Works in Progress Archives - Page 4 of 82

Keith Murphy: The Original Pitch from 2010

PETERMBALL Works in Progress February 25, 2020

Tomorrow the second Keith Murphy book, Frost, goes live over on Amazon. As always, I recommend pre-ordering a copy to have it delivered fresh.

To celebrate the moment, I went and dug out my first pitch for a Keith Murphy serial that I sent through to the Edge of Propinquity ‘zine back in 2010, laying out the twelve stories I intended to write if they accepted.

The final stories ended up very different to this pitch, especially the proposed version of Frost versus the final product. That said, there’s elements that have stayed consistent: ghostly magicians, demonic crime lords, and cults are at the heart of Exile. Frost is all about what happens when Valkyries show up, and the old bloke mentioned in Skull Monkey becomes a major part of Crusade (albeit without a skull monkey)

Even the basic concept of Piledriver filtered through, as part of the novelette in These Strange & Magic Things.

SERIES PITCH: FLOTSAM
The Gold Coast has always been a good place to lose yourself, a tourist city on the Australian coastline with a surplus of beaches, theme parks and nightclubs full of tourists. They say no-one is born on the Gold Coast; the permanent residents just end up there, washed up against the beach like flotsam after a storm.
It’s easy to lose yourself on the Gold Coast. It’s even easier to be found by things that hide there, in the shifting shadows behind the neon. There are demons hiding out there, and worse things besides. Old things, ancient entities for whom the word demon is means little. Things allowed to flourish in the shifting tides of a city where no-one stays for longer than a holiday and no-one cares about the locals.
Keith Murphy left the Gold Coast ten years ago, but now he’s coming home with orders to lie low. He’s got an occult hit man for a boss, the last magic bullet from the 9mm that killed an immortal down in Adelaide, and just enough knowledge of the world behind the world to realise how much trouble he’s in

1) Paradise City
Keith rolls back into the city with a head full of bad dreams and a nightmare on his heels, the spectre of the immortal Norse magician he helped Danny Roark kill down in Adelaide. Stopping the ghost will stretch Keith’s limited knowledge of magic to the limits, and may well attract some of the more dangerous entities that live in the Gold Coast shadows. His only hope lies in the home town advantage, but is that going to be enough to stop someone with centuries more experience in the occult arts?
2) Skull-Monkey
Keith’s neighbour in the Jadran Hotel isn’t what he seems – he’s old, he’s well-versed in ancient lore, and he lives with a weird skull-monkey creature that hisses at Keith Murphy every time he walks past. Keith befriends the old man, trying to uncover his secret, but it’s possible that digging too deep will result in one of them killing the other.
3) Piledriver
Keith gets drawn back into the world of his childhood friends, trying to forget the things he did while working with Danny Roark, but the familiar ritual of going to the local wrestling shows draws Keith and his friends into the orbit of an unfamiliar entity. Saving the life of a friend will force Keith to play the role of the hit-man once more, but he isn’t sure he’s got what it takes to stand toe-to-toe with the darkness. He makes the final decision too late for anything but vengeance.
4) Lock and Load
Keith runs into an ex-girlfriend at a funeral and learns she’s sold her soul to save the life of her son. Despite his best efforts, Keith gets drawn into a devil’s game to redeem her, but will saving her soul cost him his own?
5) 9mm
A midnight phone-call from Danny Roark puts Keith on high alert – a coven of sorcerers from Adelaide is coming to take vengeance on Danny for killing one of their own and Keith is the only one who can help. Keith hits the city in search of someone who can use blood, magic, and one last bullet to stop the coven from taking Danny down, but some trade-offs come at too high a price.
6) Murphy’s Law
The one indisputable rule Roark taught Keith Murphy is that white fellers never mess with the native magic. Unfortunately a demon from Keith’s childhood isn’t giving him any other choice, and in attempting to save his own life Keith’s going to learn exactly why Roark made the rule. There are things older and more dangerous than demons in the Gold Coast shadows, and Keith will never look at his city the same way after seeing them.
7) Frost
Most tourists never see a Gold Coast winter, so when the off-season arrives Keith is looking forward to laying low. Unfortunately he starts seeing familiar patterns in the frost and hears warning cries on the morning wind, drawing him into the conflict between a local ghost and the possessed cop who killed her.
8) Hard Rock
There are a dozen clubs on the Gold Coast strip and there are young men showing up dead in each of them, strange symbols carved on their foreheads and two incisors removed. When the investigation reveals nothing, one of the local cops contacts Keith and calls in a favour, forcing him to confront the demon responsible.
9) Valkyrie
Danny Roark appears on Keith’s doorstep with a bullet in his stomach and a curse on his lips, warning him that the warding they pulled over their hit is gone. Danny needs a hospital, but there’s a host of the Valkyrie is riding on the Gold Coast, heralding the end of the world, and the first of their number is already here…
10) Fortified
The end of the world is coming and the only men left who can stop it are Keith and Danny. Keith starts calling in favours, trying to tip the odds in their favour, but the price of the help they need is one last hit…and this time the job requires killing an innocent.
11) Ragnarock and Roll
Keith always knew the end of the world would start on the Gold Coast, and when the hosts of the Valkyrie hit town it looks like his premonition is correct. With Danny out of commission, it’s up to Keith to lure his pursuers into a trap and keep the various secrets living in the Gold Coast’s shadows from spilling free across the world.
12) Flotsam
He may have saved the world, but killing people remains the only skill Keith Murphy has. When his success against the Valkyrie leads to new contracts coming in, Keith must make a choice – remain a killer or find a new use for his talents.

