It’s been a year, and on the eve of a new one – hopefully a better one, I’ve been making some plans, pencilling in projects, and generally trying to get ready for the writing and publishing year ahead.
This blog is part of that plan.
But I don’t intend to blog, just like I don’t intend to post on social media. I find that I’ve never got anything interesting to say in a blog entry or a Facebook update. I’ve spent most of December 2020 wondering what I can do differently in 2021. I considered Patreon or writing more on Medium. But none of that feels right. I’ve also dumped all my social media as that hasn’t felt right for a long time now.
What does feel right, and what I’ve got a lot of is stories in my head, and I plan to do something with them.
Here, every day – at roughly the same time of the day (before lunch in Scandinavia) – I will post 500 words of a new story. It will be a long novel featuring Constable David Maratse, with another 500 words the next day, continuing the story until this time next year. If all goes well it will be a book ready to be published in January 2022.
The working title is Maratse 365, for obvious reasons. Each entry will be largely unedited. They will end abruptly. There will be chapter breaks when appropriate, and often in the middle of a day’s post. There will be mistakes, typos, all kinds of fun stuff, but it will be original and highly experimental, especially as I normally plan every novel and novella I write.
With Maratse 365 I’ll be writing into the dark.
For fun.
Every damn day.
As for the virus… maybe I’ll be vaccinated against covid-19 along the way. Maybe you will. Borders might open, and close, and then reopen. We know we’re in this for the long haul, so it makes sense – to me, at least – to anticipate another long haul until we’re out of the pandemic, when we might have learned from the pandemic, and thought about our place in nature, how closely connected we are.
Because, ultimately, that’s where Maratse comes in.
As one reader put it, he’s a renaissance man of the land, for the land and for the people. Before I had even heard of the new corona virus I wondered how Maratse would react to a virus outbreak in Greenland, which led me to write that novella a month or so before things really cooked off in the real world.
But Maratse 365 isn’t going to be a virus novel. I know that much, but I won’t know more until I begin tomorrow.
Beginnings are exciting and difficult, but after a year like 2020 it feels right to make a bold start to the New Year, writing as if nothing else mattered, locked down and locked in, with a blank page in front of me, and 365 more blank pages after that.
Let’s see what happens…
Oh, and Happy New Year!
Chris