Thursday, February 25, 2016

Hungry Like The...Werewolf!

To the all three or four of you who might be bored enough to read my blog, going strong now for about 4 years, you may recall my werewolf novel, PRIMAL. I'd finished the first draft and started immediately writing a sequel, PRIMAL BLOOD. Got several chapters into that before I realized the premise, while cool at the time I'd conceived it, was too implausible. So it got scrapped. As a result, the version of PRIMAL needed a complete overhaul. But I was excited by the prospect, since my story was a slightly different take on lycanthropes.

Then I lost my digital copy of the first draft. I had backed it up to a flash drive, and was transferring all my work from my old Dell to my new Toshiba laptop. The transfer was fine but in my haste made the mistake of not properly ejecting the flash drive.

I was devastated. Luckily, I did have a hard copy printout. But I needed time away from it, and the notion of retyping that draft onto Word wasn't a task I was particularly excited about. Plus, I had begun to find other aspects of the short novel I wanted to change or scrap entirely.

Flash forward a few years later. While I've been working on several new stories, novellas and a short story or two, for a collection called THE NIGHTMARE SEASON, this novel keeps clawing at my consciousness. I've been mentally piecing together the new PRIMAL story, the reworked version, which will look much different than its original. And I'm very excited. Many of the same characters will remain, including my protagonist, Jack Evans and his wife, Cheryl, and teenage daughter, Grace. The antagonist or villian, Anna, along with members of the secret society of lycanthropes, or Prime-L's (or Primals) will mostly remain the same. But the story's beginning will introduce a new character called Lobo, short for El Loco Lobo, a Latino rapper turned movie star. He's not a very nice guy, and largely, and inadvertently, why Jack becomes a Primal.

But first I need to get started. And I'm quite hungry...like the werewolf!