Buried Deep has begun! (initial thoughts and cover art inside)
About a decade ago I was writing short-stories like a man on a mission, penning over two dozen or so in a six month period. Writing a short is a lot of fun but it requires a certain kind of mindset: You have only a few thousand words to craft an entire story, beginning-middle-end, with a compelling (and quickly established) hook, and an ending that walks the tightrope between too clever and too contrived.
I loved writing shorts and still have a folder and a word doc somewhere on a computer that has another ten or so ideas I never got around to. I can’t write them now though; writing a short is too different from writing a novel. If I started up again, I’d basically have to take several months off of book-writing in order to get in that groove.
Many of the shorts I wrote a decade ago work exactly as intended and couldn’t be improved if they were expanded into a full-length novel. I suppose I could expand them, but I’d have to sacrifice what makes those shorts so good in the first place: They’re quick reads that don’t overstay their welcome, and reach a conclusion before the reader has time to figure out where it’s going.
Buried Deep, on the other hand, was always a story that I thought could be expanded, and over the past year or so I’ve been sketching down ideas that would fit naturally into the world of that short story and its premise.
I was originally going to write the novel last Autumn but El Dorado happened instead. That was one of those rare ideas that grabbed me so totally I had to rearrange everything to write it immediately. Now that I’ve finished the first three books in the Century of Wind, Fire, and Water series, I have the time to devote to Buried Deep.
Today, I finished the outline and am ready to start writing. Here’s the cover…
Buried Deep is a horror story, akin to the Stephen King tales of the 1980s. In a way, it’s sort of a “road trip” story, taking place over a variety of settings, from the snowy mountains of Connecticut, to the mountains of Virginia, to the swamps of Louisiana. The inspiration for the plot (apart from the details lifted from the original plot), and the reason behind those three primary locations, relate to the legends and tales told of three horrifying creatures: the Wendigo, the Rougarou, and the Skinwalkers. The first are feared in the northeast, while the latter two are feared in the south.
Unlike with other books, there’s no art being drawn for this. The cover was not done by me, it was actually purchased by me. I bought the rights to the picture from a photographer a year or so back, knowing instantly that it was the perfect representation of the house where the climax of the story takes place.
Buried Deep will take a few months to finish. I’m still working on the third Chumpty Dumpty book (it’s going great), but I hope to have this scary novel finished in time for Halloween.