Fifty and fighty

All right, first things first.

I turned 50 years old today.

I think I’m finally letting go of my hopes of being a child prodigy.

But I’m still here, still giving it a go, and that’ll do.

That’ll do.

—

So what am I doing in my fifty-first year?

For one thing, I’m still trying to learn new tricks, even when it comes to writing. I’m in the prep-and-research phase of a new novel project, and I’m doing something I’ve never done before – planning.

…okay, I haven’t actually planned the book’s title yet, but let’s called it Piledriver as a shorthand for now.

Raven’s Blood and the Obituarist novellas were all written the same way – I sat down with a premise, an opening scene, a finale to aim towards and some ideas for bits in the middle, and then haphazardly wrote my way into the story until I got to the end, which may or may not have resembled the ending I’d originally envisioned. I’m not going to abandon that approach, ‘cos it aligns nicely with my laziness creative instincts, but it’s high time I gave the whole plotting and outlining business a try.

But first, characters. Piledriver has an ensemble cast of, mighty fuck, twenty-four characters, all of whom need to be unique and clearly distinct from the others. How am I going to manage this Herculean task and (frankly, stupidly over-large) cast?

With a character stack.

The stack contains 24 index cards, each showing the core information of a specific character. Let’s zoom in on the most complete one, which is for the book/series’ main protagonist.

The important points you can immediately tell:

• this is a book about professional wrestlers
• yes, I’ve named the main character Jack Fetch
• yes, he’s Jack the Giantkiller, wrestling is not a world of subtlety
• my handwriting is fucking atrocious
• I haven’t worked out some of the details yet

(Why is there a B in the top right corner? I’m gonna keep that detail under wraps for the moment.)

Other cards are sketchier still – no-one else has a name yet, and things like gimmicks, style and persona are mostly vacant. But the joy of the stack is that I can just grab a card and fill in a detail when it occurs to me. Some of those will get nailed down during the outlining, others as I write, and this will help me keep things consistent. Another positive of using physical cards is that I can also pin them to a corkboard to map out relationships, group them into factions, spot who needs some screen time and (eventually) array them for a big ol’ tournament.

I might have so much fun doing that that I don’t bother writing the book. We’ll see.

Anyway, that’s how I’m kicking things off in my life as an Official Old Dude. Check back in occasionally over the next 365 days to see how the planning (or indeed writing) of Piledriver is progressing.

For now, though, bugger doing any more work tonight.
Come on, it’s my birthday.