Mass Medium (Icon's NaNo III: The Return)

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Third time doing NaNo! =D Let me shove some links here to my past two threads and then we can get this show on the road.

November is probably going to be a relatively busy month for me, moreso than it has been the past two years, unfortunately. That said, I'm certain that I will stick around and power through this year, same as I was able to do the past two.

Because I've come up with a premise that I am massive digging. Synopsis time!

SPOILER: Click to show

Life is alright in the small town of Aliston Creek. The locals are friendly, the views are pretty nice, the food is relatively palatable; it's a wonderful place to live if you don't mind staying out of the cemeteries after dark, or overhearing weird rustling in the trees even on days with no wind, or the occasional inanimate object suddenly floating. It turns out that the place is a Life Energy Zone, a magnet for spare vitae, or life force which would otherwise be recycled into the world. Elegy Courser doesn't mind it too much: she and her friend Deck would find it nice to move someplace where they don't have to worry about breakfast suddenly levitating, or grass roots suddenly popping up out of the street. But the Coursers have been Aliston Creek's hometown occultists for years, and Elegy can't go around breaking tradition, so she spends most of her time acting as a spare liason between life and death.

Elegy has it pretty good up until she accidentally binds Deck's recently-departed soul to her phone. It's an awkward few days until she discovers that when your best friend's soul is possessing your phone, the best course of action is to start running a blog about the afterlife. It's not long before Aliston Creek becomes well-known across the internet, and news about its magical vitae-giving properties is known globally.

The trouble really begins when even more Life Energy Zones suddenly start popping up around the globe, and the equilibrium between life and death starts to get... disturbed.

The afterlife is going viral.

More to be posted later. =D So psyched for this!

[PFA]

This sounds so delightfully zany, I love it.

Good luck!

[Kristykimmy]

That sounds really quirky and fun, Icon.

[Zylaa]

Like both your past novels, this sounds fantastic. And I love the name "Elegy Courser," it sounds almost melodic and I have no idea why.

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Horribly horribly inexcusably late reply, but aaaah thanks so much for the warm reception all! =D

Zylaa: You think? I'd come up with the name Elegy for a psychopomp-esque character a while back and sat on it until the rest of the idea popped into my head. Courser didn't come up as a surname for a while, I'd had a few other ideas, but I'd say it worked out better than the other choices. End result is a pretty declarative name which isn't glaringly obvious in meaning, but gets the idea of her character across pretty well.

But I digress. Have some characters.

SPOILER: Click to show

Elegy Courser takes none of your tomfoolery. The Coursers have been around in Aliston Creek for ages, and let's be real, you don't become the local occultists by being amiable old biddies who stop around for a quick cuppa, unless that sitdown happens to be with a ghost or a particularly irate demigod. Elegy doesn't mind the job; the hours are good, it comes with a nice cloak and boots, and she gets out a lot (made especially convenient by the fact that everyone else in Aliston Creek actually knows about her job. What's the point of being a medium if nobody actually realizes that there's an afterlife?)

(Elegy has never really quiiite grasped the idea of keeping the supernatural realms a secret. Not that it's ever been a problem, mind you, but the point still remains. There may be some things that mere Mortals Were Not Meant To Know, but Elegy's perfectly fine with dropping that news like it's coffee shop gossip.)

Deck Mallory (technically Declan, but nobody has ever called this kid Declan in his entire life) is Elegy's closest friend, which is basically a nicer way of saying that she's the only one in town who can genuinely stand Deck. The kid is savvy, but in a dangerous way; not in the "oooh aren't you so sharp that you'll cut yourself" way, but in the "can't take the hint that other folks typically don't like witty smug little punks" way. Deck has yet to realize that having the most smarts in town isn't an invitation for him to slack off. One of these days, Deck is going to get into some sort of trouble too large for his mind and his best friend to solve, and that day is coming up pretty dang soon.

