Stories for a winter's night

So. yeah, November - and therefore, NaNoWriMo 2016 - is over. I got my 50K completed, but wasn't able to actually write anything even beginning to resemble a story. But I do have some scenes and ideas, so I'll eventually have something to actually write. I think that my problem is that I was too ambitious. I think that I had planned on using too many characters and ended up over-extending myself. I may need to do something like Dracoqueen22 is doing in their "Crown of Empire" series and have separate but concurrent stories with one dealing with the Autobots and the other with the Decepticons. Because I have plans! I have so many plans! I want to play with the idea of the Cybertronians not only as humans, but as mutants/inhumans, and with the idea of people being parts of different factions than usual. The problem ends up being a need for a massive amount of world-building, and that means lots and lots of short-fic.

But first things first, I put a lot of work on the back burner so that I could focus on NaNo, and my plans for December is to focus on that work. So I have in progress:

- The Polyhex Candidate - I have Chapter 19 written, but I want to have some more of the story completed before i post. Lat thing I want to do is post a chapter and then make people wait another year for an update!
- Smokescreen and Bluestreak fic entitled "Survivor's Guilt". It involves Blue comforting Smokey on the anniversary of the fall of Praxis. I'm writing it in part because of a Rare Pairings prompt, but also because I've now seen a number of "remembering Praxis" fics out there that seem to completely forget that Smokey's a Praxian too.
- A Smokescreen and Jazz fic set in the "You Remind Me Of Someone I Used To Know" series where we learn more about what happened to Smokey and why he's changed his designation. There's a lot of world-building in this series and I think that it will eventually lead into the Transformers/MCU fic.
- I'll probably also be writing a few more scenes in the TF/MCU story as they come to me. I still have so many ideas for that one, especially involving how the Cybertronians react to gender and sexuality in their new bodies and how the Avengers react to their new allies.

I have a variety of fics on the back burner, but once again the writer's block and self-doubt are kicking in. It's hard when you write a rare pairing, half of which is part of a much more popular pairing, and the other half of which is a generally disregarded and/or disliked character. It leads to a lot of self-doubt and that's where the writer's block is coming from. So I've decided that I'm going to spend the next two months plotting out my NaNo novel. I need a serious break to get myself back together and this is a great way to get where I need to be. I think that the Oatmeal's Creativity is like breathing cartoon covers the feeling very, very well. I need to start inhaling and I'm going to do that by moving to a new project. It's still creative and still writing, but it's getting me away from what's stressing me.

So the story is going to be a mystery with horror elements set in a somewhat steampunk-like reality. It's going to be Lovecraftian and Gothic with bits of Shirley Jackson and Shadowrun and 40s Pulp thrown in for good measure. It's going to be about a private eye and his very broken relationship with a reporter, and about a paraspychologist trying to find her place in a society that has issues with her field and the idea of a woman professor. And about a woman police detective inspired by Kate Warne, and a librarian who wants a better world for her sons and her students. I've got a lot going on with it, so the following summary doesn't really cover it well:

A series of high profile suicides are rocking a small university town while a murderer stalks the alleys of the Red Light District, only a small group of investigators can see the connection and they are running out of time to stop the Second Coming of a dark god.

It's a lot to do. I'm hoping that if I can get an outline finished I'll know where I'm going and I can get the work drafted in November, instead of running out of plot two weeks in.

So, that's the plan. We'll see how it goes.