The two-for-one deal
It’s been a while since I’ve done a writing update, so let me catch you up to what I’ve been up to. I’ll send this out both in my newsletter and in a blog post.
A while ago, I was asked to participate in a yet-unnamed folklore horror anthology, with authors from around the world sharing stories from their local area.
I decided to dig into the history of the area I’m originally from: the Veenkoloniën, or Peat Colonies. It’s an area with a pretty fascinating history.
My family wasn’t much for telling ghost stories, so I originally intended to take some of the stories my dad used to tell me about my great-grandfather, and add some supernatural elements to it. It was supposed to be about how he’d find a bog body (“veenlijk” in Dutch), and bad things happening after that.
I dove deep into research, and even managed to a hold of a copy of “heksen en duivelsverhalen in Groningerland”, a collection of old folk-tales from the area, written in the Groninger dialect. I also found another really good collection of stories (“De duivel en zijn moer”), so I went on a deep-dive.
Ultimately, I couldn’t make the story work in the passed-on-to-me form, so I scrapped that and just told a straight story about Derk, a 14 year old boy living in the Peat Colonies around 1850. His father finds a bog body and well … bad things happen.
Once I finished my first draft, I had a problem though: it weighed in at around 7,500 words. The anthology specified between 2,000 and 5,000 words for story length.
So, I cut a whole lot of exposition and rewrote the beginning. I redid the word-count and found out I had gained 200 words.
Well crap.
I debated what to do. I could try to cut a full one-third from my story, but I didn’t think it would still work then. So, I went to a different option.
I’d spent so much time with the setting and characters that it took me maybe 30 minutes to come up with a different story I could tell in the same setting. So, I wrote that one.
It’s called Foezel, and tells the story of Hinnerk. He gets roped into smuggling foezel (illegal jenever, essentially moonshine) across the border, and decides to take a shortcut through the moor. He never believed the stories about what roams the moor, but he’s about to find out that he might have done well to pay more attention.
That story currently has a word count of about 3,000 words, which means I have space to add some context and flavour and still come out OK. Phew!
The story I originally intended to write is called “The Body in the Bog”, and while I have a finished first draft, I intend to add some more detail and context to that one too. I expect the final version to come out around the 10k word mark. I’m not sure where I’ll publish it yet, but feel free to drop me a note if you’d like to read it.
So, I started out to write one story, but ended up with two!
For now I have a number of stories in progress, so my short-term goal is to finish those. Once they’re done, I’ll start making a selection for my first story bundle. It’s still named “Sharp Edges”, and hopefully it will come out somewhere this autumn.
As always, I’ll keep you posted. So far, thanks for reading.