Saturday 6 December 2014

Kumiko (war world #3) novel -- sixty-seven thousand words - Hecate-inspired audio noise terror

while I have a week off work, while I'm no longer driving buses around Oxford, I challenged myself to finish this third novel in the War World series: namely Kumiko. During the week, I had several spells of jog-solving. I'd be out on one of my daily 4, 5, 6 mile jogs and suddenly, I'm juggling 4, 5, 6 Kumiko loggerheads with C2S or Cracking Creative Solutions, LOL. And it was a juggling act itself to get back home with all these ideas/solutions intact. Admittedly, one or two of them didn't make it into the story but they led onto actual novel content. It was kinda like 'dreaming whilst running'. Very strange.

The musical inspiration for this final push of typing-in was Hecate's Ascension Chamber, Hecate at the Seven Gates and The Magick of Female Ejaculation CDs, a ritualistic triumvirate that has inspired and energised my writing mind since I first heard them when I was working at Rebellion in 2009. I'll actually be writing a collaborative novel with Hecate (aka Rachael Kozak) in 2016 titled "Vemonist", the first chapter of which my co-writer has already titled Snake Knives and Razor Eyes. So somebody's probably gonna end up getting hurt, somewhere down the line.

Kumiko's come a long way since my last update - come a long way in terms of word count which is now 67,000 words and looking like a worthy conclusion to the War World series despite its kinda left-field opening premise and kinky ethnological stance i.e. the eponymous faun-Kumiko herself. The origins of War World and how mankind can ever hope to logically escape were coming together in a way that was both interesting and organic, and this is from the writer. Half way through this final rewrite though I realised that I'd double-attributed one of the essential narrative threads and had to go back in and reassign ownership of it to one or the other of the characters.

In fact, I nearly broke the book, right there in the last week. But I think I've salvaged it, and in a non-arbitrary fashion. It wasn't so much a coin-toss as a considered move on the Great Chess Board of story writing. I didn't have to fill out a tedious and expensive PAF or Patent Application Form to do it, either.

Kumiko's due for simultaneous release some time in (later) 2015, once I've finished Reaper (that's free planet #3).