God I suck!

Its fucking May and I've written fuck all on this thing. Which is shameful. It began as an effort to keep writing, even as writer's block snuffed out my creative flame. And I can't even keep this up. Except, well, I started a rewrite of The Few Who Dared. My first serious attempt at a novel.
The rewrite has removed some of the flawed and ridiculous teenage nonsense that effected the original.

Alright, I'm getting ahead of myself. Most of you will know this, but for those who don't: The Few Who Dared is my first real project. It is a story of a small group of people whose world is upended by a natural disaster. A solar storm knocks out all power to electrical systems and technology across the globe, causing an instant regression to the dark ages. Without the luxuries and securities that modern civilisation affords us, the characters must band together, to survive and rebuild some form of society from the rubble of the former.

I think its a decent idea, done to death, but I still feel mine has just enough originality to be viable. I like my characters, I like what I have to say about society, war, community, human perserverence and brutality, empathy and compassion. Basically, I believe in my story.

The older version was somewhat different. Understand I was a teenager when I started it. I'm now 25 (Jesus Fucking H Christ), and a different person. In the original the cause of the collapse was not a natural disaster but... well, nothing. I have still kept a semblance of the idea of T.S. Elliot's poem 'The Hollow Men'; "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper." I loved the idea of it, the idea of the death of our world being something quiet and mournful rather an Roland Emmerich blowing the holy shit out of everything ala Independance Day, 2012 and the like. So the original the collapse of the world's economy, government and society just sort of happened, a slow burning mismanagement. It was a nice idea, but perhaps niave. I like the idea of the solar storm, the northern lights descending and simply shutting off the human empire like God flipping a lightswitch. Its a sort of Deus Ex Machina... except at the beginning, instead of the end.

The other difference included the primary threat to my protagonists. It is 2003 and America, with British lapdogs... I mean allies, is about to invade Iraq. I'm a fairly politically minded person so this angered me. I wrote it into the book. In the original, America invades Britain, mostly as a distraction to their own nation. On paper, I get it, but in reality its patently ridiculous and screams of teenage activism. Like satire, but shit.

I also had a bunch of world conspiracy, fantasy malarkey tucked away inside. The character of Jape was a witness, a breed of human being that lives for a long time. There was lots of Witnesses. They live among us in secret, they are at war with themselves for control of the human race blah blah blah. Whatever. Boring. What the fuck is this, Highlander!? I didn't need this. I like the character, and the basic idea. But no, its the end of the goddamn world. Do I really need near immortal warriors battling it out among the real drama?

So yeah. The new book feels right. And people are reading it as I go along. Which is nice. Even Old Matt said it wasn't bad. He still liked 'Ghosts of You and Me' better, but I'm sure in ten years I'll come back to all that stuff as well. It'll be a cycle of perpetual writing. And I'll never finish a thing... :/