NaNo 2019: 3rd Times the Charm

So it's time once again for me to start screaming, primal, into the void as I figure out what I'm doing for NaNoWriMo.

Before I get into that, though, I'm going to point out that NaNo has a new site? It's kinda neat when it works! You can find me here. 

It's weird to think I've been doing this since 2004, but here we are.

So this year, I'm going to work on the same story I worked on in 2014 and sorta 2018 - sorta because I got basically nothing re-written last year.

It's Ghostlight!

The idea behind Ghostlight is sometimes I get a bizarre craving for writing a Weird West-ish setting, but I also like Lovecraftian madness and fantasy too much, so I smushed it all together into one messy pile and got the base concept for this novel. Also I love trains? Because there are trains.

I think my problem in my two previous attempts were I was humanizing the non-human monster-people too much. Yes there are non-human monster people, each worshipping their own vaguely non-euclidean diety, which are able to make pacts to have people become members of their priesthood - or warlocks to the humans in the setting because lol DnD. 

But in the previous versions the monsters were too human, I think? Appearance and culturally, it wasn't quite... what I wanted. I'm really feeling it with them being more alien. They were very much just human-with-bits-added.

But as can probably been hinted from my glorious stick art...

...I'm going to be deviating more strongly away from that.

So the idea, broken down to the bare minimums, is:

Person A is hired to retrieve Person B, by Person C. Person B is Person C's illegitimate child, and for some reason they need them to break a curse or something. Person A finds and collects Person B, starts to take them to Person C, and bad things happen, leaving them traveling through the wilderness, which is a very bad place in this setting. Ultimately, they bond on this journey, and Person A gets Person B to Person C. But it turns out Person C needed Person B to do something nasty to break the curse thing, and Person B is like "no fuk u" and leaves to live with Person A in the wilderness.

Very straightforward! Most of the story is in the adventure portion, which I am going to probably wing encounters for mostly, except for a few big ones. 

Then we add things like "Person A is a "necromancer" who has a pact with one of the Lovecraftian-style gods - actually, no, I think they might be more Bloodbourne flavored at this point to be honest - anyway, a pact that lets them do this type of magic. In addition to that, they were abandoned/sold (I haven't decided) as an infant to the satyr/faun people and was raised by them, and as a side effect of the culture is literally turning into a faun herself - which she is delighted by!"

It makes things fun!

Obviously there is a lot I am still working on; there are a lot of plotpoints that I am probably just going to make up as I get to. It's going to be an exercise in shock value too - nothing is too awful for this storyline! 

So yeah, Ghostlight it is this year.