Bones of the Titans (NaNoWriMo Project 2016)

Plotting Your Novel as a Pantser Bone White (a story for Halloween)

Bones of the Titans (NaNoWriMo Project 2016)

Confession: I love Ghost Trilogy and its characters, I’m still working at shaping the story as best I can and at finding a home for it, but this year my NaNoWriMo project will be a brand new one.

Kind of…

In fact, the protagonist is someone I created a couple of years ago, and you may have come across her if you have been around this blog long enough. She’s Ombretta Vivaldi and I created her in quite an unconventional way: for a treasury challenge on the Etsy site.

It’s quite strange, really, I wasn’t going to create a character, but one of the group I was part of came up with a very cool idea: creating a series of treasuries that would tell a murder mystery story. If you think I could resist that, you don’t know me well enough.

This is the sequence of treasuries.

(Note: Sorry, I see that this theme doesn’t seem to sustain paragraphing in the lightbox, but if you click on the ‘read more’ button, it will take you to the original post)

Murder Mystery Game – The suspect: Ombretta Vivaldi
Dear Museum Colleagues,

You and a guest are cordially invited to attend our Annual Gala Dinner as a fundraiser for the expansion of the Museum’s artifacts collection. Cocktails will be served at 6:30 pm in the Museum Garden Atrium. A formal dinner will follow at 8:00 pm in the Etruscan Antiquities Room.

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Ombretta Vivaldi was born deep on the Dolomites.
She’s an archeologist, specialized in human remains and ritual artefacts. She’s always thought there is a lot more inside what we hold in our hands after digging it out of the earth than we actually see.
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Murder Mystery Game – The suspect: The secret paths
Ombretta was born deep on the Dolomites mountain, where ‘benandanti’ walked the path between realities in the old days. Today, people still say that when you walk the woods under the trees’ shadows, in the lull of their whispering, away from any road, you can never be sure what you actually see under their gree canopy.
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Murder Mystery Game – The suspect: The Warrior Queen
When she first went to Ireland, Ombretta was fascinated with the tales of the Morrigan. This goddess of the earth, protector of kings, but also caller of death, destroyer of warriors.
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Murder Mystery Game – The Scene: The Hexagonal Room
Dear Museum Colleagues,

I was informed earlier today of a mix-up in the availability of the Etruscan Antiquities Room for our Gala Dinner. Renovations are scheduled to begin sooner than expected, and preparations to clear the room will begin immediately.

Please assist in these last minute changes by suggesting other possible Museum locations (i.e., the crime scene) for our Gala Dinner.
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The Hexagonal Room in the south wing still displays the exibition ‘Memory of the Storyteller’, but it’s perfect for a round table, so the stuff had made it available for our Gala Dinner. They are always so kind, aren’t they?
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Murder Mystery Game – The Crime: Feathers and Blood
Dear Museum Colleagues,

I have just been notified by security of a car break-in in the parking lot. Broken glass was found by a valet attendant. Please be aware of your surroundings, and do not leave your valuables unattended.
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“Meet me in the room of the Storyteller exhibit after the gala. There’s something I think you should know.” That’s all the woman whispered to her. But when Ombretta got there, she only found a few black feathers in a pool of dark blood.
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Murder Mystery Game – The Clues: What Does the Feather Mean?
Dear Museum Colleagues,

I’m afraid our Annual Gala Dinner has been disrupted by an unfortunate turn of events. The police just arrived and have instructed us to stay put. Dessert and after dinner drinks were scheduled to take place in the Museum Rooftop Garden. Unfortunately, nobody is allowed to leave the building until the authorities have questioned everyone.
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The museum is unusually cold and dark. The police serching around, probbing… it feels wrong. Unsettling. Echoes bouce on every wall and floor.

“No, I didn’t know her,” Ombretta says to the detective. She lowers her eyes on the black feathers stained with blood in the plastic bag the man holds in his hands. “I don’t know how she knew me.”

“And what does the feather mean?” the detective asks.

She keeps her silent for a long time. “I don’t know,” she says then, but she sees he doesn’t believe her.
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Murder Mystery Game – The Reveal: I’m Still Waiting
Dear Museum Colleagues,

While the police are still here conducting their investigation, it appears the commotion earlier this evening has subsided just enough to conclude our Gala with dessert and after dinner drinks in the Museum Rooftop Garden. Please join us outside for a cordial and a decadent assortment of petits fours as we conclude our evening.
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Ombretta watches the police leaving the museum grounds. They didn’t find anything, no clue, no lead. The detective glances at her before getting into his car and a shiver goes down Ombretta’s spine. He suspects something.

