Twelve Tales – Phantoms

So – here we are at the end of the first of twelve months, in which I’ve pledged to write 12 short stories, charting my progress as I go.

The first one – titled Phantoms – is finished.

It’s – well – not great.

Now, I’m a copy editor by trade, and I’ve been on the other side of this particular table plenty of times. It’s easy to tut, wag your finger and say “Why don’t you let me be that judge of that?” or “Don’t put yourself down.”

In this case, however, I’m comparing it to work I’ve done previously. This story is not up to my usual standard. Even now, at this nascent stage of my writerly development, I’ve done much better before.

But it’s the first of my 12 stories, and it was written and posted on time. That – in itself – is an achievement, as my first aim in this project is to start a writing habit and produce finished work on a regular basis.

I’ve also learned a lot this month – about my current level of ability, the limitations of my time, and the process of writing to a schedule.

The brief I was given for this month was ‘Ancestor’s views of a person working in a phone shop.’ I started with an ambitious idea – that an Aztec scribe and colonialist collaborator who had died of smallpox would find himself awakening in today’s Mexico City on the Day of the Dead.

The implication would be that this is the latter stages of Mictlan (a sort of Aztec Purgatory, if I’m not being too reductive in saying so, where those who died from anything but sacrifice, battle, childbirth or drowning languished) and his task would be to find out what he needed to do to move on from there – in the course of the day. He would meet a young woman – owner of a small phone stall – who would clearly be a descendent of his, and she’d help him find the vindication he needed to move on.

It’d be full of bizarre fever dreams of horrific Meso-American gods and human sacrifice; fascinating interplay between the city old and the city new – both characters in their own right; explorations of imperialism and cultural integration…it was going to be pithy, complex, and – of course – bloody great.

About three weeks into the month, I realised that there was no way I could finish. Just the research required was far beyond the scope of the time I had available (less than I expected to get – work and family life are of paramount importance) – I knew only the most superficial details about Mexico City, Tenochtitlan, the Day of the Dead, Aztec civilisation and the Spanish conquests, and while I was enjoying finding out about these things, it was three quarters of the way through the month and I’d barely scratched the surface – let alone made any headway with weaving the sort of complex strands of character, plot and theme I was hoping for. At my current level of ability, it just wasn’t going to happen.

So – about ten days ago – I shelved the Mexico City ghost story. Sitting on the bus, I banged out an outline for an altogether simpler tale, which I’ve now written, posted and linked to at the top of this post.

I was going for a Twilight-Zone-esque slipstream sort of thing, but ended up with a poorly-defined theme, a passive, unsympathetic, unlikeable protagonist, and a rushed ending.

If I did it again, I think I’d have more fun with it – think of some ‘what if’s about phones and what they can do – pick some interesting power or function and build a story around that plot device.

Still – I did it, and I’m happy with that as an outcome. I’ve got a much better sense now of how much time I can spend writing each day, when I can do it, and where my writing needs work. I also know that I can get stories written and done – even when things go wrong and I need to start again late in the day.

A big part of this project is to map my progress, and this a good place to start improving. Feel free to read, if you like, and any feedback is more than welcome.