I don't know what to write about today, so I'll just update you on my work.
For those of you who enjoy the Donovan Schist stories, the third installment is well beyond the idea stage. It has actually been smelted, forged, and beaten into something resembling a story. It's still a long way off from publication but I just thought I'd let you know that the series is alive and well. Or alive anyway. This is Donovan we're talking about, not the Care Bears.
That poor guy is something of a damage-sponge, isn't he? Someone, upon reading Cruel Numbers remarked how in noir the protagonist is always beaten and bleeding by the end. I hesitate to make sweeping generalizations, but it definitely seems to be the case with noir I've written.
I realize this, as I glance back over the third story, and I worry that I'm falling into the Trap of Tropes. I tried hard to make Vacant Graves satisfyingly different than Cruel Numbers without compromising the world or characters. [SPOILER ALERT] The next one takes place in Manhattan again, so certain similarities to the first are inevitable, especially the physical state of Donovan by the end.
I've given it some thought and I think that the persistence of noir characters is kind of their draw. Nothing illustrates persistence like soaking gunshots with a stiff upper lip. Noir characters are by their nature anti-heroes, so we can't look for moral behavior to make us like them. They might do a good deed every now and again, but it's really their survival that keeps us interested, the David vs. Goliath aspect of a single human taking on a brutal system.
Or maybe we just enjoy reading about Donovan's pain, I don't know.
At any rate, I'll let you know when I have a date for the next round of Donovan-torture-prose.
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