For the seventh time, I’ve won the National Novel Writing Month “contest”, completing 50,000 words of a new novel in just 30 days. Actually, it took me just 29 days. Woohoo!
This year’s entry, SPECTRAL IRON, is the fourth book in the Dakota Frost series, my urban fantasy series featuring the best magical tattooist in the Southeast (and she’s not afraid to tell you that herself). SPECTRAL IRON was a bit of a detour from the work I was doing to edit LIQUID FIRE, the third entry in the series, but I’m glad I did: SPECTRAL IRON taught me a lot about what makes a book coherent and I can use that to edit LIQUID FIRE.
So what is SPECTRAL IRON about? Originally, I was thinking the story was about a villain that murders ghosts, but now it’s looking like the villain is a ghost who’s a murderer. Maybe. There are some very interesting plot complications developing. Let me see if I can pull out an excerpt that doesn’t give much away. Well, maybe it spoils a minor surprise, but it doesn’t give away the plot. This is the kind of thing they’d put in a movie trailer. Regardless … SPOILERS:
Now, all that was left was to walk down a hundred more yards of train tracks in the dark.
The dolly had left us, but the spotlight had not. The mobile klieg operator wheeled it forward, slowly, tracking me, Ron and Sunny as we walked down the pathetic, waterlogged track. The further we went, the more layers of mystery were stripped off, one by one, by the light.
By the end, we no longer stood in a chasm of night. We merely stood in a dilapidated warehouse loading bay, a long, low brick-walled chamber, weathered with graffiti, with chained-up wooden doors atop its loading dock and beer bottles in the puddles between its train tracks.
“Nothing here,” the Lady Nyissa said. “Nothing obvious, at any rate.”
I stopped before the back wall of the loading dock. It stretched up before us, a mottled wall of brick thirty feet wide and fifty feet high, with a notch cut out of its bottom right by the platform and another cut out the top by a door. Rusted zig-zag metal stairs led up to it.
“Well,” I said, putting my foot on the train-brake at the end of the tracks, staring down at the pathetic mud puddle rippling before us between the end of the tracks and the wall. “It looks like The Exposers have found another Al Capone’s vault.”
Oh, me and my dumb mouth.
From the water erupted a foul spray of black—topped by a bone white mask.
So, there’s a few thousand more words of brain dump to go, and then it’s back to editing LIQUID FIRE, revising THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, and working on the DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME anthology, oh, and revising my own story for the anthology, “The Doorway to Extra Time” … aaaa! But at least I have this year’s Nano victory to console me:
Regardless, now that Nanowrimo and 24 Hour Comics Day and the Google Holiday Toy Collection are all behind me, I’m looking forward to getting back to my other projects, including all my writing, the Dakota Frost blog, and, heck, I dunno, my wife, friends and cats. Onward and upwards!
-the Centaur
