A lot of my anxiety from pushing forward with a series of
Lighthouse stories comes from the fact that there's paranormal stuff out the wazoo out there. I mean, there's a part of me that's interested in getting a slice of that action, because apparently people suck it right up (insert vampire joke here), but I also know that a lot of the ground has been pretty trod. It's a part of the speculative fiction market littered with Robert Pattinson posters from J-14 or whatever magazine caters to his fangirls this week, and love notes to Anna Paquin from
her fangirls. Then I remember something I thought was said by
Marc Schuster, but consulting my notes I see it was spoken by Larry Kane, legendary Philadelphia newscaster and himself an aspiring novelist: "Don't believe that just because something has been written about that you can't write about it." ("They didn't necessarily do a good job," he added a few sentences later.) So yeah, plenty of stories out there involving vampires and werewolves and wizards and angels and demons and stuff. Some of them even involve paranormal investigators, like the B.P.R.D. or Fringe division. Okay, Fringe division is more about pseudo-science so close to the supernatural it might as
well be the supernatural, but I'm going full supernatural instead of the Fringe route. I can't compete with Walter.
Seriously. Nothing I do will be this cool. But I'm trying to go at it from a new angle. I have some
history and
mechanics laid down. So I need to work on setting and characters, find ways to distinguish why they're different and why readers should care. I need to engineer the ways in which readers will be captivated by these folks, be they humans or otherwise, and might even fall in love. This will involve collecting my disparate attempts at putting this together and, well, putting it together. I'm still in the brainstorming stages. Please forgive my ramblings.
Blue Ink Alchemy
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