In the spirit of my last post, I’ve been poking around at my incomplete draft from last year’s NaNoWriMo and sat down with my Lester’s Dent Hero’s Journey Outline Template along with some world building brainstorming questions to see if I could get myself unstuck with this story.

I enjoy discovery writing. A lot. The trouble is, I tend to meander quite a bit and often get lost. Stuff gets changed mid stream and when a draft does get finished – even with a short story, like what I usually write – revisions end up being somewhat of a nightmare.

Having an outline has been very helpful is preventing a great deal of this kind of mess, even if I deviate from the outline, but Fleurya is a brand new world for me that I’ve never written in before. New playground to romp around in. New stuff to discover and figure out. New places to get tangled up in and get lost.

So that’s where I’m at.

The trouble is, while I thought filling out a long set of questions like the one from this site would be helpful, it hasn’t been. Some of them I find myself asking, “How the fuck should I know?!” or “Why is that even important?!” and “Didn’t you ask me this four times already?!”

In many ways these questions feel like they are designed for those who already have a good idea of what their world is like before they even start. Or maybe I’m just working with the wrong set of world building questions?

I don’t have a clue aside from a handful of characters that are interacting with each other, creating a chain of events, stemming from… *sigh* what I feel is social-political in origin. And that’s the part I need to work out. The why of it. I feel like the physical setting is largely irrelevant to this story since it’s about the people and how they’re treating each other.

So full disclosure, and yes this IS completely related to the topic so bear with me, I’ve never read the book “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells. I did however, watch the film as a young child.

I understand now that the separation of the Eloi and the Morlocks was supposed to be a result of human evolution, but I’ve always have been fascinated with the question of how and why that happened. And what if the people had resisted this separation? Stuff like that doesn’t just happen by accident.

And it bothered me that H.G. Wells story suggested a stark lost of intelligence on both sides. I don’t buy that if they came from human origins.

For years, growing up, I thought that it was the Morlocks that were the oppressed and enslaved, running these big machines underground to support a paradise above ground, but in reading summaries it was actually the Eloi that were livestock in this equation.

Either way, in order to make this set up work, one side needs to remain intelligent enough to keep the system running. So who’s calling the shots in all this?

Anyway, those were my thoughts and some concepts that I had wanted to explore with my piece. And as always with discovery writing, the story took a life of its own. I have no idea where it’s going.

I am of the mind that I need to start over and fully plan SOMETHING in terms of plot before I begin to write the words.

And to hold myself accountable, I plan to post those discovery draft chapters here on this blog. Just don’t expect any of it to be canon since all of it is the mental equivalent of primordial ooze and subject to dramatic change without warning. Hopefully I’ll have things set up and rolling here very soon.

Since Fleurya is dominated by forest, and I enjoyed the music from last week’s playlist, I’m sharing this endless mix based on one of Peter Crowley’s pieces.

Whatever creative endeavors you have going on this weekend, I hope they go well. Much love, light, and laughter to all of you!