I am now about a third of the way through my rough draft of Volume 2. This is a big deal for me, because the 1/3 mark is usually where I either give up or start enjoying myself. I do not think I’m going to give up on Mr. Echwell, because he is both fun and easy to write.

Gothic stories, especially the not-terribly-serious kind, are easy to write because whenever you get bored you can just toss in one of the following things:

-decayed corpse

-monster

-fortuneteller

-storm

-abandoned mansion

-sudden pervading sense of evil

(etc)

The only tricky thing for me to work in is the cliffhanger. This has to come at the end of each fragment, and they have to be good ones – hero suspended over the edge of the cliff by a shoelace, hero being swallowed by a giant snake, hero being tied up by unholy gouls intent on tearing the still-beating heart out of him…you get the idea. But since each fragment exists without the rest of its story, these cliffhangers are, necessarily, never resolved.

For a writer, this is fine; it saves you the work of having to figure out how to get Mr. or Ms. Narrator off the cliff, out of the snake, and rescued from the ghouls. For the reader, though, this must be incredibly irritating. Imagine reading a book made up of the first chapters of various murder mysteries, and you will have an idea of what I mean.

My one concession to continuity is having the same unnamed narrator throughout. He is British, middle-aged, and easily horrified:

Still panting from that wretched smell, I hung my light on a nearby crag of rock and passed the cloth underneath. An instant’s examination was all that I needed – my worst fears were true - O, unhappy moment! I clutched the cloth to my chest and reeled against the damp rock in a near-swoon. “It is her!” I cried aloud, not caring what fiendish ears might be nearby. “It is the muslin she wore this very morning, at the breakfast table! My bride has been carried this way, past the river, past the dead man, and into the very bowels of this hellish cave!” 

Poor thing. He’s going to have a lot more unhappy moments by the time I get to 9,000 words.