I finished the Baby Werewolf.
This writing project lasted for more than a year. It ended up being 88 Cantos and 77,000 words. I poured my soul into it. It burned up more writing energy than anything I have ever done before. Is it a good piece of writing? Maybe. Is it the best thing I ever wrote? No.
After the exhausting process ended, I have to regenerate. Like Doctor Who, I need a new life, a new face, a new adventure. If I don’t have something new to write, I might as well be dead.
So, here’s the plan.
I will turn this, my first completed hometown novel into a published novel on Amazon. That requires some serious editing and re-formatting. I have to tone down some of the risque things in the nudist camp section, including some things I have learned about nudists by becoming one. I intend to soften the language, because it is at times too salty to serve as soup in a young adult novel. I don’t intend to challenge people’s blood pressure limits. And you can’t always opt for realism and have kids talk the way they do in real life, totally uncensored. I don’t know how long this will take. But it will happen.
Then I will follow that with another story I’ve been itching to write since the 70’s.
Sing Sad Songs was originally titled The Little Boy Crooner. It is about a talented little orphan boy from France who is, by way of a fatal car accident and family relationships separated by too much time and distance, suddenly dropped into the middle of a dysfunctional and totally disillusioned family in Iowa. He doesn’t know them. He can’t talk to them. But, oh! when he puts on the clown paint and sings! Well, I am not ready to tell the story right here and right now.
Like it was with Recipes for Gingerbread Children and The Baby Werewolf, Sing Sad Songs will have a companion book. That is the story of a goofy family who harbor a talented child of their own, an autistic young man who can only talk through a ventriloquist puppet, but turns out to be a hidden genius.
It is a completely complicated and confusing mess of a writing plan. But what does it matter? I do it for me. I write what I want to. What I need to. Nobody is reading my novels anyway. Even beloved daughter has only read one of my published novels, about which she says, “Eh…” So I am not writing to become a millionaire. I am not committing acts of great literature. I am writing simply because I have to. Who knows, maybe one day in the far future, after Trump turns America into an impoverished irradiated wasteland, and aliens from Zeta Reticuli land to find out what humans have done to themselves, Zenu 231 will find a copy of one of my books in the rubble, read it with a dispassionate eye, and say, “Eh…” It could happen.
Werewolf Writing
But I can tell you a few things about my novel.
First of all, the werewolf of the title is not really a werewolf. He is instead a boy afflicted with a genetic hair-growth disorder called hypertrichosis. It is genetic in nature and runs in families. It may skip generations. But it is a hard thing to deal with in terms of self image for the sufferer. Once the wearers of werewolf hair were treated as circus freaks, to be marveled at, pitied, and sometimes reviled.
But this is a horror novel of sorts, not really about the hypertrichosis sufferer, but more about another member of the family who has become abusive in increasingly horrible ways. And the murders in the book are committed using canines as weapons.
The wolfishness is not located in the animals, but in the heart of a man.
There is a lot of Saturday night black and white horror movie watching in the 70’s that went into this book. It also comes to fruition by way of my own experience being sexually assaulted at the age of ten. The fear and self-loathing that this story has to tell about are metaphorically very real things. I was not myself a monsterous-looking creature in my youth, but I felt the same feelings of isolation and rejection that one of the main characters, the boy with werewolf hair feels in this book. Part of why it took me twenty years to write this tale is my own personal struggle to overcome my own fear and self-loathing.
But even though this book comes to its conclusion with silver bullets and death by wolf fang, it is basically a comedy. Comedy, in the Shakespearean sense, always ends with the hero getting the girl and the monsters defeated. And it has a few laughs that not even the death-by-teeth parts can overturn.
So, I am glad I am finally finished with this book. Not edited and published, but finished as an exercise in wringing things out of the terrible nightmares and monstrous memories buried in my cluttered old brain.
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Tagged as novel writing, The Baby Werewolf