Making a manuscript: From farm to table (brain to book?)
A horror novella, set on a boat, told in non-chronological order. Do you think you could write a book from that? I wasn’t sure either, but six years later and here we are.
All the way back in 2019, Mortal Thoughts started with those three provisos; nothing more than a writing challenge I’d set myself, a little palate cleanser after I’d finished my first full-length draft of my fantasy novel. I sat myself down on a park bench with a new leather journal in which I intended to write the entire thing (spoiler alert: not the best idea), and this weird combination of three very specific factors which I wanted to use.
First came the sequence of the days, which I neatly delineated based off an arbitrary distinction between there being a ‘before’ and ‘after’. Before and after what? A poltergeist infestation? Demonic possession? Sea-monster attack? Infection? Foolish, naïve young 22-year-old me initially landed on the latter (you had no idea COVID was going to steal this one away from you, did you?), and then I stumbled merrily across my next obstacle – how do I write a sea-bound mystery, having never spent any great length of time off land? A cruise would be easiest I thought, after quickly losing interest in researching sailing logistics and nautical lingo. Then with that decided, all I had to do was give it a crack…right?
I immediately proceeded to break the order of chapters I set out for myself (although, is it really breaking order if it’s all non-chronological anyway?) and started with chapter two, day five of the cruise. I had a clear image in mind, a memory of a stormy Coolangatta beach day, and started describing it:
‘Thunder rumbled through the cove, the deep vibrations resonating at the cusp of audibility. Clouds the colour of slate intimidated those below, threatening to push down and break the ethereal barrier separating sky from sea. A light drizzle settled in, the precursor to a bruised purple storm-head which promised a more violent deliverance…’
The paragraphs flowed page after page, using rude caricatures (with somewhat more generic names) of the characters I now have, and one tragic event after another I’d written a novella.
At the time, I never expected it would be any larger or more sophisticated and soon put it aside. Now, it’s been six years and five drafts since that first little leather-bound novella rife with grammar errors, crappy horror tropes, and gratuitous violence. The characters, the ‘evil’, and the ending (now featuring my twisted version of schema therapy, for all of you in the know) have changed much since then, but the core of the story is the same: it’s about the unbreakable connection between a mother and her child, and what happens when that bond is damaged beyond repair.
Who knows what horrible things could happen then?