Back in 2016, when National Novel Writing Month was coming around again, I felt like I needed to change things up. I'd gone through two NaNoWriMos working on the same project (and didn't "finish" it despite making the word count both times), and while I had a great deal of affection for the characters and world I had created in that project, I didn't want to get stuck in a rut creatively. So, I decided I'd stretch my muscles by doing something in the vein of Deadlands, a supernatural "Weird West" story.
I grew up watching Western movies, but strangely hadn't ever particularly enjoyed Western books. Writers like Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour have never been able to grab me, and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian was a slog (a well written slog, but not a page turner) for me. It's always bothered me a little, given my interest in post-Civil War history, that I couldn't get into the popular fiction set in a time period I was so fascinated by. But that might be because the history was more interesting to me.
For the setting, I didn't want to be wholesale stealing from Deadlands, but I did want to play around with the mixture of supernatural and steampunk. And since the remake of The Magnificient Seven had only recently come out, the basic structure seemed easy enough to work with. At the same time, though, I didn't necessarily want to just have "The Magnificient Seven with magic." I wanted to make the world distinctly my own, without the apocalyptic overtones of Deadlands or the feeling of "dumb farmers who can't fight back" from The Magnificient Seven (one element from The Seven Samurai which I've always thought didn't translate over as well as it should have).
As far as the characters, I didn't want the typical samurai-in-cowboy-hats. I wanted, at best, anti-heroes that Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" would have felt comfortable buying a drink for, if only to be polite. I imagined snake-oil salesmen working with voodoo bokor and PTSD-afflicted Civil War vets, characters who weren't necessarily nice folks, literally the lesser evil compared to the railroad baron who was in the process of taking over the western half of North America.
The project got stalled, but hopefully, serializing what I've got so far will help reignite the fire.
I grew up watching Western movies, but strangely hadn't ever particularly enjoyed Western books. Writers like Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour have never been able to grab me, and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian was a slog (a well written slog, but not a page turner) for me. It's always bothered me a little, given my interest in post-Civil War history, that I couldn't get into the popular fiction set in a time period I was so fascinated by. But that might be because the history was more interesting to me.
For the setting, I didn't want to be wholesale stealing from Deadlands, but I did want to play around with the mixture of supernatural and steampunk. And since the remake of The Magnificient Seven had only recently come out, the basic structure seemed easy enough to work with. At the same time, though, I didn't necessarily want to just have "The Magnificient Seven with magic." I wanted to make the world distinctly my own, without the apocalyptic overtones of Deadlands or the feeling of "dumb farmers who can't fight back" from The Magnificient Seven (one element from The Seven Samurai which I've always thought didn't translate over as well as it should have).
As far as the characters, I didn't want the typical samurai-in-cowboy-hats. I wanted, at best, anti-heroes that Clint Eastwood's "Man With No Name" would have felt comfortable buying a drink for, if only to be polite. I imagined snake-oil salesmen working with voodoo bokor and PTSD-afflicted Civil War vets, characters who weren't necessarily nice folks, literally the lesser evil compared to the railroad baron who was in the process of taking over the western half of North America.
The project got stalled, but hopefully, serializing what I've got so far will help reignite the fire.
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