As I said, my first thought was: “I want to write about a creepy circus”. From there on in, I threw around ideas about a vampire circus, a zombie circus, a circus from hell, a ghost circus, a circus that shows up every year, a circus that appears every 100 years, and other assorted various ideas about a circus that was not all it seemed.
The plot remained Gothic steampunk for the most part. The original idea itself came from “From Out of the Rain” a Tourchwood episode about a ghostly circus that showed up every time it rained. In that episode, Captain Jack and the gang noticed that every time a theater played old reels of circus side shows on a rainy night – people from the reels vanished from the film, while people from the theater were found frozen to death. Somehow the circus people had been literally captured on film and trapped on the film reels and could only escape if the film was played on rainy nights. Than they became soul sucking vampires who drained the life out of the living and returned to the film reel once it stopped raining. It was one of my favorite episodes of Tourchwood, and I wanted to write a book based on that same basic story line.
Something Wicked This Way Comes, another book/movie based around a ghostly circus, was also attracting my attention. Another circus that appears with changes in the weather – this one riding in on a ghost train, just before lightening storms. These shadowy carnies are attracted to the wicked desires of the hearts of mankind, more or less a circus straight from hell itself sent to give wicked men everything their hearts desire at the cost of their souls. In this story the men no sooner get their wish, than they are swept away and trapped forever as slaves to the circus’s evil leader Mr. Dark.
Another inspiration was “Dig This Cat, He’s Real Gone”, an episode of Tales From the Crypt. Again a circus theme, but this time an ordinary, every day, non-supernatural circus, which gets swindled by a freak of science – a man with a cat’s brain grafted to his own brain, thus giving him 9 lives to live and 8 times to die. He becomes a modern day Houdini, who instead of escaping actually died before your very eyes. After swindling the circus to near bankruptcy he gets his own just deserts when he remembers too late that he only had 7 lives to die because the cat had to die to give him it’s brain.
So throughout August and most of September, while my plot changed quite a bit on a daily basis, it remained firmly in the idea that it was to be based around some sort of creepy circus that could embody the terror these three circuses held for their audiences. And so while it had it’s basic theme, it still had neither plot nor characters to write about.
Find Out More About My 2009 NaNoWriMo Project
What’s your take on this? I’d love to hear what you have to say about this post. Leave a comment and share your views!
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