It's all about the ferals

I know I promised the low-down on The Feral Diaries yesterday but I got completely enfolded in planning for NaNo. I literally spent the entire day working on my outline and character notes. Now though I’ve decided to write the promised post all about the Feral Diaries.

As the name suggests The Feral Diaries is a series of diary entries about the creatures known by my characters as Ferals. It’s kind of like a zombie novel and does in fact draw inspiration from Living with the Dead, a blog diary that I’ve mentioned before here. I was originally going to write it in novel form, with each chapter being a weekly entry and other bits and pieces such as emails and lab reports inserted at seemingly random points. After thinking about it though I’m planning to put The Feral Diaries online, at least three posts a week, done in real time. It’s going to take some work, particularly in explaining how the internet is still working in a country that’s lost much of its infrastructure (I’m thinking dongles but if anyone’s got a better idea let me know in the comments).

You’re probably wondering what the Ferals are exactly. I’ll tell you. They’re people, or at least they used to be, mutated by a contaminated vaccine that’s offered all over the country. They’re vicious, bloody thirsty and look a bit like a werewolf mid-change. All this is told from the point of view of an alternate me in a little village that fights to survive. There’s rebellions, famine and attacks from deeply unpleasant people as well that they have to deal with.

Planning the thing is a bit of a task. In my original outline I used prompts from a LiveJournal group called RunAwayTales. I still am as I work on my first draft in fact. I’m getting all the important points covered and reading back every 10 entries or so, figuring out how to separate all the stuff up. I’m also having to juggle the realistic side of how long it would take to build a wall, collect supplies and the like. I’ve had a lot of help with this aspect actually and it’s quite good. My assistant as I shall call her (she’s shy and doesn’t want to be named) seems to have a crazy amount of experience in the things I’m working on and she’s got an incredible mind for figuring this sort of stuff out.

The outlines have been done in 6 month groupings and I’m still on the first group. I’m almost at the end though and it’s coming along well. Now I just need to make the adjustments, copy it all up and expand on some of the entries. I’m planning to leave some leeway so that I can allow for real-time events of the natural kind (floods etc) that might be big news outside of the UK. I don’t know when I’ll be ready to start posting but I hope to have at least a month’s worth of entries all ready to go, maybe more.

I’ll let you know when I do get around to putting it online. It’ll be on a different blog site though. I’m also still iffy about the name The Feral Diaries.

In the meantime I’m gearing up for NaNo and working on my RoW80 goals so expect a post about RoW80 tomorrow and one about NaNo on Tuesday.

Keep writing.