Purple Monster

My mood is highly affected by my surrounding but these can be blocked out with the aid of music, but music has even more affect and influences what I want to write. Of course it could just be that when I’m in the mood to listen to certain types of music I am in the mood to write certain types of things!

So what themes do I want to permeate my writing this time?

Dark, gritty, desperatly coragous, mythic, timeless, expansive, bloodily elegant and absorbing.

I am therefore picking out certain music to make an iTunes group to listen to during my long slog in November.

It will contain:

Tangerine Dream, Pink Floyd, Quadraphenia, Gary Numan, Tori Amos, Kate Bush, P J Harvey, Solaris sound track, Doni Darko soundtrack, Gorillaz, Matrix sound track, Maroline Manson, Flaming lips, UNKLE, Godspeed You! Black Empire and probably many more once I get into it!

The Elves are the original Homospapiens of Earth, they arose amongst a plethora of other higher primates with tool building and culture, but in this world there was limited resources and so war was fought primative and brutile.

Until one species gained dominance, keeping the few surviours as slave stock.

They then went on to diversify and fill the planet creating vast empires with cultural and business epi centres in two or three vast sea communities. Internal war and conflict hit the Elves resulting in annialition and the scorching of the earth and poisoning of the sky.

The survivours found themselves barren of want to miscarry. In fear they turned to the slave breed stock. None where compatable but a breeding programme began none the less – to get the most elfish characteristics from the slaves.

Eventually they had a result and with some direct genetic manipulation they had three breeds of human.

But it soon became apparent that two of the breeds where dead ends – too intelligent and not robust enough or too violent and unpredictable. These strains where culled leaving only those direct anscestors of the modern human.

Life extention technology was another solution to the plights of these elves which teams of scientists work on. Several times the breeding programmes where hit by terrorists or plague and the human stock taken dangerously low, resulting in more DNA splicing from other primates and the elves themselves.

Eventually the terrerosist faction is destroyed and the levels of humans arises enough to begin a civalisation once more with the Elves as godheads over seeing the operations and using there technology to influence climate and the like. Humans prosper.

This is the dawn and Punk is already born in a lab where they have tried to combine their own DNA with humans – the results normally being bad due to the different metabolic rates means they have used life extension technology on her too.

The idea being if they have several Chimera’s they can force breed by genetic intervention and get a fertile elf back out of the process – taking human fertility with them.

The humans are also being breed for interllect as it is hoped they will be able to become engerneers like the elves but the humans are more feeling and respond to instinct. Their passion is open and they think in a way that is unpredictable to the elves. Though the elves have high tech they are engerneers not scientists – they are methodical without lateral thinking and the ability to reason out why.

The tower of Babel is built and the young punk watches it destroyed by a remnant terrorist faction who then proceed to try and hunt her and her kind down. Labs burnt civilisation in ruins the humans begin agian with faint memories of the elves and strange half tales of great cities in the sea.

Time passes and the elves are come to light some times openly in control sometimes hiding from the humans but influencing events none the less. They form an underlaying power network that control human affairs and are involved with many secret societies and the like – ie Knight’s Templer, the Vatican, Masons, Bruge Lace makers.

Two main factions exist within these elves – those who seek to destroy the monstrousity of the human race which they mantain should never have existed and those who still seek immortality – if not for themselves then of their people!

Wooow – so lets see I have elements of Mysterious Cities of Gold, Star Gate, Vulcans from Star Trek, Snow Crash, Clan of the Cave Bear, Ban Brown, Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and a host of others :/ The only thing missing is UFO’s and I’m not sure they aren’t going to appear somewhere along the line – sigh!

Suggestions and feedback appreciated.

Basically I have been quiet sick this year and so am very out of condition with everything – this doesn’t just mean physical stuff it means mental stuff too and skills like writing and drawing – I am out of practice.

I was very concerned about this and was wondering if I would manage NaNoWriMo cold – it would be I think like running a whole marathon with no training what so ever, now I’ve run half marathons with no training before but that was before I was really out of condition and I feel that I would die if I attempted it now. So why should the writing be any different? I remember starting school again after the summer holidays – my hand always ached by the end of that first day!

So I was desperatly searching around for something when I saw the 100 days challenge as proported by @WritingSpirit on Twitter and I thought – thats it!

