JeffKirvin.net

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what to write next. I’ve finally burst through my depression (for a while, anyway, it’s a lifetime struggle) and it’s time for me to start writing again. Writing fiction. I mean, these articles I write for JeffKirvin.net are nice and all, but I’m a novelist at heart, dammit, and I always have been.

My first idea was to do what the other people in my writer’s critique group are doing, reworking and cleaning up the messes we all made last November during NaNoWriMo. The problem is that Homeworld, my “Bill Gates goes to Mars” novel, is such a mess that it’s really not salvageable until I figure out what the heck it is. Essentially I tried to write three books at once: the prep for going to Mars, the year long voyage out, and what happens when they get there. I need to pick one. Any one of those three would make an interesting novel (please, lord, not another Mars trilogy) but I can’t do them all as one story.

Or I could return, again, to the Unification Chronicles universe and keep telling that story. I’ve got a better handle on it now, having started rewriting it from the start from the point of view of Jill, the embedded journalist onboard the Cho who will be my chronicler, as it were. Only for some reason I can’t get moving on that, either. It’s a massive, multi-volume space opera and I’m sure I’ll get back to it someday, but right now it’s not the story I need to tell.

So what is?

I started thinking about the kinds of stories I love to read, what I’m drawn to in characters and plot. And the more I thought about it, the more something became clear. Maybe it’s my background as a diehard comics fan growing up (other than George Lucas, I think my biggest influence growing up was Stan Lee), but I crave heroes.

In particular, the stories I enjoy most feature a strong central character who is rarely if ever overshadowed by his or her supporting cast. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a great ensemble show and it wouldn’t have been the same without the “scoobies”, but it was about Buffy. Spider-Man is about Spider-Man. And even the forensic novels by Jeffery Deaver about Lincoln Rhyme are about that rather singular quadriplegic criminalist. The secondary characters are important (Spidey ain’t really Spidey without Mary Jane), but we’re really following a hero on a mythic journey. This is basic Joseph Campbell 101 here.

So I’m really looking for a central hero capable of larger than life (okay, mythic) struggles. A Hercules. A Sherlock Holmes. A Batman. A Neo. Someone that I don’t just write about, someone I believe in.

As it turns out, I have such a character. In fact, I’ve had him for longer than any of my others, going back to the late ’80s. He’s changed greatly in the last 20 years, as have I. I’ve tried to write Mike Carlton’s story as a screenplay, a graphic novel, a novella and a serial (still available as parts of the series “The Ghost” on Fictionwise), but for some reason I’ve never given it a really serious shot as a novel.

So that’s my “new” project. To write Mike’s story the way I simply wasn’t capable 20 years ago. To do it justice, dig past the super-powered secret agent to the man inside and then torture him until he grows and changes into a hero worthy of myth.

And maybe along the way other people will come to believe in him too.