The Order of Play, Version 1

(I’m a geek with some computer science in my background. I start counting at 0.)

I have a confession. While I write short stories (and so far have a little more luck with them than long form), they’re as much about working out how a world works as anything else. When an idea hits me, it’s often as a combination of facts and characters that eventually work themselves into a scene, so writing is just excising these ideas. A few of them work into a long form, some are stillborn and don’t work at all, and some are somewhere in-between and have enough substance to then become a short story – which then may or may not get rehomed.

Although a lot of my ideas are set in the same worlds, I try to make each story “stand-alone” but, by the nature of building on what comes before, I guess things at the end are clearer if you’ve read the ones that take place before. I also have a tendency to find myself going backwards and forwards filling in gaps in a timeline and creating an overall arc (yet I can’t write an actual, individual story like that, it really drives me nuts trying to keep track of things) so I try to avoid putting too much detail and tying myself down too much when I could come back next week and scrub it all out. You wouldn’t believe the notes I keep leaving myself. And, yes, this is effectively just another way of leaving myself a note.

So. Having had a play around with the world structure, things in what is currently known as the Alex Jones world now look like this:

1st Cycle

These can more properly be described as the ideas that directly involve the character of Alex Jones. (I may rename the world so that I can refer to the “Alex Jones” stories without causing too much confusion.)

  1. Half-Breed (Short)
    Published: Twisted Tongue, Issue 11, 29/08/2008
    Podcast: Cossmass Infinities, Episode 5, 01/05/2010
  2. Heart’s Desire (Short)
    Published: Drops of Crimson, Volume 2, Issue 1, 01/11/2009
  3. Second Date (Short – draft)
  4. Dog Handler (Short)
    Published: Title Goes Here, Issue 1.9, 02/09/2011

I’m throwing around some ideas for future stories, having worked out something of an arc – or, more precisely, worked out what it is that Alex wants and the major characters around her want, and whether they can get it. There’s a couple of working titles that stand out to me to use as seed ideas and prompts:

  • Alpha Male
  • Another Me

The titles probably won’t make it into use of anything published. And you may have noticed that the “Values Dissonance” mentioned in the previous version has made it off the list. This is part of the theme and intention behind the latest story, “Second Date”, as Alex has a values system that’s skewed from the norm, and she deals with werewolves who probably never thought society’s rules applied to them. It’s sort of the trope of the same name on TV Tropes [Values Dissonance: External Link] and will come up multiple times (if I write it well enough) in anything that involves Alex.

2nd Cycle

Alex now has competition in the kickass female hero stakes in the form of Elkie Bernstein (name may change but I wanted a name that would sound unusual in a rural British community). Elkie is the lead character of the “25 Ways To Kill A Werewolf” (Novel length) story and, if she finds a new home, is likely to come up again. In other words, “25 Ways To Kill A Werewolf” still remains a separate work set in the same world – although Elkie runs into some of the same characters and they’re secondary to the main plot (at least of this novel). Timing-wise, I’m now putting the start of “25 Ways To Kill A Werewolf” about fifteen years (roughly) after “Half-Breed”. Of course, I’m not prepared to tie them down to specific years.

I’m still interested in looking at a werewolf / other were-animal story and I’ll probably doing it using Elkie, with the above proviso about rehoming the first novel. This would work pretty much as given in the If Werewolves, Then… post. Well, the background would but you’ll have to read the hypothetical novel to find out the plot!

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