So starting at the beginning of autum with 100 days left of 2009 I have decided to do at least an hour of solid writing aday. It is working well so far and is getting me geared up for NaNoWriMo nicely.

I believe the idea comes from QiGong but am not sure.

Now I don’t actually write for an hour in one go – I have chronic pain and the longest time I should mantian one position for is 20 minutes so that is the size of my writing slots – I just do 3 of them with 10 minutes inbetween to make hot drinks and do a few housey things.

I’m hoping this is going to put me in good sted for the work ahead 🙂

How do others get ready for writing marathons like NaNoWriMo?

I have decided on a drastically slow ageing process for The Punk in Pink – she will age a day for every year!

This give me the sort of scope I want for her as she can easily have been a young adult/teenager for the key events I want her to be involved with.

Her Elvan peers are still going to have a life span of about 700 yrs.

She will basically live a magnitude longer ie in the 1000’s of years so is to them what they are to humans!

I think this could actually give her a mythical status amoungst the elves to be honest which is an interesting concept to conjure with!

I still need to decided exactly what age she is when but the basics are getting there 🙂

EelKat on twitter has informed me that the normal lifespan of an elf is 700 yrs which would allow me to encompass the Elizabethan times and the few years in the future that I was aiming for. However I think I want to make the Punks life span even longer than that – why?

Because I have decided that she is Joan of arc and that she is going to appear in the classical world i.e. Rome and Athens and the like, I want her to be mixed up with the old civalisations of the world.

But I also want there to have been several generations of elves since humanity arose.

I have been pondering mixing in some anti-ageing stuff – after all the Punk is engineered in the first place so why should she be constrained to the life span of the elves?

Could it be that these long lived beigns are searching for immortality and the lose of their fertility due to their own warring has led to the production of the Human-Elf Chimera The Punk?

Sounds good to me 🙂

I have found myself having to look up stuff to do with cave men and when they became modern humans and about the sister homosapien groups that went extinct. This is important as I could have the elves as a sister clad or group who diverged from the same ancester as us or I could have them engerneer all the different homosapiens which is an intreging idea.

I have even been doing abit of delving into our genetic history and found that there are some interesting bottlenecks where the human population went very low indeed 10,000 to 1000 breeding pairs according to wikipedia!

This is all good stuff though possibly not that relevent to the story I’m trying to write!

However I have decided that I need to work this stuff out so that I don’t hobble myself for future stories involving the Punk or her elvish kin!

I need to construct some sort of time I think.

So I think I am going with 700 yr lifespan – I need to work out what that is in generation terms – and then I still need to decided on the Punks ageing :/

On EelKat’s writing blog she mentions this Blog Meme which is a set of questions you fill i n about NaNoWriMo and then you post a link back in a comment on the guy who made it up in the first place’s blog! The dude is: Benjamin Solah – I have taken his question and put them in a list here so you can just copy and paste the whole list and answer it. I’ll be doing the questions myself as I feel a few of them could help me over come and pin point some issues I may face when writing!

One or two of the questions are things I was going to post about anyway – so I may well still do seperate write ups for them.

When and how did you find out about NaNoWriMo? How did you go?

How many times have you done NaNoWriMo?

How many times have you won? If you haven’t won, what was your best result?

How did you go last year?

Where do you write and with what do you write?

How do you find time to write?

Are your partners, friends and family allies or enemies?

What are you strengths and what do you use to help you get to the end?

What are you weaknesses, obstacles and challenges that hinder you from finishing?

Do you plot/outline/plan or do you write by the seat of your pants? How much do you plot or how unprepared are you?

Do you participate in the real life community, go to write ins and meet ups in your area?

What are your writing aids? Special snacks, music, totems, rewards or punishments?

As part of my research for my NaNoWriMo novel I have set myself the task of watching all the Elizabethan dramas, comedies, documentaries that I can lay my hands on. This means I have highjacked the family love film account and taken no prisoners!

I have also been to the local liberary, been talking to locals about the Bisley boy, reading cyber punk novels that people have suggested on facebook and twitter. I have also been scouring the local charity shops and the local Monastry for books I think may be relivent.

Hopefully I’ll get a chance to blog about how each and everything book/film/programme etc… has been useful but right now my main priority is actually going to be absorbing all this info.

I am having to go beyound the history of the Elizabethan times, mainly due earlier history being relivent to the characters developement and the series as a whole even if it is not quiet keyed to this specific book!