By which I mean this kid dies a couple of chapters into the book. (whoops spoilers I guess. Sorry? Don't worry, it's okay! He gets better)

(...sort of)



And them's the protagonists. Look, pictures!

Left to right, Elegy and Deck. (what do you mean, 'you need to improve your ability to draw hands', ahahahahaha)

Keep in mind the whole "not entirely set-in-stone, characters are subject to change based on the author's whims" disclaimer. A lot of this characterization is pretty set but I'm still solidifying the details? More to come in the future, most likely.

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I've made something that looks passably like an outline! It's pretty barebones at this point, it doesn't even really touch on a lot of the points I do want to hit in-story, but at least i have a general sense of what and where I intend to go with this.

I'm gonna go rambling for a bit here, so just bear with me. Or don't! you probably don't have to read all of this if you don't want to; just want to get some of the ideas I haven't outlined and questions I haven't answered pinned down (come to think of it, I might actually be rambling about things that are slightly spoilery)

(I mean it's not that you all are likely to know all that much about the plot, but do keep that in mind if-when you peruse the box below)

SPOILER: Click to show

Primary Inspirations in No Particular Order: Discworld Series (Most notably Reaper Man), Octopus Pie, Paranorman, Paranatural, Johnny Wander, Cheekyhead (Vapor's NaNo from last year), and both NTWF Mafia games

Some sort of metaphysical afterlife bureaucracy, because turning the omnipotent into mundane is always loads of fun, and everyone pulled that off so well in Mafia II, and I figured I might want to do something like that. Probably not strictly in the, ahem, "Returns Department", but more on the IT side (what kind of internet connection does the afterlife have?)

What if we have, say, a minor demon for secretarial work, screening the afterlife's calls, computer troubleshooting, that sort of thing (I've been considering writing this character as genderless? Why not, let's roll with that, minor demons are probably too busy dealing with the souls of the recently departed to worry about inane concepts like gender)

Now I want a tiny swarm of imps who go around messing with people's internet connection just to be malicious, that's a thing I should add

Electronic demons? Digital wraith-type monsters? ("Gigabites" is a terrible pun but it's pretty tempting to use)

Can life energy be transmitted via, say, e-mail? Wi-fi? How? (Glitch in reality itself seems too over-the-top; how can wi-fi and life energy be connected? Synonymous? Subsection of the other?) I need to figure this out, kind of a critical point

I've got more questions that remain unanswered, but I think that this is a pretty decent load of questions so far. Progress updates will come as I start writing.

Four days until NaNo starts!

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Well it's day two and I'm hovering around the 4500 word mark. =D Taking a while to pick up the primary plot << What I've got so far isn't bad, it's just a bit slow.

I realized that I haven't actually put as much work into how the story is going to be written as I should have. Not in terms of structure-- I've got a pretty decent outline, and all-- but in the style of writing, characters' voices, that sort of thing. It's been really sporadic; I've got some scenes in first-person from Elegy's point-of-view and some in third-person. The actual plot is being interspersed with parodies of website chatter that's tangentially relevant to the scene at hand, which is kind of clever, but at the same time I'm not entirely satisfied with the way I'm pulling it off.

I really don't want to think about revision this early into the month but I'll have to keep these thoughts in mind for the future.

Excerpt time? Sure, why not.

SPOILER: Click to show

‘Cause the other part of mediumship is, you can’t just assume it’s all ghosts and Ouija boards. There’s a load of a lot of other work you have to do as well; we have to hike up to the woods on a near-weekly basis to make sure that the trees aren’t growing faster than normal. My parents keep tabs with the town’s civic cleanup program to make sure there’s no overabundance of weeds. We’ve to deal with complaints from storeowners whose products suddenly begin floating (or worse, stop floating; Aliston Creek has never had a china shop that lasted more than two weeks.) Gran spends an awful lot of her spare time down at the library archives, researching people’s births and deaths and relationships to the town.

And I get saddled with the job of communication.

