As I write this, I have about a week left in my month of drawing. I don’t do the big thing everyone else does, since the creator of that prompt list copyrighted it. Instead, I ask my fans to give me a word (or half- dozen because most of them are clever boots) and I take all the words, line them up in two columns, randomize each column and wind up with… chaos.
Pure chaos. It’s fun to draw, though. And this year, like other years, there’s a story in it. It isn’t just for me, either—AC Young is writing a whole novel (novella?) over on Substack, using each day’s prompt. For me, though? It all started with music. Well, yes, Cedar, you might be thinking. Music does help with writing. Except… that’s not how it started. Well, ok, let me explain.
You see, I’ve been putting up the timelapses for my daily art as little videos, anywhere from 20-40 seconds long. The app I use, Procreate, generates these which is fun and means I don’t have to set up a camera or anything complicated. And then, once I have the little timelapses, I thought I’d come up with some music, and I still have the Suno subscription in spite of their altering the deal. Suno added a feature which allows me to set the length of the music.
Oh, that’s handy—so in I dove to make little musical bump tracks for the art. I did one for Revenge Dittybag. Between the drawing, and the music, a story started to appear in my head, vague, ephemeral, I thought I’d just mess around with the music some more. Several songs and many iterations later I had a full-fledged story in my head. One that I now know is actually a series, or part of a series…
And thus was born Cataclysm.
I’d recently been talking to my husband about starting to write a short story on the weekends to give myself something other than the deep novel I’ve been writing for several months now. A mental break, as it were. So, I decided that I was having so much fun with the story in my head, and creating the score for it was really bringing it to life in my head, and I could just sit down and pound out a short story…
I didn’t track wordcount. I know one day I hit like nine thousand words. I know that after about a week I had about thirty thousand words, then it hit forty. Then I thought it would shrink during revision and my Dear Reader, it did not.
So here I am, with what was supposed to be a weekend short story sitting at full-length standalone romance novel status. All because I got a prompt, drew a picture, made some music, and my brain wanted to tell a lighter story than the one I’d been working on. We take strange paths in our creative journeys.
I had a lot of fun with this story. Originally, my intent was to start it out as a noir science fiction tale. The hard-boiled man. The dame. The corrupt ‘protection’ racket. And while that’s in the story, it isn’t where it started. This story starts at the end of that story, and tells what happens after they get out of the city. I don’t know that any noir actually does this part (summoning D. Jason Fleming to the courtesy phone: Noir history, to the courtesy phone please) but it’s what my brain wanted to do and I wasn’t going to fight it for a fun little short story of a couple thousand words. I wrote the escape, the staying alive, the falling in love. It’s a romance. The funny thing is, there’s science in it, because I’m me.
The science was also supposed to be just a throwaway scene. Hah. I’d posted a while back about the affection I have for gardens in space, and how that had been a bit controversial. Dorothy Grant is incorporating that concept into a work in progress, and so that inspired me to slide a garden into Cataclysm. There was also a book I didn’t read that inspired part of this—the result of a conversation about covers, squandered potential in fiction, and how unintelligent a lot of romance novels can be. And yet, here I am, writing hard sci-fi romance… my brain. I do not understand it.
It was a lot of fun. I’d do it again. Just not this weekend.
9 responses to “Strange Paths”
Wow, I had no idea that’s where that came from! 🙂
The way people are about spiders, I made her very subtle on the cover. But that’s Tallulah.
Speaking as one of those people, I appreciate it!
I am punchy and befogged at the end of an editorial read, so I’m not entirely certain what the question is. Therefore, I will try to answer every variation of what I think is being asked, and hope that one of them is what you were looking for. 🙂
First iteration, do any noirs start at the end? Certainly. Relating the bulk of a story as flashback is very much a noir trope. In film, Double Indemnity is almost entirely a flashback as Walter Neff narrates into his boss’s recording device everything that happened. (Oddly, I don’t think I ever read the James M. Cain story it was based on, so I don’t know if that was a device from the book, or created by Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder in the script.) Murder, My Sweet (an adaptation of Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely) uses Marlowe getting interrogated by police as the frame for narration, and I Wake Up Screaming! from a few years before that does the same (based on a Steve Fisher novel). In novels, Ed Lacy would often begin the book near the end, and have most of the story be a flashback, or in Enter Without Desire, each chapter would end with a flash-forward, giving the reader the ending of the book one piece at a time.
Second iteration, do any noirs take place after leaving the city? Yes, rural noir is a thing, though I don’t think I’ve read many myself. Nicholas Ray’s quite good On Dangerous Ground features Robert Ryan as a big city cop who is sent out to the boonies and there is a pretty noirish reason for it. Ed Lacy’s Room To Swing has a black private eye running away from something in New York City, and hiding out in a small town just north of the Kentucky border (not a comfortable place for him to be in the 1950s), though he does go back to the city to resolve what he was running from in the back half of the book. I’ve not finished reading it yet, but Frank Gruber’s Falcon City Frame-Up from the ’50s also seems to fit this slot, being about a man from NYC hiding out in the much smaller Falcon City.
Third iteration, do any noirs take place after a noir story has already happened, but not include all that as a flashback for the bulk of the story? (Which I think is closest to what you were getting at, but I might be wrong. Again, I’m fairly punchy this week.) This I’m less sure of, except for the case of continuing series. The excellent Peter Rabe wrote about half a dozen novels featuring the character of Daniel Port, starting with Dig My Grave Deep (which has more or less the same plot as Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key, and is damn near as good), so every book after that one definitely takes place after an earlier noir story.
And if none of the foregoing gets at what you were asking about, I’ll have to try again later. 😀
Didn’t mean to catch you punchy! I just know you enjoy these kind of things. I also think I’ll have to get some books now, from those answers 😉
And the middle, the storyline taking place after leaving the city, was what I was doing with this story.
No worries, was just trying to explain why my coherence is less coherey than usual.
Hope you get a chance to rest and do something fun.
When does it come out?
Today! Cataclysm is live! https://link.amazon/B04h8ns1J