, except to say that prison camps are horrible places. I’m also familiar with places like Dachau, which I have visited, and Auschwitz, which I haven’t, and the kinds of treatment that gets meted out.

The story will center around an individual who, like Shin, manages to get away, but instead of finding themselves in the world which we inhabit, the world is instead one in which the original incarceration and the reasoning behind it are acceptable to the general population. I’m not going to go into the philosophy behind the prison camp today, because that’d be giving away too much of what needs to be discovered. One thing I will divulge is that the book will be a challenge because I’ll need to write it in the first-person present tense since the reader needs to be right alongside the protagonist and find out about the world at the same time. The story will work better if nothing is revealed to the reader that the protagonist doesn’t know or cannot see, feel or learn.

Voyage To Nowhere.

One thing I can guarantee about this story is that Voyage To Nowhere will not be the title. It’s just a label for a pigeonhole in my mind where everything relevant is going to get stuffed.

Voyage To Nowhere will be a sci-fi  that I could loosely describe as a cross between the plots for Passengers and Lord of the Flies. There’s no meat at all on the bones of this one, so there’s not much more I can say, except to let you know that the passengers and crew on this particular voyage will encounter difficulties that grow exponentially and test their ability to find ways to cooperate and survive.

Other Plans.

One thing I can’t wait to get back into is my garden. 2018 wasn’t a good year for gardening for me. I had to take my hands off it and step back to concentrate on other projects.

2019 is going to be significantly different. I have a good rotating bed arrangement and a lot of enthusiasm. There’s not  much that rewards quite so well as getting your hands dirty growing your own food while listening to a good audio-book.

Up Next…

There are other plans, but they form more a part of a ‘New Year : New Me‘ drive so I won’t go into them here. Two weeks Thursday, though, the Old Man manuscript should have finished marinating and it’ll get put back on my plate for the second revision. I expect to be through with that and the gamma reading processes by April, so if you’re interested in being a Beta Reader for the book, you could drop me a line at the Contact Me page – which I need to revisit because it looks dreadful! – or comment here, or if you don’t want to do either you could just hang around and wait for me to post a more detailed invitation. Right now I don’t have a definite plan for exactly what I want to get out of a beta process, but I’ll be working that out right here on the blog.

Anyway, there’s only one more blog post due before Christmas and that’ll be on my birthday, next Monday, so I hope everyone has a warm and safe week until then.

Categories: Administrative, Black Box Factory, Plans & Planning, Voyage to Nowhere