DREAMS OF A LOST MOONCHILD

So about the third story in ‘maybe we were the monsters’.

I ran into a snag, as in I was stuck for a little while. I unstuck myself and if you want to know why and what happened,

I don’t know if I ever explained the concept of the book, but all stories have the same 6 characters in different scenarios.

So the first I planned was called SSV DYATLOV and was about a prison colony in space, I do have half that story and I have every intent of finishing it with different characters that is.

the next was a dark future story called CORPSE RAVEN, that was about demonic possession from a ritual gone wrong. But that became it’s own beast and so I will finish that outside the ‘monsters’ concept.

THEN I tried with making a found footage style story that X was home with a broken hip, forced to see his friends die one by one by some monster. But that was too close to a entry that my co-author Anne wrote, so I abandoned that too. It had no working title.

so I ajusted some and started writing a story about ghost hunters where it went wrong, so I kept some of the found footage idea – that had the working title of ONCE WE WERE CADAVERS. And that was where I got stuck, because as I wrote on – i loved it, BUT it was much too close to one of the other two stories I wrote, and so I had to do something.

I think it ended up so close to that other story because I was unclear on why the ghost would kill people, and as you know characters sometimes take on a life of their own – and I wrote myself into a corner, as in ‘why would X do this’ – and I had no answer. Then i can’t write it, it’s pretty simple. It might work for a creepypasta not to explain stuff, but not for a short novel lenght story. And I struggled with coming up with both a fictive ritual, as well as a reason for it – plus what to name stuff. See my first idea was that every character should be a personification of a trait, and when i hit the ‘let’s form them into deadly sins’ I knew I lost the plot completely. This was not what I wanted, but I didn’t know what else to do.

My main issue was, if you were somewhere and you realised it was haunted and stuff tried to kill you – you’d get the fuck out of there, and no argument in the world would be good enough to stay, and nothing held the caracters there, it’s a plantation after all, not a large structure, mostly to seperate it from another story of mine. So I had to figure out why they stayed, well if I put myself in their sted I’d only stay if I thought leaving was either impossible, or someone I love would die or get hurt. – so bomb collars and landmines were out of the question, this leaves ‘the loved one’ theory, but one of the main points of the story is that they are school friends and meet up many years later, and then would you care? not really. So I was stuck, super stuck..

And so I started writing something else, just to get my mind off it, and hopefully get some inspiration from my super fickle and messed up muse. It worked.

I simply decided to remove all occult and supernatural stuff, and leave it as a ‘saw’ sort of thing. This way – it works. Still needs to work out the ‘why’ but that is probably going to solve itself when i get there. that is often how it works and i’d have to go back and ajust stuff as I edit to make it stick. The story now sits half done on something about 30 pages – and has the working title of THE FUNERAL LULLABY. it might be rephrased to something like lullabies for funerals, or whatever if I know myself right.

I have a bunch of graphics I made that I am not using for any of the three stories you can download here

I wanted to finish it this week, but I also have a examn that I really need to focus on (work related uptimising course) so i might be a little slower than i wanted to.