Working Title – “Yellow Green”

Ever since starting this here blog I've alternated my publishing schedule a bit. For the longest time I had this weird OCD impulse to upload a set number of articles a month, including this now past year, during which I made it my mission to upload three articles a month. Now I'm changing my mind and I'm gonna let go of those neat impulses to instead publish more randomly, whenever an idea comes to mind and I write it down and I feel it's nice ready to be shared. So this post sounds a lot like it should be under the Blog News tag, but it isn't because of the main reason why I'm letting go of my three or four or six articles a month schedule – because I'm writing a new book.

I've never done this before because my first two books were finished before I started my blog, and my third one was started way before I even had any ideas to write a blog. But with this one it's different because I've done quite a bit of writing by now, and I don't plan to stop, I just plan to slow down and to be a little less strict with the numbers game. It's also a strange and new thing for me to announce a book before I have a lot of it written, but I do have a fair few ideas that I could write down here, even if during the process of writing a lot of them end up drastically changed.

And so what's this fourth book all about? First of all it's gonna be in english, as you likely already guessed, and in some ways, at least as far as it relates to themes and the overall atmosphere, it's gonna be a bit more in line with my first book, The Wandering King. Still, it won't be short stories, it will instead be a novel, something of a thriller. It will take place in an unspecified exotic country that is currently undergoing a military occupation by another unspecified and very powerful country. The official goal of this occupation will be a manhunt... The man in question will be a pretty solid character, as the entire story will revolve around him, though he might not appear often except through voice alone. This voice aspect is important because the way to catch him will be, not through conquest necessarily, but through intelligence, namely wiretaps and other such sneaky things. The protagonist then, the man who will enter the scene to break the stalemate, he will be part of the military, yes, but not as a soldier. Instead, he will be an intelligence agent who will play the game, so to speak, as part of his obsession to finally catch his hunted man.

I have quite a few weird ideas already, such as including a lot of strange and cool animals, maybe making them a bit bigger than they are in our world. I also intend to play around with geography, which makes sense since I deliberately set my stories in unspecified places so that I'm not bound by real-life geography or geopolitics. Regardless, part of the reason why I like animal imagery in books so much is because of how symbolic they can be, alluding to an almost archaic or even mystical side to the entire story. This one should be no exception, the entire goal will therefore be to combine the political and the military, with the philosophical and mystical. This combination should synthesize in my hunted man, of course. Any details about him I'm not at this time eager to reveal, but suffice it to say he's been gaining shape thus far, and I'm eager to give him a voice on the page.

As far as the protagonist goes I intend to give him many voices and faces, because in order to play the game and to break the stalemate he will need to ingratiate himself to many people by adopting different personalities, so to speak. His real personality though might not be that heroic, certainly not a villain, but far from a hero too. Whatever the case may be though, the entire novel will be written according to his perspective, so I have to make him at least interesting, if not somehow likable. Also, a neat trick I hope to do is something I've only alluded to in my first book, namely this thing of occasionally giving a slightly different voice to the narration, almost as if it momentarily shifted from a third-person narrator into a more first-person voice, whether or not it belonged to the protagonist per se. In some ways it may come across as a little disorientating, especially without proper quotation marks or italics, but that's just how I like it and I think it can have a pretty cool effect.

With regards to the rest of the characters, I have quite a few in my head already, ranging from the loftiest of military men and politicians, all the way to native farmers and merchants. The main person the protagonist will ingratiate himself to will be his major or captain or lieutenant or whatever title I end up deciding fits best. Because I'm not bound by real-world logic I hope any such mistakes, whether willful or not, end up not mattering that much to the story. At the end of the day, I hope to find a sense of realism in the overall atmosphere rather than in the harsh details, and I suppose no spurious detail should ever get in the way of a good story... But anyway, this boss character will be a pretty solid role as well, fairly comedic and silly but he presents himself that way in order to hide just how smart and machiavellian he can truly be. You can probably guess by now that this manhunt won't be all that honest, maybe not even all that noble either. The stalemate will exist for a reason, but the protagonist will seek to break it due to his own obsession with catching this hunted man.

Overall, I'm planning to write soldiers, generals, scientists, spies, farmers, merchants, prostitutes, witches and so on and so forth. In that sense it should be my most ambitious book to date, at least not counting my strange third book. I'm planning to make this one into a more story-driven narrative than my previous writing, with actual moving plots and characters who can drive the story forward, but with all these competing interests so that, hopefully, some fun conflict arises. I'm also planning to write shorter chapters so that each one either builds things up or moves them forward significantly, splitting the book in a fairly digestible way, rather than my usual idea of long books with few chapters, so that some are brief and others are dreadfully wordy... Aside from that, you could say that in my previous writing I had few characters to begin with, but in this story a wide array of characters is necessary and I hope to make each one not only engaging in his or her own right, but also as an integral part of the story. Like Cool Lester Smooth once said – All the pieces matter.

Speaking of which, and ending this little marketing ploy, I could talk a bit about my main inspirations. I think an obvious one and easily the first and foremost would be Apocalypse Now. In many ways my hunted man will be heavily inspired by Marlon Brando's Kurtz, and I am not ashamed to admit it, nor should I be. Regarding the movie as a whole I admire not only the war aspect but also that almost mystical vibe, which is something I just can't resist. Then with the more realistic aspects of the story the main inspiration would be, as seen in the previous quote, The Wire. Just this whole scope of characters “playing the game” and finding their own way in a grimy world of betrayal is simply brilliant and easily another main source of inspiration. Lastly, I'm thinking of men like Percy Fawcett and Paul Rosolie because I do want to make my country quite exotic and fairly unbound by real-world restraints. Of course, the land Fawcett explored and Rosolie explores is a real place, but with so many riches and mysteries that a fella can't quite resist going into vast detail about, venturing deep into imagination until we come up with some really majestic sights and beasts, depending on who you ask, of course.

For now that's about it. I shouldn't be writing much on here, at least not at a very steady pace, hoping to instead share what I do have so far. Share, share, share... At this point in my life I need to make something real, something meaty, something I can actually touch. But in the meantime I'll be around, writing this book, the title of which I'm unsure about but that I do like quite a bit. Maybe I'll be editing this very article someday soon, with all the new information about a book already published, and wondering how many of the thoughts I now have will have made it onto the final page. For now I obviously don't know, but I do know I desperately want to get to writing to find that out.

See you when I see you.

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