You could say our first year of Collective Inkwell was a bit impulsive. Or, as Sean would call it, exactly the way he likes it!
Commit first, ask questions of how later.
For me, though, it’s like being a firefighter and running into a burning building without first securing a water supply for your hose.
We’d committed to doing a release every week in 2012. But we’d not quite figured out how we’d write them all at such a breakneck pace. Because it isn’t just writing the stories — but allowing them some breathing room to form. This was something we couldn’t do with back to back releases all year long if we also wanted to maintain quality storytelling.
Fortunately, Sean and I have waaaaay more story ideas than which we can write. We have what we call a story garden full of seedling ideas developed over the years — many going back to my childhood — waiting until they ripen and enough to be told.
Perhaps a way to tell some of these stories, and fulfill our crazy plan to release a book per week in 2012, would be to cultivate some of these ideas, and more often than not, come up with entirely new ideas, to write as short stories.
I fell in love with short stories as a child. I especially loved ghost stories or weird tales that made you wonder “what if?”
I remember coming home from school, curling up on the couch, and being carried away to other worlds — just a bit different from our own.
As a teen, I discovered the old black and white goodness in the form of the TV shows The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
I went on to devour a lot of short stories written by the writers of those old shows.
So Sean and I decided to supplement our series books with a short story or two between seasons of our other titles.
We’d still be releasing a new book per week, though they wouldn’t all be serials.
But that was OK.
We were still writing, and more importantly, experimenting with our fiction.
The short stories were also a return to us writing for one another.
As Yesterday’s Gone started as us writing our own chapters trying to impress/outdo one another, the shorts allowed us to do that again.
We’d each write a rough draft of our story, then pass it to the other in hopes of scaring, amusing, or making the other say, “What the?”
Sean’s first short was Respero Dinner, which takes place in the future world of The Beam.
Mine was The Watcher, a story which asks how far you’d go to stop evil?
Remember how I said that short fiction allows you to ask what-ifs? Well, some of our shorts do just that.
What if you woke up as a zombie, but still had your humanity? (Chris Wakes Up)
What if the only way to find out if your love was cheating on you was to give them a special tea that would reveal the truth. But, if they were lying, they would die? (The Ugly Truth)
What if you were a grieving father who spent his time secretly breaking into other people’s homes living vicariously through their family photos when you stumbled upon a note from a girl who knows what you’re doing, and could you please kill her father her abusive father? (The Watcher)
Short stories allow us an opportunity to create new worlds without having to worry about writing a three season series around it. If our serials are long journeys into the unknown, think of the shorts as vacations into the weird.
These brief trips have allowed us to peek in on characters (well, one so far, but we will write about others) from our other books. We’ve written five shorts about reader favorite, Boricio Wolfe, the serial killer from Yesterday’s Gone, which are much better stories than they have any right to be!
Now, the one thing we weren’t sure about early on, is one of the things I feel most confident about now.
And that’s the name.
We batted around a ton of different ideas for naming our shorts. We toyed with going pulpy, like the old sci-fi and horror pulp magazines of the 20s and 30s, such as Weird Tales or Amazing Stories. While I love the art style of those magazines, we weren’t sure if readers would be dismissive of the work, or if it would make the stories seem less serious.
We wanted something that sounded like a place where weird things happened. Earth, but not quite the Earth we know. Where something is just a bit different. Like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. I even pictured a road sign indicating such a place. We came up with the name Dark Crossings, and kinda liked it, but didn’t love it right away.
But we’d already written two stories and needed to get them out. So we just went with the title as it was the one we hated least.
Now it’s become one of the titles I love the most, and am most proud of. Much of this has to do with the kinds of stories we’re telling in Dark Crossings — exactly the kind of stories that offer the escapism and “What-ifs” I love reading.
So, now that our 2012 was kicking ass with four series and a bunch of short stories, what do you think we did next?
Why, we fucked up, of course.
But it began as what we thought was a dream come true — being officially published!
More on that soon…
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