osprey_archer | December Writing and January Goals

The Depression Era tramps book has been a dream to write, aside from the part where it was on hiatus for a year at the 30,000 word mark. But since I restarted it in late November, I’ve been writing with great speed and on Christmas Day I completed a draft at 76,000 words! And I think it’s a pretty solid draft, too, which not all drafts are.

For my next project, I’ve resurrected another book that has been on hiatus for a year, although sadly I abandoned this one at a mere 6,000 words. (I think it will be a novella, so I may end up writing a similar amount of words than I did for Tramps.) This is the 1910 college girls book with the heroine inspired by Jean Webster’s prankish college girl Patty, with a dash of Psmith thrown in.

Some other ideas I’ve been kicking around for possible 2022 projects:

1. Ever since I read William Dean Howells’ book The Shadow of a Dream, I’ve been dying to write an m/m/f romance in the late nineteenth century and call it A Three-Cornered Household. But could I differentiate it sufficiently from The Threefold Tie? I could set it a bit later, 1880s or early 1890s, but the relationship dynamic - a man, his wife, and his intimate friend - would perforce be similar.

2. So I have this idea that is basically “Anne of Green Gables but what if the main character was Marilla who is a lesbian who falls in love with Anne’s teacher.” The problem is that, although the Anne and Marilla characters are quite lively in my head, the teacher character so far remains inert.

3. I also have an idea set in the American bohemian artistic scene of the 1920s, which originally was supposed to be about an artist and a model, but then I fell in love with the artist’s studio mate. (When they first meet, the soon-to-be studio mate is basically cosplaying Oscar Wilde, because he doesn’t WANT a studio mate and figures this will drive away all comers). So I’d have to start over from scratch to write the story as artist/studio mate. But the ~20,000 words that I’ve written are awful ANYWAY so honestly that’s just as well. (Sometimes I open up a file and am pleasantly surprised, but this time I opened the file and went “Oh God, this truly is as terrible as I feared while I was writing it.” Look, I wrote it in 2020. It was a difficult time, I say, as if December 2021 when I wrote Tramps was not also a difficult time. Perhaps I was not yet acclimated to difficult times in August 2020?)

4. And finally, we have the tale of Kip & Alec. Kip is a World War I vet who believes his severe facial scarring puts him forever beyond the reach of romantic love; Alec is an old schoolmate who was extremely unpopular in boarding school and has the psychological “I am inherently unlovable” scars to prove it. (Alec also has an awful ex, whom we will call Percy though I haven’t settled on a name, who liked to remind Alec that he could never love Alec that way.) Basically, it’s “no one could ever love me” chicken.

Alec began, “I don’t expect you to – to be in love me – ”

“Why not?” Kip snapped.

Alec stopped, flabbergasted.

“Do you think I’m so pathetic that I’d get involved in a love affair with anyone who offers, even if I didn’t care for them at all?”

“No, of course not. I just thought… I didn’t want you to think I expected it, that’s all.”