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My work in progress, an un-outlined novel about werewolves in the Rocky Mountains of Idaho has reached or nearly has reached the half-way point.

I am aiming for a novel from 80,000 to 90,000 words in length. Yesterday the total word count for the project passed 40,000 as I wrote the unfinished chapter 12.

As I have laid out in earlier posts, my approach to this novel is quite different, starting with a scene that I had no concept of where it might belong in the story and spinning out from there. While there is no formal outline and certainly nothing like the monstrous ones I have produced in the past for other novels, there is a single page document laying out the five acts and very rough plot points that might occur in each of those. But even that is subject to inspirational and sudden change. Last Friday as I reclined in the dentist’s chair while they implanted a socket in my skull for an implanted false tooth a new understanding of the story’s third act, the one I am currently in, came together in an epiphany.

I am unsure of the market for this piece. The genre I am aiming for is horror, modern, real-world set but with fantastic elements horror. Currently there are a lot of werewolf type stories out for people, but an awful lot of the prose ones are romances, with commanding ‘alphas’ as dominate, sexy leads and that is pretty much the opposite of what I am trying to craft.

This work is in theme much closer to the subtext of Siodmak’s The Wolf-Man with a commentary on fascism and how that brutal ideology can be seductive. My werewolves, discarding the discredited ‘alpha wolf’ theory for the junk science that it is, is focuses on wolf family dynamics, transforming these werewolves into ‘Family Value’ fascists. That’s a lot of political weight to carry in a horror novel but I firmly believe that stories have to be about something more than plot and horror needs more than gore.