Writing Report February 22, 2020

Ditching a couple of thousand words in my new Q’a story proved the right move.

The plot blockage has broken up, things are zipping along.  Q’a still ended up doing a little climbing, but not as much as in his as-yet-to-be-published novella; just enough to establish that on her list of skills.

My Q’a stories are twisty and turny, with nobody telling a straight story or acting off straightforward motivations.

Even Q’a herself is morally / ethically compromised, and it’s a fair question which genre offers the more morally ambiguous characterizations:  Pulp noir or sword & sorcery.

As I’ve posted elsewhere, Q’a came about when I  saw a cartoon about Conan the Librarian, which got me to thinking about what kind of a library would employ Conan, which gave me a great story idea but since Conan is Conan™, I needed to create a character as far removed from him as possible.

I’m certainly familiar with sword & sorcery even though it’s not my favorite genre.  I’ve actually written for Conan and of course Thundarr The Barbarian is a credit I’m proud to claim, but I was never than big a fan of Robert E. Howard’s original Conan stories.

To be honest, I enjoyed his Kull tales much more thoroughly and prefer them to his Conan oeuvre; the writing and character seemed much more sharply focused than the Conan tales, which tended to be meandering (one of the best -- “A Witch Shall be Born” -- didn’t even start out as a Conan tale but as Howard was writing it, he felt himself getting bogged down and thought, wot da hell, let’s throw Conan in and see what happens, and boy howdy!, did a lot happen!).

If there was a major influencer in my taste in barbarian fantasy literature, it was the late Karl Edward Wagner and his Kane series.

Kane was actually Cain, the original murderer, cursed by God to live and fight until the end of time.  Wagner’s Kane novels are brutal and bloody, and when a minor character survived at the end of one book after Kane finished slaughter scores of others, readers of the series remarked how Wagner was finally lightening up…

In any case, I’m underway now, and the story is (finally!) proceeding briskly.

While I’m happy with my breakthrough re the new Q’a story, I haven’t been neglecting other things as well.

Expect two lengthy essays up in the next couple of weeks, as well as the weekly rounds of fictoids.

I’ve written four fictoids this week, which should get me through October of this year.  I’m aiming to have the whole year lined up before I go the San Diego Comic Fest on March 6-8.

Nor will I be slowing down at that point.  I’d like to get a couple of years’ worth of material ahead so I’ll know you will always have something new every week even if my schedule is disrupted by outside events.

© Buzz Dixon