Friday, April 29, 2011

That's Just Wrong

In the spring of 2007, I attempted to write "Hannar", based on a recorded script of Revolution Nine played backwards. It was a nice project at first, until it turned into this demented story of a satanic murderer somehow coming back from the dead and plaguing a small town's police department. So then, I found it almost three years afterwards and wrote some more, and the story got even more twisted, and then Westbury Detectives showed up and filled the place of "gritty experimental detective drama". After that, I dropped Hannar, until now.

What I'm wondering is whether or not I should keep poking at Hannar. I'm seriously not kidding when I say that this is the most gruesome thing I've ever created, and I don't know what to do with it. There's four years of effort in it, so I can't destroy it. But the story contains ultraviolence, elaborate hallucination sequences, and multiple characters slowly going insane. There isn't a solid demographic it appeals to, so what the hell do I do with it?

At the moment, there's only four lines of the Revolution Nine script left, so where's this going to go? I might figure out where to post it when the whole thing is finished, but some stuff in it is pretty rancid, so it might only be tolerated on Livejournal.

1 comment:

  1. (Yep, me again.) I have an incomplete short story, which I've toyed with folding into another writing project, also shelved, which was to be a novella. Both were to have nasty little sexual assault scenes which bothered me, because I felt they were too lurid. In the story plan, I changed the scenes slightly, so as to contrast violence with innocence, describe the events indirectly, and more clearly develop sympathy for the affected characters. Writing certain acts of violence can be tricky, especially for sensitive souls, but one writer who is good at it is Stephen King. He can describe the most hideous things in much fewer words than any other writer I'm familiar with. Those sections are like crystalline bullets that explode in the imagination. I guess what I'm suggesting is that you finish it, reread it, and consider rewriting it. If you want to leave it as is, then go ahead, post it somewhere. All artists should take a risk, now and then.

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