Over time, the Coursers have built up a bit of a reputation as respectable, upstanding citizens. It’s to be expected, then, that we have to maintain that reputation, and one of the best ways of doing that, at least according to my parents, is maintaining a full-transparency policy.

I run Aliston Creek’s Supernatural Activity Blog. Keeping people updated on the things they need to know about life energy acting up; high snaps, low fronts, sudden bursts of vitae bearing unusual side effects. It’d almost be fun, if it weren’t such a pain in the rear.

It also raises a few miscommunication errors around town; after all, when you’re the only face people see updating the blog with spectral difficulties, they have the tendency to assume that you’re the only face who can do anything about aforementioned spectral difficulties. ‘Tis a vicious cycle, being saddled with the job of telling people around town that no, that sudden rain of mice was only a one-off, and yes, we’re absolutely positive, and furthermore it was two weeks ago, wouldn’t someone have reported it if they’d seen any more?

People are a load of whiners sometimes.

It’s an unforgiving job, but someone’s got to do it.

At least I get a decent cloak out of the whole ordeal.

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Just hit twenty thousand words, yeah! And I'm at a particularly rockin' scene, too. Think I might save this bit for tomorrow so that I'll be able to breeze through my self-imposed quota instead of worrying about it tonight.

I also miiight have unsnagged myself from a plot hole that's been bugging me for a few days! Trouble being, the solution that most fits looks pretty cliche, at least while squinting. I'll have to see how if looks once i actually get the words down but the story so far looks a bit suspiciously archetypal. Note to self; see if we can try to subvert the apparent tropes to some extent.

Also, I may or may not have come up with a character duo that I quite possibly like even more than Elegy and Deck which I didn't even think was possible. Whoops i guess?

SPOILER: Click to show

Disiocene, Infernal Chaos Demon of the XIVth Plane is a minor demon. That isn't to say that they can't drink alcohol, or that they serve as a semitone chord, because it turns out that Disiocene is very well acquainted with spirits and knows more about notes than you'd ever initially suspect. They're an IT demon, metaphysical tech support at Incorporeal Incorporated, which is exactly as rough a job as it sounds. They look like a Dementor on Casual Friday, they act like a college student deprived of coffee for a week, and they're generally cynical about- well, about pretty much everything; after you have to deal with installing new software for the whole celestial office building you're generally pretty worn out.

Ocule, She-Who-Is-All-Seeing and Knows the Fall of Every Sparrow is a slightly-less-than elder god (goddess, sorry). She's Disiocene's partner-in-crime when it comes to making sure that the computers are running smoothly and that everyone backs up their files (64 Angebytes may sound like a lot of space, but when you're programming the laws of physics you need some enormous servers), and she see monitors everyone's internet activity to make sure that nobody wastes too much time on the internet. Everyone's. It's almost terrifying.

Dis and Ocule have pretty uneventful afterlives (beforelives? Unlives? who even knows) until they notice that there's some unusual life force distribution going on around Aliston Creek, and they do some digging and can't help but notice an unusual subnatural investigation blog making the rounds. I've only just gotten to the point where they're about to confront Deck and Elegy about this, and the plot is going to pick up from here tomorrow. =D

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I've kiiiind of gotten stuck with this. << Built up a decent buffer so that I wouldn't have to worry about writing over finals, but then with studying and preparing for finals taking up several days it felt like I spent too much time away from the story, so I really ended up losing that mental inertia? Coupled with the fact that I really haven't been able to write at all over the past few days? I know what it is that needs to get written, i'm just not able to go hands to keyboard and... y'know, log it.

I feel a little bit bad since this sounds like I'm saying that I intend to quit on this idea; I want to continue it, 's definitely very much a story i want to tell. But my writing skill isn't quite ready for it yet. I'm really not satisfied with what I've got so far in terms of actual technical quality.

36k for a first draft is decent, but I feel like I might just have to set this on hold temporarily. If I can get a bit of inspiration and pull a last-minute win I will, but at this point it feels like it'll be better to let it settle in my mind a bit longer.