{"id":1261,"date":"2016-08-15T07:12:56","date_gmt":"2016-08-15T13:12:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/?p=1261"},"modified":"2016-08-16T09:17:55","modified_gmt":"2016-08-16T15:17:55","slug":"perils-of-the-writer-the-terminal-cases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/perils-of-the-writer-the-terminal-cases\/","title":{"rendered":"Perils of the Writer: The Terminal Cases"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The other day I was asked (via email) about dead projects, and how one, as a writer, knows not to keep working on something and put it in the drawer. \u00a0So I decided to look over my &#8220;Terminal Cases&#8221;.<\/p>\n<div>The Terminal Cases are projects that aren&#8217;t<i> technically<\/i> &#8220;dead&#8221;, and&#8230; as you never know when lightning might strike and there&#8217;s call to go back to them. \u00a0But it&#8217;s more likely than not that I won&#8217;t go back to them and finish them. There are some good ideas in there that it&#8217;s worth looking them over, and possibly mining them for things I can use later. \u00a0And it&#8217;s always good to remember the dead ends on the path to publication. \u00a0Now, some of these aren&#8217;t genre, and you never know&#8211; at some point I might want to write something that&#8217;s non-genre lit.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>The Fifty Year War:\u00a0<\/strong>This was my first attempt to write a novel in the Maradaine setting, this detailing the war between Druthal and Poasia that&#8217;s been referenced in the Maradaine novels. \u00a0This one I had a complete manuscript, but it&#8217;s not a proper narrative. \u00a0It&#8217;s more like a loosely connected series of shorts and novellas. \u00a0Maybe some day I&#8217;ll pull elements of it out, rewrite it extensively and put it out as a series of novellas. \u00a0Maybe.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Crown of Druthal<\/strong>: This was, at the time, my intention for the Grand Fantasy Series. \u00a0It&#8217;s, of course, in the same setting as the Maradaine books, but this series was to travel the whole world. \u00a0Which was the point and the problem: all I had was, &#8220;I&#8217;ve made this world, now let&#8217;s show it all.&#8221; \u00a0Plot was essentially smacked-in with a hammer to justify the path of the journey. \u00a0So it wasn&#8217;t much of a narrative. \u00a0I had one manuscript\u00a0written, and an outline planned out for several more, but in the end, it really wasn&#8217;t a story. \u00a0But it was a useful exercise to learn how to write a novel.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Lowered Bar<\/strong>: The idea behind this was to follow four mediocre students as they muddled through a mid-grade college, eventually to get degrees but not really getting educations. I never really came up with a full outline, just various scenes. It never really came together into a unified whole.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Long Night of the Pieman<\/strong>: This one was based on my experiences pizza delivery, boiled down to a driver&#8217;s adventure in one night. Here I had a full outline, and wrote a fair amount. But as my days as a driver got further and further behind me, the less relevant the piece felt to me.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Xanadu Job:<\/strong> This one was a sci-fi Ocean&#8217;s Eleven, quite literally. The team was even eleven people, with roughly the same jobs in the movie, and the underlying plan was similar, with some sci-fi twists. A few bit and pieces of this did find its way into\u00a0<em><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/29097931-the-holver-alley-crew\">Holver Alley Crew<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/li>\n<li><strong>Arthur Wood&#8217;s Metatextual Life<\/strong>: My concept here was Arthur was a young man, just moved to a new city, starting up a life there. But at the same time, Arthur is the main character of a TV show, with a rabid on-line fandom. So I had ideas for how these different facets affected each other. Like, from Arthur&#8217;s point of view, he had a friend that he saw all the time, but doesn&#8217;t see anymore; but from where it&#8217;s a TV show, the actor playing that friend left and is now on another show. Stuff like that. I had an sketch of how Arthur&#8217;s life would go over five years (in the form of a five-season episode guide), but there was something structural about the whole concept that eluded me. I never quite sussed it out. So here in Terminal Cases it&#8217;ll sit.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Convergence of Angels on the I-35<\/strong>: This one is well over a decade old in the Terminal Cases pile, really. I had written many chapters longhand, long ago, and then typed it up on the computer. Due to various mishaps and errors in judgment, any electronic version is lost. I still have the longhand, but I have yet to type it up and do anything with it. And I may not, because it is very much a &#8220;young man&#8217;s&#8221; book&#8211; I&#8217;m no longer 23 years old, spending long nights in diners. But I do love the title.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Nightingale<\/strong>: This was my &#8220;flawed superheroine&#8221; project, about a wife &amp; mother who survives when her family is killed, and gets her vengeance on. I had imagined it as a short TV series, or later as a web series.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Dr. Hiro Hirose vs. Professor Badass<\/strong>: This originated from that Internet Meme of Prof. Badass, which you&#8217;ve probably seen. I imagined him as the head of a whole evil team. Then I came up with matching heroes to oppose him, lead by Dr. Hiro Hirose. \u00a0The whole thing started as an exercise in googling interesting hero-like pictures, really. But when I tried to actually write, at least so far, I realized I had characters, but no story. Yet. Maybe it&#8217;ll percolate back up later on. You never know.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The other day I was asked (via email) about dead projects, and how one, as a writer, knows not to keep working on something and put it in the drawer. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1261"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1269,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261\/revisions\/1269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrmaresca.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}