I am still looking for more cyber punk suggestions by the way and any good Elizabethan historical novels would be nice too 🙂

Thanks

When I started with this storyline concept I knew I wanted The Punk in Pink to be a cyberpunk novel as I have always wanted to write scifi horror stuff but tended towards distopian close futures or alternated societial structures and then I tended to write them in a style remaniscent of The Big Sleep – this was unsuprising as I loved and was maybe alittle obsessed with those types of films as a child.

When I started to show my work to people they told me I was writing cyberpunk – this was a genre I had never heard of and so presant arrived of Snow Crash and then Nueromancer – both of which I absorbed and wanted more. Another friend had already given me a few penguin classics of Raymond Chandler which I have in pride of place on the book shelf!

Anyway part of my issue is that the things surrounding this novel – the world in which it is built is stretching back and back into the mists of time to our earliest existance. I also know a large stretch of the book is based in the Elizabethan period so how the hell is it a cyberpunk novel?

I definatly still want it to be a cyberpunk novel and the main protagonist has to be The Punk in Pink so now I’m thinking that it maybe the first in a series of stories and that there is something importantant hiden or found out about during the Elizabethan period that is relivant to the futuristic Punk on her flying bike.

This then leads on to interesting questions about the structure of the novel itself.

For a start do I write it in first or second person?

Do I do all the historical and then all the future bits or do I do a crossing backwards and forwards or just do flash backs by the main character?

It’s starting to take shape and like with everytime I try and write a novel it splits itself into a huge mega series – I’m hoping that this time it will actually get written!

The elves in my nanowrimo story are going to be viscous waring, sentimental thinkers too wit humans who live along time with slightly higher if more narrow brain functions than ‘normal’ humans. They are divided into groups who bicker and war against each other.

Once they ruled but they fought a war and were brought to the brink of extinction. This was when they started breeding humans to produce a more intelligent race that could help them solve their falling fertility and to provide for the few who remained.

This group of survivers slowely schismed and as they are the sort of Mason societies this has a marked affect on the humans.

Of course Newton and others would have been involved in their war and many ‘monsters’ like wearwolves would be the result of genetic engerneering by them.

The Punk herself is an experiement in the war on infertility.

However some of the elves believe such creations to be abomination and so attempt to wipe them out. This means that initially the Punk would have been raised by the elves who were raided by another faction and as an apparent small child she ends up wondering on her own with little knowledge of what she is.

I am however concerned that this is just going to turn into some awful mash up of Anne Rice’s Taltos, Dan Brown, and the Cyber Punk novel Snow Crash – perhaspe with over tones of Clan of the Cave Bear. Hmmm ok maybe that will actually be a nice mix.

Dan Brown in not actually the main story I’m thinking of here but I can’t remeber the name of the film but I have some how mentally lumped them all together as the ‘Da Vinci Code’ genre even though it pre-dates the book! :/

Not entirely sure how much will be relivent to my story though :/

Well The Punk in Pink is an elf-human half bred, the elves in question are another higher primate. Sort of like Cro-Mangon Man and Neandethals. They are close enough to cross bred but not close enough to produce viable offspring. This means the Punk is infertile but as the second homo-sapien type race ages alot slower than humans do it may not be that much of a disadvantage.

Obviously she was Queen Elizabeth – in fact The Punk in Pink was the Bisley boy who stood in for princess Elizabeth and then became Queen. I have also decided she is Joan of arc which leads to an interesting plot issue of how she gets out of being burned and dying of old age etc… I do not want her to be ‘immortal’ like in the Highlander movies or to have regeneration skills that have a similar affect – she needs to fear for her life!

She simple ages alot slower than humans do.

The Elves she is part off would also age at this slow rate and are probably the origin of many myth and legends not least of which is the idea that they were the origin of the ancient gods – we are talking everything here from Egypt, Greece, Summer and India. I am also pondering what sort of technology they should have achieved and exactly how fast they age.

I need to do some research into early human existance – fortunatly I did work in this field for a while even if I was only looking at bats teeth!

The questions I am asking myself are – how far back can I have a homo species exist?

Are normal humans a natural sister group to the elves or are we the result of their technology?

How does their appearance and physical aspects differ from our own?

How many of their generations do I want to have passed and how much do I want The Punk to be involved in history?

Are they going to have internal factions and is it relivant to my story?

Again help is much appreciated.