Monday, September 24, 2012

Teaser Trailer

So I guess it's about time I started to pimp my current work for two equally important reasons:

  • to start a hype and intrigue that will have you guys salivating with curiosity and making me (or rather, my book) totally irresistible when the time comes. And
  • to prove that I haven't been sitting around scratching my arse for the last nine months, or at the very least, that I've been writing whilst sitting around scratching my arse.
It all began on a snowy day in January. There I was, slaving over a hot laptop, typing the closing words and wrapping up the edits on a brand spanking short story. For some months I had been working through all the little ideas backlogged, preparing them for my planned second and third short story collections. Now I was once again faced with the arduous and somewhat exciting task of choosing which little gem I would tackle next.

My hands fell upon an A4 page composed mostly of white space. The top half of one side contained a scribbled excerpt of a phone call. Nothing more, nothing less. Says I, 'Right, let's get this one out of the way.' It had, after all, been sitting around waiting for nigh on one year.

So I got out a pen and a notebook and began to jot down the layout of the story, the character details, the locations, the setting. Two days and a notepad and a half later, and I was still going. That tiny, half A4 page had mutated into something huge, intricate and (I hope) unique.

Let the fun and the heartbreak begin. Without wasting a moment, I delved into the prose. The basic premise of the story was rather overused, so I had dedicated many pages of my notes solely to brainstorming ways to do it so that it could not be labeled as 'done before.' But although the premise may have been cliche, the plot itself was a world apart, the first two chapters delivering the reader a swift slap in the face and dragging them headfirst into the middle of an eerie mystery.

And around the halfway mark, thanks to some random thralling on the web, the plot suddenly exploded once more. Out came the pen and the notepads, and they were soon covered in my feverish chicken scratch that outlined the basic ideas for a sequel and - because why the hell not - a third book in the trilogy.

Now, instead of a simple idea done in a different way, I had on my hands a complex plot that spanned three books; a plot that would tackle links between Christianity and the occult, that would marry Satan with supernatural folklore, that would grab hold of some of the most outlandish speculations on the bible and whisk them up into a jaw-dropping concoction of conspiracy and horror.

The end result would take all those speculations, all those bedtime scare stories, and two of the world's most feared and infamous monsters, place them in the same setting and create a connection between them that is so simple it's almost ingenious... if I do say so myself. 

Book the first - almost complete.