She goes back into the museum. All the guests are excited, their chit-chatting prinks at Ombretta’s ear, triggering an headache. She decides to go into the office the museum assigned to her earlier on this month. It’s nice and quite here, she can barely ear the noise of the police cars leaving. No voices come this far into the building.

There’s a note waiting for her on the desktop. She stares at it for a long time, her heart pounding, before coming closer and taking it up.

The note reads, “I’m still waiting.”
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Ombretta came to me absolutely naturally, as characters sometimes will, and by the time I finished the challenge, I knew I’d write about her sometimes soon.

But the story never really came to me. I wanted it to be set in the 1920s, just like Ghost Trilogy, but since Ombretta is Italian, I wanted the story to be set in Europe. Slowly, some ideas congealed: the story would be set in Berlin (Weimar Berlin is an exceptionally exciting place); it would involve European mythologies in some way; like Ghost Trilogy, it would have a multiethnic cast.

I tinkered lazily with the story for a couple of years, until last summer, as I finally decided Berlin was going to be my setting, I thought that should be my next NaNo project and started brainstorming more actively.

So, here’s the idea

BONES OF THE TITANS
When a very unique Viking dagger the British Museum has just acquired shows up at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ombretta Vivaldi doesn’t think it’s her concern: she’s just a secretary. But her boss Ross Harding can’t speak German – among the numerous other things he can’t do – so she doesn’t really have much choice but follow him.

When she sees the dagger the first time, Ombretta wishes she never came. The dagger stirs the gift she’s forsook many years ago, the gift to see a future, a future she seems to have no power to shape. She senses the evil inside the artefact aweken.

That night, the director of the museum is murdered and the dagger disappears again.

As the police investigates, Ombretta realises the troubled times of the young Weimar Republic, with its resentment for the war, the rising of nationalism, and the fear of a much uncertain future is the perfect place for such evil to grow. Navigating among brazen politicians, rebellious kabaret artists, war veterans and people who have more than one secret to defend – including Ross – Ombretta tries to bridle that gift she has never been able to muster and get to the dagger before the police will, so to put it to rest before something truly horrible happens.

I know, I know, the blurb is lousy, but I’m terrible at writing blurbs when the story is written and revised, you can’t pretend that I write a good blurb before I write the story…

And the blurb doesn’t even mention a couple of things that I’m really fond of.

First, this story is going to feature my first queer character. Now this is vastly outside of my comfort zone, but I can’t ignore that – except during the Third Reich – Berlin has always been a very queer-friendly city, still is. And besides, kabarets will be a prominent settings.

It doesn’t even mention Wolfgang Neumann, who’s shaping up as one of my very favourite characters. He’s a WWI veteran, now involved in politics. He has a very strong sense of duty and justice, but is nonetheless a ruthless man (can’t expect him to be too subtle after the war experience, now can you?).

The dagger is where European mythology comes into play, if probably quite subtly. It is made of a shard of the Titans’ bones (hence the title of the novel) and it keeps their hate towards everyone but also a huge confidence in one’s self. Therefore, people who own it tend to become self-confident beyond their normal character but they may fall to hate with disastrous outcomes.

I’m thinking about the classic tale of Zeus defeating the Titans (who were powerful, but wild and violent and primordial) in order to become master of the Olympic people, but also about Ymir, the giant of the Scandinavian mythologies, from whose bones earth was created.

BONES OF THE TITANS - A #dieselpunk novel set in Weimar Berlin #NaNoWriMo
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It’s just sketchy ideas at the moment, but I am researching and I’m loving it. You know I’ve always said that the 1920s sound so much like our times. This is certainly true for Europe, but there’s even more. Enzo Traverso, and Italian historian of the two World Wars, theorizes that there weren’t two world wars separated by a period of uncertain peace, but there was just one, 30-year-long war. It makes a lot of sense to me. What I’m learning is that what went into the war in 1914 was Old Europe, with its old Victorian ideas and ways of life. The young people, who went into war enthusiastically thinking that would renew their old world, were weirdly right. Of course, they couldn’t foresee the extant of that change and how long it was going to take, or how brutal it was going to be, but Europe as it came out of WWII was really a new place, with new ideas and ways of life. In good and bad, it was Europe as we understand it today.

To me, Weimar Berlin was the place where everything started.