It all started with...Downton Abbey.
WTF?
You read that right.
It's late July/early August, 2021. My girlfriend Alessandra is a big fan of period piece dramas. She informed me we should watch the Downton Abbey series. It's not my usual cuppa, but I'm game.
I enjoyed the series, but at one point in the latter seasons, I told her I could picture this in a horror vein, the upper-class being vampires, the help being werewolves, and some variation of the regular townsfolk as zombies. I even mapped out the dowager as a mutant blob of sorts overseeing everything. Nothing too original, I'm sure there's been plenty of novels/short stories that have taken this setting and added blood and monsters. I wrote a page or two of notes, just for fun, then set them aside, never really expecting to do anything with them.
But the seeds were planted. My brain had werewolves on the mind...and it really wanted to play in the world they occupied. Something out of character for me, sure--I rarely deal with familiar horror tropes--but this time...this time I was nudged to dive in. Or perhaps shoved in might be more appropriate.
Those seeds blossomed into OUR SAVAGE ANATOMIES when we made our way to visit a friend in the Marche region of Italy, near a small town called Loretello. I wrote about it in my previous blog post; you'll want to check that out.
This post is as much about how the writer's brain works. My weird writer's brain, at least.
Though most big writing projects are somewhat mapped out or, at the very least, on my radar, on occasion I have noticed after I've started a big project how the seeds had been planted weeks or months before, even without my consciously knowing as much. These are the surprise projects, the gifts the Muse gives you and it's up to you to run with them, as with OSA.
What do I mean?
Here's an example:
I remember a couple years ago waking up from a violent, sex-drenched dream and thinking, what the fuck was that? At one point within that dream, as I am telling my brother about the dream in glorious, graphic detail (yeah, dream within a dream craziness, thanks Poe), my brother said to me, I want to read this. I was flabbergasted. I mentioned it to another person later in the dream and that person said the same thing: I want to read this. I told Alessandra about the dream and what the others said and how I wanted nothing to do with this horrible scenario...when she saw things differently.
It's 4:30 in the morning, John. Go! Write those notes!
I wrote a page of notes and got back to bed. I wondered as I lay there why I had thought up such a brutal dream. I have written rough stuff, have no fear about 'going there' if the story needed it, but this...this was not where I mentally was.
Or was it?
That's when I remembered I'd recently finished reading Charlene Elsby's Violent Faculties, a no holds barred psycho-sexual nightmare of a novel that Does Not Flinch. Sexual violence was prevalent, all within an academic setting. It's an excellent novel for those who can handle this kind of thing.
The sexual violence of that novel had planted the seed for what eventual became my novella, Souls At Zero. Yet, I did not realize this until the words were staring me in the face, laughing at me...and I was hooked on finding out where it all went.
Just as with Downton Abby, of all things, and how thinking about werewolves and vampires and the mutant blob that was the dowager, easily the seed of mutant vampire, Jack Pandemonium, led to my writing OUR SAVAGE ANATOMIES.
The writer's mind is a strange thing, my friends. The writers already know this, of course.
Anyway, the next blog post will include photos from the Marche region, and Loretello, as Alessandra and I are headed that way for a necessary break from the chaos of the world.
Here's Rufus, the lead werewolf from OUR SAVAGE ANATOMIES, perhaps giving me a side-eye at all this nonsense.
;-)
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