Progress on Dystopolis has been incremental, but steady. I hit a thousand words today, which doesn’t sound like much, but I’m still warming up - in these clumsy first steps, I’ll throw out a hundred words here, a couple of hundred there, but before long I’m writing a couple of thousand a day. It remains to be seen if any of it’s any good, of course, and I have old fragments that could be reused here and there, but… it’s coming together.
The biggest stumbling block has been building the world - something I’m usually quite good at, but I’m usually using a roughly similar version of this planet as a setting. Dystopolis is a newfound civilisation, with shadowy people pulling the strings, in an idyllic city where happy endings are accepted as the norm for everyone, and deviation from the advised course of your life is extremely rare (and unbelievably dangerous). The society I’m building is one where the beliefs of a strange, apocalyptic cult have metamorphosed over the course of three hundred years into a much deeper cultural understanding.
And the worst part, I want the core kernel - the basic idea that art imitates life, and it’s perfectly ordinary to strive for a life with a beginning, middle and end full of meaning and purpose - to be grossly flawed. I want to take these stories to dark places, and to find happiness in the most unconventional places. I don’t quite want to call Dystopolis a giant middle finger to Aristotle, but that’s part of it.
But there’s so much to build if I want it to appear coherent. I’ve made notes - pages of them, now - on details that’ll never make it to the page, but need to be there so I can write about people who live in the space in between those details.
That said, I’ve advanced. It used to be that knowing this was such a challenge was preventing me from doing anything about it. I stopped writing for at least two years - and possibly three, now that I think about it. I rode off the slight wind generated by Tales From The End for too long. Some of the stories in that book, I wrote in 2007. They’re six years old. That’s intimidating, but also reassuring - I have got better in some respects since then, and the rusty bits that need oiling are slowly getting the proper maintenance.
I’m excited about this year for so many reasons, but the idea that in a few months I might have something approaching a book is really exciting.