Cheesecake Fiction

Day 8 of the Writing Marathon.

Have you ever been to the Cheesecake Factory in Chicago? Well I have and it's crazy. Big-butt (as in: that's what'll end up having) slices, massive amounts of other food, all for equally massive prices. If you love to eat, that would be your place. I'm not sure it if the decor is the same in every Cheesecake Factory, but I found at least the atmosphere to be inspirational. Pictures speak more than words so let me show you what I mean:

Inspiration

Pretty organic feel to it, no? That was kind of where I was going for with the tree-houses inside my fairy tale city FabelInsel. Simon, Maya, Alix, Karl and Sesame (the monkey) are now inside the city and staying at the Sleeping Beauty Inn, where they are staying, while the jury is still out with a verdict what to do with them.  They're going to spend some time (of the book) in this city so I needed a lot of reference materials to properly describe a magical  forest dwelling. 

I got my inspiration from other places too. The Maldives resort Nancy, Alex and I stayed at in the end of 2007 gave me the idea for the lighting of the city as well as the Great Library (which I might have to axe for Book 1, seeing that it's getting to big).

Firefly Lights

Glow Worm Lights

The Great Library

Security Globes at the Gate

Chapter 9: Emotional Resolution

Inspiration is all around us and it's up to us to use it and reuse it and... you get the picture. Today I finished Chapter 9: Sleeping Anger; a riff on Sleeping Beauty. It was a tough long chapter to write, because it was all new and gathered a bunch of emotional moments together in a more concentrated burst of character conflict. This sets the tone for the next few chapters when something similar occurs. For now, Simon is no longer shell-shocked by the Aelemental world around him, but actively bonding with Alix, while Maya watches all of this from the shadows. Karl happily and clumsily adds comic relief to the foursome.

I'll be back tomorrow. Zwaai-zwaai!

Post Dramatic Stress Syndrome

Day 4 of the Writing Marathon
Starting to tire today. I finding it once again to be true that when you employ more time (as in deep into the evening) on any given task, your motivation to do that exact same task the next day diminishes rapidly (a lesson for all you workaholics out there, who think your performance remains top notch after burning the midnight oil days in a row - it doesn't). So I escaped the house today, wearing baggy clothes and a 4 day beard (ouch... rough) and took a breather. This is what my day looked like:

• 6:00 Woke up, put Alex on schoolbus (well, not on the bus).
• 7:00 Crawled back into bed. Not exactly sure why, cuz I wasn't tired. Maybe cuz when I woke up it felt like I had just closed my eyes and was super awake. Have you ever had that? Strange. May have to lay off the sake I've been drinking lately.
• 10:30 Sat in my creaky chair (where is that WD-40?) and started on chapter 7. Oh right, now I remember why I finally started sleeping past midnight. I was still caught up examining my notes on the draft 3 plot I had printed out. OCD anyone? Granted though, the next few chapters need to be chopped up and sewn back together again as if it was Frankenstein's monster.
• 12:30 I'm going mad. I need a break. The bit that sent me over the edge was Zuul's first exposition. Zuul is the villain of the book and a multi-national CEO, who can only talk in business lingo. As if that wasn't hard enough, he is talking to someone I cannot reveal yet, about something I cannot be too specific about revealing emotions that have to be kept mysterious. Fudge on a stick! 
• 1:30 After lunch I decide my break is not long enough, so I decide to leave the house and go to nearby mega-mall Terminal 21. I walk around, air out my head, buy some bread and dark chocolate and enjoy a quick 30 minute back massage (for $10 !) before walking back home.
• 4:00 Crack knuckles. This sucker is going down! This is how my work space looks like (it's only slightly less complex than the material I'm trying to redraft):

So, there you have it.
If you zoom in enough you'll probably figure out a nugget or two of cool spoilers

but really... the way I'm redrafting now, don't bother;
chances are it might not end up in the final version. ^_^

• 5:45 Break for dinner. Tonight on the menu: old fashioned Dutch food. What is this you say? Ah, just boiled potatoes with gravy, chicken and brussel sprouts. Trust me, after 3 days of fried rice the kid was ready to eat something else. Besides, he gets chocolate pudding for desert.
• 7:30 Back again.
• 9:30 Wrapped up Chapter 7: Hideous Zuul and The Pumpkin Jail. So far so good. I managed to put in the right amount of 'mythology information' I wanted the reader to have, without overwhelming them or making it sound like a countdown of bullet points. This was Nancy's (my editor) main gripe. Simon, the lead character is shell shocked at this point, having been just introduced into his new magical world and also having blown up the entrance to the city by accident (you have to read it to believe it). So I hope many of the terms used are excused for the time being as Simon (and hopefully the reader) simply read past them in order to get to what comes next: the Trial of Simon.

I leave you with another few pieces of art:

What I picture my fairy tale city to look like.

Chicago as inspiration. Add the great Redwoods and voila.

Aufwiedersehen.

