It is Word Count Wednesday once more! "Howl of the Ulfhedhnar" is finished and in editing; it is scheduled to post on Friday, 1/27/17 on Tales from Midhgardhur at Channillo.com. Berserkers and werewolves! That sounds like fun, right? "Howl of the Ulfhedhnar" weighs in at around 5430 words.
Right now, most of my energy is going into "Remember!" Remember is going to be a very short piece (not my shortest - that honor goes to "Hjalti's First Holmganga," which is exactly 55 words, and probably one of the hardest things I've ever tried to write precisely because I was trying to keep it to exactly 55 words. No, "Remember!" is not that short, but it will probably only be 3 or 4 pages long when it is finished. "Remember!" is not challenging because of its length, however, but because of its perspective.
"Remember!" is the first story I've written for Tales from Midhgardhur that is written entirely in the 2nd person. That is not as easy as it sounds. Most stories are written in either the 3rd person, in which the narrator tells you what he, she, it, or they did. Some are written in the 1st person, from the perspective of a character in the story - I tried that with Ormsbani, and it was great, but I found it crept into everything else I was writing at the same time! But 2nd person narratives - telling you what you are experiencing - are extremely rare.
I got the inspiration to do a story like this from an old Weird Tales story called "The House of Ecstasy" by Ralph Milne Farley, published in April 1938. The conceit of that story (without revealing too much!) is that the reader is being told of something that he experienced and has been hypnotized to forget. The idea is that the reader is to internalize the story; the reader experienced that story, and the reader was hypnotized to forget, and only as he is reading "The House of Ecstasy" does he begin to "remember" what happened. As a writer, reading this story, I was fascinated. Oh, the story itself is a little hokey now, but it still works, for the most part. But the technique of a 2nd person narrative fascinated me. I made an immediate note in my commonplace book that I would like to try a 2nd person story, sometime.
Well, it took a long time for me to get around to actually working on "Remember!" . . . I kept jotting down ideas, adding to the basic premise I came up with, but I wanted to think about this one a long time before I actually started composing anything. I admired Farley's technique, but it had flaws, especially for a 21st century reader, chief among them that the reader was assumed to be male. That assumption is made explicit several times throughout the story, and indeed, the plot hinges on the reader being a heterosexual male. In 1938, a writer for Weird Tales might have felt safe making that assumption about the prospective reader. But that is not an assumption that I would ever care to make (actually, I have some anecdotal evidence that supports the idea that the majority of my readers are female, though not overwhelmingly). But just think about the challenge, here - writing a 2nd person story, one in which you, the reader, are the protagonist, yet makes no assumptions about matters like the gender or sexuality of the protagonist. So, no love interest in this one, right?
I'm experimenting; I admit that. That is part of what the Tales From Midhgardhur were meant to be - a way for me to experiment with many different kinds of writing, quite apart from the format of the novels that I write. And while I have no problem with taking inspiration wherever I may find it (my "Appendix N Revisited" project is an exploration of how my readings in Gary Gygax's Appendix N, which are the books that inspired Dungeons & Dragons, also have inspired me, over the years), but I have no interest in copying anyone. It would be boring and pointless to copy Farley's story. But Farley's story inspired me to do something different in the same person as he used, one I have never used before.
I'm hoping to have "Remember!" finished and polished up in the next couple of days; I'll try to post it before the beginning of February if at all possible. Current Word Count: 2020.
Happy Reading! Skál!
~ Colin Anders Brodd
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