Upcoming gothic western serial

While Sunny Day Parasol Co., the serialized noir I’ve been posting, has been “in the can” for about a week now and the publication of the story has been winding up, I have not been idle with the spare time I have had at my disposal.

I’ve been working on the worldbuilding necessary to support a serialized “gothic western” currently called Ash & Thorn (and likely to stay that way, as the title fits the series rather well). While some writing has been done on the actual narrative, the bulk of my time has been spent dreaming up how this world works, as it is a leaning towards having modest amounts of the supernatural embedded in the overall story. Less high magic and more folk superstitions combined with fey encounters. Still, there are rules that need to be created to keep it grounded and I don’t want the narrative to be logically inconsistent.

And, unlike my usual modus operandi, I am attempting to apply more intent to my writing. While I have historically been very much a by-the-seat-of-my-pants writer (a “pantster”), I’ve decided that a serialized work is less supportive of being so completely carpe diem with my approach to writing this series and I am doing some (gasp) planning, likely eking into “planster” territory. Or even the dreaded “planner” territory. While I wouldn’t call Vivian Locke’s tale a raging success story, I feel like I did get a better grip on the narrative by setting up the next couple of story beats ahead of time and then writing into them; which made me feel like the story was a told better tale than other long pieces I’ve written. This tale is going a little further than that and I am looking at general narrative beats far into later episodes so story feels more grounded and less ad hoc or a result of convenience (deus ex machina, anyone… Bueller? Bueller?).

That said, there is plenty of room to switch the story if it wants to tell me a different one than those beats set out as targets. I’ve only scoped out the first couple of episodes (to be split across 2-5 posts each, depending on the narrative needs; most will be 3-4 posts).

This is to keep everything morsel-sized.

Doing a little bit of research as I started thinking about structure I discovered that some of are intuitively correct in our gut feel of 1200-1500 words per reading session is about what is agreed upon as the ideal length for serialized stories. That comes with an important caveat, however, that suggests those numbers are fluid relative to the narrative and atmospheric density within those passages. It may be fewer words if there is a lot of action, active description or dialog; or may support up to around 2000 words each post if the atmospheric buildup is central to the post. Anything significantly more should probably be split off into several smaller posts.

This theory doesn’t necessarily hold true for one-off bits of narrative; this is more applicable to serialized stories. But it is something to consider if you feel your completion rate for readers is rather lower than you hoped.

As previously mentioned, I “borrowed” the title for this story arc from an even older piece to use on a failed National November Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) attempt a few years ago and this shouldn’t be confused with either effort.

Vengeance, My Heart is the first planned larger arc: “Book 1”. The title is borrowed from the Shakespeare play, Titus Andronicus. The passage reads:

Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,

Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.

But this is not a tale of vengeance in the way you might imagine. No “best served cold” allusions. That’s all I’ll say about the matter.

What is the story? The broad overview is that this starts off like Sergio Leone “drifter” in the desert with a gun and a duster, helping out a family of pilgrims. Like Clint Eastwood’s character in the spaghetti westerns, she embraces no name. And that is about where the similarities end.

Her gun is “different”. It kills like any gun, but it can also kill — with a cost. Her eyes are not a normal color. And she has a crow familiar with matching eyes. There is wild magic around, but no spell-slingers — magic is mostly out of reach for humans and the other denizens of the world. There is a superstitious earthy folk feel to the magic, it is “occult” by way of the word’s original meaning: “hidden” or “concealed”. Magic is of the world, not something that can be harnessed and used. When small rituals “work” no one knows the mechanism, just the connective “recipes” — the meaning of which was lost long, long ago. And they don’t always work as intended.

And there are the ruins of the Old Ones, the people who came from before.

Anyway, I wanted to let y’all know what was on the horizon. I’m expecting the first episode to drop by sometime next weekend or early the following week, to give you a few days to recover from my other effort before beginning the next onslaught.