Milestone

PETERMBALL Works in Progress December 4, 2019

Word count on my exegesis draft ticked past the minimum viable word count last night, although I’m still a few thousand words away from having a final draft. Which puts me behind the self-imposed deadline I set up back in April, but well ahead of my last attempt at writing one of these where I stalled out five thousand words in and ultimately dropped out of the RHD program rather than continue.

There was a point where it felt like that was a perfectly logical choice this time, as well. My imposter syndrome is strong with theoretical writing, and the fear that I will expose myself for an idiot triggers my social anxiety something horrible.

Fortunately, my beloved was there to suggest it might be time to check in with my GP and have a chat about how my mental health is going, and my GP promptly set me up with a plan to pull things back from the brink.

I’m still nervous about writing this damn thing, but not paralysed by indecision and fear.

Next deadline isn’t until early January, but that’s where I need to hand over something way cleaner than what I’ve got now, with all the referencing done properly and the chapters making sense. Still, after nearly six weeks of this eclipsing everything else going on in my life, it’s nice to have the to think about fiction a little more.

Word Count Versus Progress in Thesis Land

PETERMBALL Works in Progress October 29, 2019

I’ve been wearing my thesis hat a good deal through October, because there’s an official deadline to get an exegesis draft finished by November 30. It’s gotta be somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 words. My impulse is to aim for the middle, assuming some stuff is going in ’cause I missed it while I will pull out other things ’cause they don’t need to be there.

Meanwhile my supervisor stresses that I’ve met university requirements so long as the exegesis clocks in at 20,001, and pointedly suggests that that minimum viable length will be just fine given that I’m submitting next year.

My draft currently sits around 18,616 words, so I’m doing okay on the productivity front, but it’s also a stark reminder that there’s a big difference between word count and progress. It looks like I’m almost done on the surface, but the stuff that’s actually “rough draft” only makes up 11,519 words of it.

The rest is all random bits, theoretical chunks of a larger jigsaw where I still searching out the edge pieces. Short pieces that may or may not fit into the overall thesis structure, written out of order and frequently trying to lock down a particular idea or argument. It’s valuable to have them, but they won’t make sense if someone asks to read where my research is at.

A few months back, when I started this process, those segments counted as good progress. They were how I got the computer every morning and started typing new words. Doing everything I could to avoid starting with a blank page.

You can rack up a pretty good wordcount that way, but it takes more than that to become a narrative (and an exegesis is a narrative, telling the story of your research and process as you solve a particular problem).Those notes got me to the point where where I could start linking things up and figuring out what chapters should look like, effectively moving me out of first gear and getting on the highway.

The core of progress is always word count, but the type of wordcount that counts as progress is likely to shift across the lifespan of a project. I’m still locking down ideas and rough notes at this late stage, but they tend to be part of a daily braindump into a diary rather than occurring on the page.