Parked and Tuning Up

Flights to and back from America are horrendous. I'd like to say that we had nice service on this 23 hour journey, but the fact is nowadays if you travel with the cheapest flights available you end up paying for it on the flight itself. Take United for instance. I used to have a high opinion of them when I traveled between Amsterdam and Washington D.C. or Chicago, but that was 10 years ago. Now the flights between Bangkok and Narita and Narita and Chicago are a shame on airlines everywhere. A single screen for the sardines in economy (if it's working in the first place) counts for entertainment if you can stand the censorship they commit. Not that Alex could even see anything potentially traumatizing: he sits too low in his seat to see anything past the seat in front of him. Luckily they fling enough drinks at you during the flights, but maybe that's because you otherwise can't swallow the poor excuse for food they serve (Seriously? Instant noodles? What are we, students?)

So that's the flying part. Next up: customs and immigration. If you're lucky you get to the humiliating cattle-prodding before you leave foreign soil as America now has official territory to call its own in many foreign countries at airports worldwide. Can you imagine if Germany, Canada or even Saudi Arabia demanded a piece of O'Hare airport to call their own if you wanted to fly to their countries? There would be an outrage, a revolt. Anyway, never my favorite excuse for ego-boosting exercises in police state paranoia, immigration gracefully left me alone this time (and the computers weren't even down). I bet blogs like these don't help the cause, but even before that the simple fact that I came from Holland and had visited Egypt, Eritrea and other suspect countries always made me a red flag suspect. When I got my Green Card it only became worse as I didn't fit the cookie-cut mold of a immigrant willing to please Uncle Sam at it's every whim. But there is light at the end of the tunnel or should I say an Obama at the end of a Bush. They seem to be a tad more relaxed since 2009.

Now, I get to enjoy the truly beautiful of America. No, no, not the shameless buying at Walmart and eating warmed up frozen dishes at Applebees. I used to do that, but I enjoy a more global education now and tend to avoid the pitfalls of FalseTrade products and health endangering foods. No, I mean that on which the corporatocracy cannot put a price. Fresh air. Wide spaces. Sidewalks. Green springtime lawns and blossom heavy trees. Silence. Nancy's mom lives in the suburbs of Chicago, but even there it is a blissful paradise of quiet, green, clean greenery with silent monoliths of houses, driveways and the occasional car lazily cruising along the wide street. Compared to noisy, stinky, crowded Bangkok (which is not doing so well this week) where you're always fighting with cars, street vendors and rat covered garbage for a place to walk, being able to open your door to cool crisp clean air and a silence that makes your ears ring is pure....bliss.

Sure we'll have to fly back in two weeks. It doesn't last, but that's the beauty. A change of pace, setting and culture is exactly what the Muses need to replenish. So now a week in Chicagoland, another week in Florida and yet another up north in Wisconsin. That's vacation. It costs a lot, but it's worth it.

Sneak Preview

Gutenmorgen Herren und Frauleins,

I have no idea why I wrote that in German. No wait, I actually do. I'm giving you a sneak preview of stuff already happened in the book. I use a lot of visual aids in writing the book (not that I'm necessarily working towards a screen adaptation...heh heh) and thought: wouldn't it be nice to show you what I work with without actually lifting too much up from the curtain? So here goes:

Our heroes will arrive at a fairy tale city in Germany inspired by great forest kingdoms ala Endor (Star Wars), Rivendell (Lord of the Rings) and other less mainstream influences. But my greatest influence strangely enough came from: Chicago. Yup. A city that has less in common with forests than Jabba the Hutt with South Beach diet. For some reason walking through the canyons of windy Chicago I got the impression of giant powerhouses of industry. My fairy tale city has been around for centuries in a nature-respecting environment, so what better way than to transform the great city of Barack Obama to a Grimm Brothers version:

 

And so I've done with a lot of the pictures shot in Chicago until I got a good representation of my vision. The characters inhabiting the city would be inspired by a mix of various sources, but most importantly: I wanted to get away from the standard representation of mythological beings. So say you have a dwarf. I sure as heck don't want it to look like a Lord of the Rings dwarf, or (shudder) a Disney dwarf (no offense guys, but we're seeking something a little edgier for today's urban youth). So I went to literary sources (Clive Barker's Abarat and Holly Black's Ironside), comic books (Mike Mignola's Hellboy, Andreas and Bachalo) and even role-playing games (TSR's Dark Sun, Shadowrun). Google Image Search any one of these names and you'll get my drift. Of course these all remain influences only, as I was looking for a specific unique vision. I have a whole library of images (which I can't show you), but rest assured once I get drawing the illustrations I hope you'll be blown away.

Here's another something to keep you busy. The map of the city. Sorry, I had to blur out some parts as not to give away too much and also had to keep it small, so you wouldn't see a famous amusement park, which ties in to the city's history. It's all 'Chicken and Egg' stuff, but let's not explain that any further right now and leave you nice and confused on this Sunday.

 What? It's Sunday? What are ya doin' sitting behind your computer, ya lazy bum! Get out there and do stuff. Go shop if you're in America (the patriotic thing to do apparently), go for a bike ride if you're in Holland (cuz all the shops are closed) or hang out at the pool (any applicable Equator type country). Sheesh.